On Monday and Tuesday of last week, our department was directed to administer benchmark assessments for Unit 3 of the model curriculum of the New Jersey Department of Education, which was developed in response to the Common Core Standards. This marked the third time this year that instruction was interrupted to administer these benchmarks. For units one and two, we were instructed that the students would be given two class periods to complete the assessments. We teach an A-day, B-day block schedule, so we lost 8 days of instruction for both benchmarks.
Furthermore, the board office is interested in seeing the progress on the benchmark scores, and they issued a mandate that the results are disaggregated within a week. The problems here pile quickly.
1) With over 120 students, the workload is huge. You can’t forget that there are other assignments in the “to do” pile as well, so despite their perceived importance by the higher-ups in the district, they’re just another method of assessment used by the classroom teachers.
2) The instrument needs to be analyzed beyond grades by looking at individual questions to see where group deficiencies lie in order to determine what SLO’s (Student Learning Objectives) need to be revisited and retaught. This problem exists with some extended problems.
2A) Each unit in the Model Curriculum has a duration of 6 weeks, so there is little to no time (once disaggregating the benchmark data has been completed) to move back to what may have been missed.
2B) The first two administrations of these benchmarks were given with traditional pen and paper, so it fell to the teacher to chart each response as they graded the assessments. These were 2-day assessments that comprised a total of 168 minutes worth of work. We’re talking about a massive amount of work. This problem was addressed in the third administration by moving to scantron sheets and a test that lasted just one 84 minute class block.
The problems listed above were logistical in nature, and they do not even begin to address the issues I have with standardized testing as a way to measure learning success. Those issues are - well - not really worth getting into, since as everyone who has run my PD this year has told me, “The Common Core is here to stay. Just deal with it and move forward.” (Okay, maybe it wasn’t directly quoted like that, but the first sentence is exactly how it was said in each and every PD I attended regarding Common Core.) Suffice it to say, engaging in these benchmarks, their administrations, and their evaluations is an experience that - in the words of a colleague - “makes me itch.” They just make being a teacher a miserable existence in which students are nothing more than the score they receive on the same test, and their teachers are nothing more than the cummulative improvement of those scores. Turning in my data - my students’ scores - sickened me, and made me feel that all the work I’ve done to enhance the experiences of my students has been in vain.
If education continues down this road, we’re beat. As a society, we’re totally and completely beat. We will lose the individuality we claim to hold dear. We have already decreed that despite the pedagogical importance of differentiating instruction and student choice, what really matters is the students’ ability to perform on something as arbitrary as a standardized test.
I didn’t even sit down to write about this tonight. I was going to write about - well, it doesn’t matter. This is better. Eh, it might be better. It’s definitely different. And I think that’s my point in this rant. We don’t know, as people, where we’re going, but the thing that makes us great is our ability to explore, to search, and to learn. This is about the fight between greater opportunities for our students to find out who they can become and the mindset that believes each and every child is the same and can be assessed in the same way to determine their growth - and by extension - their worth.
But maybe I've got this all wrong. Maybe the two full weeks of instruction that my students have lost is right on point. We're about halfway through the school year - 20 weeks or so. Maybe students should be spending 10% of their schooling with standardized tests. After all, the Common Core Standards focus on college and workplace readiness, and colleges and workplaces are certainly areas where uniqueness, originality, and individualism are NOT sought-after virtues.
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