Teaching isn't always pretty. For example, look at this picture one of my students took surreptitiously today, after 3 hours of Public Policy. It ranks high among the least flattering shots of me ever, and I'm just glad she likes me enough not to share it in the wrong places (I hope).
Lately education has been getting down right ugly all over the place, and a lot of it centers around testing. I remember when I first heard people complaining about the growing emphasis on standardized tests. It was the mid 1990s, I was in grad school, and New York State was just starting to ramp up the Regents exam system. I thought, hey, I took a few standardized tests when I was growing up and they didn't hurt me much, so what is the big deal?
Turns out it is huge. Over the last 20 years testing has started at earlier and earlier ages, the tests are more frequent, they're much longer, and they're including nearly everyone, regardless of special needs or abilities.
There was lots of chatter around New York last month when all elementary students spent three days on English tests and another 3 on math. Educators were complaining and parents were talking of opting their students out. There are many well reasoned blog entries and editorials floating around that you can read, I won't repeat their points here.
But you know what? It is going to get worse. This month your average New York State high schooler is starting a 6 week stretch of testing. On Monday next week the Advanced Placement exams start. They run for 2 weeks. In mid-June high schools stop teaching altogether as they run all the New York State Regents tests that are required in core subjects for graduation. And in between, around mid to late May, are the new post tests for the SLO. These in particular are pretty bad and once parents learn what is going on, I think they might lose their minds completely.
Here's the short version of the SLO story. Obama's education policy, Race to the Top, required states to submit competitive applications for grant money. New York won quite a lot of funds, but had to promise to implement a new teacher evaluation system, a new data collection system, and the new Common Core standards.
The Annual Professional Performance Review (APPR) measures teacher effectiveness. Most unions across the state negotiated that 60% of teacher effectiveness scores would come from administrator evaluations, while the other 40% would come from a combination of state and local measures of student performance. Making that 40% equitable across disciplines, grades, and student ability is an enormous challenge. If you teach a class that has an existing Regents exam, then you get to use that test as a measure. If not, you develop Student Learning Objectives (SLO). Students in all classes, all grades, all subjects, were given SLO pre tests at the start of the school year. As in "welcome to school, here's a test on stuff you've never seen and we kind of hope you don't do well." In May all the students will get post-tested to see if they know anything more than they did at the start of the year.
Have you ever seen school-wide testing? Classes stop. Everyone is roped in to proctor. Adminstrators scramble to find quiet rooms, scribes, readers, and extra time for students with testing accommodations. Substitutes are brought in so that teachers can grade (only no-one is allowed to grade his or her own students, so scheduling gets complicated). The tests are "secure," so they are kept under lock and key and teachers are not allowed to talk about what was on them. All this is happening as the schools are trying to review for the needed-to-graduate Regents exams in June (when they just send home any student who isn't taking a test).
Man, already this post is too long and I haven't even gotten to the quality of the tests. Let me just say that I participated in some test creation, and although I signed a non-disclosure agreement as to the form and content of the exams, I don't think it is illegal for me to state that they are not exactly robust measurement tools. Hundreds of professional development hours and dollars were spent as district after district hurredly wrote many many tests in order to meet state deadlines. Every teacher seems to have been told something different about how the tests should look and how they are to be administered, and every teacher has a bunch of stories about glitches in the process. The first year of anything isn't perfect, but this year has been rough on everyone.
Now, I am happy to be evaluated. My principal is welcome in my classroom any time. I just had a great post-observation meeting with him, actually, and I'm going to change up a few things because of it. We need a way to effectively encourage good teaching and to either get rid of poor teachers or help them become better. But the SLOs as they currently stand are not the solution.
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