This morning my daughter woke up on time and ate breakfast sitting in a chair at the table (for the first time in weeks) before sharpening six pencils to take to school because this is the first morning of many days of standardized tests. At this point there isn’t much an individual student or teacher or parent can do about the test score. This is where luck comes in. Hopefully the high pollen count will not aggravate allergies or asthma or headaches. Hopefully clothing won’t be itchy or pokey. Hopefully the room will not be too hot or too cold. Hopefully there were no noises in the night or bad dreams to interfere with sleep. Hopefully there were no rude strangers on the subway train during the morning commute. Hopefully yesterdays BFFs are still BFFs today, and if they’re not it won’t become an issue until after the tests are over.
The New York City Board of Education rates teachers according to how much progress their students make on the state math and English language tests, how they were expected to score and actual results. If the students scored better than expected then the teacher is rated as better than average. But, if the students score highly to begin with there is little room for improvement. If any of the students in the classroom happened to get a perfect scores on either of last years standardized tests then there is nowhere to go but down.
My daughter’s 5th teacher is going to get screwed.
She teaches at a school with involved parents who knew last year that their 4th graders had to get the highest score of 4, on both their math and English tests, if they were going to have a chance of gaining admittance to some of the more selective middle schools during the “school choice process”. Some parents hire tutors for their children because “fine” and “at grade level” are unacceptable.
Why does my daughter’s teacher even bother if she’s going to be made to look bad?
Why did she set up that elaborate classroom economy with jobs and salaries and taxes if it’s not going to be on the test? My kid fell for it and has been getting to school on time, turning in her homework, working well in groups and all kinds of behaviors tied to imaginary dollars that are saved and counted in order to be eligible to go on the class trip to Washington, D.C. –the culmination of a study of the Constitution of the United States which is also not going to be on this test.
Keeping the class pet alive is not part of the test.
Showing an x-ray of one’s broken arm, naming the bones and what the doctors have done help it heal is not part of the standardized curriculum for this grade level.
Discussions of Obama/Osama are a questionable use of valuable class time on the day before an important standardized test.
There is no time or space to transform a personal experience into literature on a shade-in-the-bubble score sheet.
There is also no room for experimentation which does nothing to encourage future research scientists.
Frankly, I don’t care if my daughter does well on standardized tests. I find it demoralizing when she does. I remember how we felt compelled to teach our seven-year-old that the information she had learned from the park ranger during her visit to the Statue of Liberty was irrelevant –even though it was true, and was one of the choices. It was “wrong” because that information wasn’t contained within the paragraph about the Statue of Liberty, that she had been instructed read before selecting the “best” answers to the questions that followed on a standardized reading comprehension test.
No wonder the union doesn’t want teacher ratings based on students standardized test scores to be published. The scores do not mean what the NYCDOE officials think that they mean.