Getting Testy about Testing

The most recent round of backlash to high-stakes, state-mandated testing comes as no surprise to anyone who has been paying even the smallest bit of attention to changes in educational policies over the last decade. From the onset of No Child Left Behind to state-mandated tests as a result of the recently implemented Race to the Top initiative and Common Core State Standards, our culture has been more focused on what tests have to say about what is happening in our schools. We expect more transparency. Testing has been seen as the easy window into the classroom. Not only do I see this in my own tenth grade classroom, but in the classroom of my own children.

My son started kindergarten this year. Early this past May, we attended Kindergarten Round-up, a morning set aside to meet teachers and administrators, to meet future classmates, and tour the school. At least that is what I thought it was going to be. Instead, my son and I were separated. He was taken into a separate room with four stations, asked to sound out words, arrange letters, make stories from building with bricks, and spoke with the school psychologist. In the span of circulating through four stations in 30 minutes, his reading and reasoning skills were assessed so that he could be “leveled.” Meanwhile, the other parents and I sat with a group of teachers and the school’s principal, listening to how important the kindergarten assessment would be when students took the test the following May. We were continually reassured that the elementary school routinely performed well on the state tests, which children would take every year from kindergarten through eighth grade. A state standardized test for kindergartners. The focus of this initial meeting was not on helping young learners build relationships, understand connections, or foster a love of reading and learning; instead, the overwhelming message was about the importance of testing. My six year old son was sent home with weekly homework packets filled with practice sheets in preparation for the routine DIBELS tests, popcorn words lists to memorize, and handwriting practice sheets. After the first month of school, recess was taken out of the schedule as parents were told that the time was needed to better prepare students for the tests students would be taking. Instead, recess time was replaced with time in a computer lab. My six year old son spent a portion of his time at school in front of a screen in order to prepare him to take a test.

The backlash against the proliferation of high-stakes testing should not be a surprise to anyone.

As Peter Afflerbach points out in his text Understanding and Using Reading Assessment K-12, high-stakes multiple-choices tests are not a recent addition to our educational landscape. Testing and sorting of students is a century-old practice. What has changed is the increased use of such tests in early grades despite the fact that experts in the field of reading instruction, including professional groups like the International Reading Association and the National Council of English Teachers, have all questioned the validity, reliability, and appropriateness of using such high-stakes tests to measure student ability (148). Additionally, as Afflerbach states,

High stakes assessments are used to focus responsibility for students’ failure and success on schools, which has the effect of placing the entire burden for students’ education and well-being on parents and teachers rather than the social systems that contributes to the poverty that influences students’ reading development in the first place. (150-1)

It is much more difficult to address the systemic issues that contribute to a student’s success or failure. Test results are easy to get and easy to interpret.

In the case of my own classroom, my tenth grade students recently took the Pennsylvania Keystone Literature test, a test which students must pass in order to graduate. This is a recent change, with my current group of tenth graders being the first class of students who face this new graduation requirement (fortunately, this now seems to be on the way out). As a result, our curriculum and even course offerings have changed. I have a state reading assessments workbook I was asked to use with my students which consists of short non-fiction passages and multiple-choice questions to work through. Instead of having students read full texts, we are moving more and more to passage-based reading. As research is not something assessed by state-standardized tests, teachers have dropped the more intensive project-based learning opportunities in favor of short reading assessments with multiple-choice questions aligned to our state standards and replicating those questions that students will see on the Keystone literature exam.

During the actual testing itself, the state told us that not only did we need to cover or remove any content specific posters/decor in our rooms but that we also need to remove any motivational posters. Over the last year, the state conducted a study and found that students testing in classrooms with motivational posters performing statistically better than those in rooms without. So to level the field, we needed to make our classrooms as bare as possible.

Reread that.

We have gotten to a point in our testing craze that teachers are being told to remove decorations and motivational posters from their walls to accommodate high-stakes testing.

As Afflerbach states, the negative consequences of such high-stakes assessments far outweigh the positives. Students broke down and cried during our six days of state assessments. Students began school with two hours of state tests and then went through their regular classes. A full day of classes following a grueling two hours of high stakes tests upon which their graduation is dependent. And a number of students will find out this summer that their efforts were for naught. They will be labeled “Below Basic” and rescheduled into a “Keystone Reading Class,” which students all know as the code of a remedial English class. “Labels from test results are accompanied with myriad related consequences, such as lowered expectations, differential treatment in the reading classroom, and decreased perseverance for those labeled as low-achieving readers” (160). So rather than providing support for our struggling readers, such tests do much more harm than good.

And this should come as no surprise when educational policies are made by those outside of education.

Questioning?

I'm just starting my first online graduate course for a grade. I've participated in MOOCs but not for graduate credit. This class, a requirement by the state of Michigan to move from my Provisional License to a Professional Certificate, focuses on reading strategies. And our course reading has me reflecting on the role of questioning in class. But let me first describe where I am now.

I am 83 minutes into the first day of proctoring our state literature exams. I'm covertly jotting notes because for 90 minutes I am to stare intently at the nine students currently testing in this room. No grading, no reading a book, no writing, no. I am to walk around and monitor these nine...now eight students as one just finished her test. Closing her test book, she put her head down to sleep. While monitoring, I am not to look at what they are reading or writing. I am not to answer questions that will clarify anything in any way. The walls are to be free not just of content specific posters and artwork, but of all motivational posters. Rooms should be sterile. Proctors should stoic. What does having all these protocols in place ensure? How does this impact the test takers?

The questions these eight students are grappling with have a right answer that can be bubbled into a form. As fast as they can, these eight students are reading four excerpts from longer texts. Stripped of context and plot development, this excerpts are literally only part of the story. These students darken bubbles for seven or eight questions on each passage and then write a one-page response to each. All in the span of 90 minutes. What is this test purporting to measure? What is this test actually measuring?

What are we telling our students when we realign our curriculums to better prepare students for this type of testing, tests which feature only excerpts and ask students to scribble down responses as fast as they can?

My students will sit in a desk from 7:30 to 9:30 each morning for six days in order to bubble in responses on the Pennsylvania Keystone exams, and then they will have a short five minute break before they are asked to head to their first block class and go through a shortened schedule of their regular classes from 9:40 am - 2:22 pm. Their graduation is dependent upon their success on these tests. My teacher evaluation is dependent upon their success on these tests. It will be a long six days. And by the end of the six days of testing, everyone - teachers and students alike - just want to get back to learning. I question this type of questioning.

Reading through the opening scenarios of Peter Afflerbach’s text, Understanding and Using Reading Assessment K-12, I was struck by a sentence he used to describe the ideal reading instruction given in a fourth grade classroom: “Reading assessment that gives students useful feedback while shoring up their self-esteem is important to the students and the teacher” (2). That is certainly not happening in our classrooms this week. Afflerbach writes, “Teaching to the test is, in effect, teaching to an impoverished notion of what questions can tell us,” (55). I could not agree more! If you can Google the response to a question, then you likely shouldn’t be asking it. So, why are we putting so much emphasis on these tests? What is the purpose?

When they finish their state tests and head to our first block class, I will ask my tenth grade students to think about the role of questions. As we wait for some of our classmates to finish testing, we will critically questions the types of questions asked by our state assessment. What is the purpose? And I will give my students an opportunity to creatively respond. And then I will ask them to come up with better questions for the texts we are currently reading. I will share with them the Webb's Depth of Knowledge chart, asking them to reflect, much like I am for my graduate class, on what makes a good question. I'll ask them to anticipate the responses and consider their purpose in asking. And then I will give them the opportunity to post their questions to the class, selecting a couple of students each day to become our in-class discussion leaders and our online discussion leaders.

And in questioning questions, we'll together craft better questions and more critical responses.

In the Name of Rigor

My English department is undergoing quite a bit of change in order to accomodate the reality of state testing in the era of Common Core State Standards (CCSS). I was told yesterday our current curriculum overhaul is an attempt to add rigor and help students prepare for the state tests our students will take in their tenth grade year, tests that are now tied to student graduation as well as to my teacher evaluation.  That word rigor has found its way into quite a few of our conversations recently.  And while on its surface, I wholeheartedly agree that our curriculums need to be challenging, need to engage students in higher order thinking skills, and encourage students to think critically about our content areas, I worry at how many are taking up the word "rigor" in light of the CCSS.

Barbara Blackburn knows quite a bit about this.  She's been writing and presenting on ideas of classroom rigor for quite a while.  And in her recent post on the MiddleWeb blog, "Five Myths About Rigor and the Common Core," Blackburn highlights just a few of the ways that idea of rigor has been misused in attempts to prepare students for CCSS realities.

Rigor is not additive.  It is not about adding more books or adding more homework. Instead, Blackburn points out,

"An environment that supports rigor focuses on risk-taking, since working at higher levels requires that students take a risk. How do we do this? By reinforcing progress, effort, and grit, or persistence."

Rigor is not found in State Reading Assessment workbooks.  Rigor lies in creative and critical thinking, in encouraging students to pursue inquiry, in choice and ownership over the learning process.  So why is it that there seems to be such a disconnect between the goals of rigor as presented by CCSS and how it is taken up by districts and departments?

This past Saturday, I helped organize Edcamp Philly, an unconference for teachers that encourages discussions about pedagogy and practice over your typical conference presentations.  It was a whole day filled with collaborations and connections.  I talked with other educators interested in inquiry and passion-based learning.  I learned how a local school has called their inquiry project DaVinci Days.  I met with other teachers interested in flipped learning and teaching for mastery.  All around me were energized teachers talking about the learning happening in their classrooms, talking about that learning in rigorous ways.  And no one was talking about using workbooks to teach students already struggling with reading.  And no one was talking about simply adding more books as a way to add rigor.

It is disheartening to hear rigor being thought of in terms of test preparation. It breaks my heart to hear justification for returning to traditional teaching methods - e.g. workbooks, assigned full class readings, required constructed written responses without audience or purpose - as a way to better prepare students.  But prepare them for what? To take more tests?  Who benefits from this? In the long run, it is not our students.

I am not opposed to the Common Core State Standards. They provide a foundation for teachers to talk about the skills we want to foster in our group of learners. However, the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) are not a pedagogy.  The CCSS are not a theory for teaching reading and writing. And the CCSS certainly were not intended to be an assessment strategy. Yet it seems that so much of what we are hearing is about how schools are moving away from the pedagogies and best practices of teaching reading and writing that research has shown to help develop the skills necessary for students to succeed beyond the classroom.  Choice, autonomy, purpose, creativity, inquiry, and reflection are pushed aside to make room for "rigor."

I have spent the last few months researching and presenting on why such inquiry-based teaching in the English classroom does more to grow writing and analytical reading skills than test preparation. In fact, it's what I'll be presenting in Chicago in a few months and at the PCTELA conference in October. It feels a bit of a backwards move to be talking about adding rigor in terms of simply requiring that our students "read more" instead of inspiring true rigor which comes from the student, not forced upon her. As an English teacher, my content is more than books. My content is certainly more than workbooks. It breaks my heart to see all that we know about growing engaged and empowered readers and writers undone by tests.