We’ll take a brief hiatus from my students’ persuasive ideas this week. After all, it’s that time of year for my annual look at why standardized testing is a bad idea for our students!
In about a month, you’ll be asked to vote for the NRHEG referendum. The school is looking to update some areas that sorely need attention. These look to be some necessary changes, and all of that costs money. The buildings themselves are integral to a quality education.
But beyond all that, school districts everywhere face issues which also require money and are at least equally important, if not more so, than the brick and mortar. And these are at least partially linked to the scourge that is the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments (MCAs).
I’ve written in the past about the difficulty in tapping into student motivation and intrinsically pushing them to try their best on everything. This problem is growing exponentially. It used to be that you could figure on about 5% of students who it seemed there was a great difficulty in reaching, in trying to get them to produce some work that matched their abilities. That number is growing and doesn’t look to slow down any time soon.
Let me paint you an all-too-familiar picture. I teach 7th and 8th grade, a time that is difficult for students to weave through, period. Bodies are changing, social pressures are mounting, and some kids become lost in the changeover to being a teenager. With ever-changing family dynamics and the presence of social media, being a teenager is tougher than it’s ever been.
I have students who simply do not want to work. They will just sit in class after class and do absolutely nothing. I try a variety of steps in dealing with these kids, as do all teachers. I’ll try talking to the student to see what’s going on, what might be an underlying reason for this stupor. After all, sometimes life events overpower any desire to work.
If that’s not effective, contacting parents is the next step. At times, there is a good response, and together, we figure out a path back to success. Other times, this is a dead end as well, for various reasons. And the student will continue to sit there and do nothing.
So what’s next? That’s where things become difficult. How much power or ability does a typical classroom teacher have to deal with this type of situation in conjunction with all the other students’ needs?
And this plays out in standardized testing. Last year, I had 15 students finish the MCA reading test, which has about eight stories and 60-70 questions, in less than an hour. I had many of them flat out tell me they didn’t care. Many of these are some of the same students who don’t accomplish much in their classes.
To be a true measure of student achievement, this is a problem that needs to be addressed. And believe me, in talking to teachers in other districts, it’s not a problem limited to our area. These are students who we say fit into Tier II and Tier III intervention status. The methods we use as described above would be Tier I.
In reality, every school needs people who are working full time to provide those interventions. In our school, we have a couple of things that are being done, but those can’t reach all the kids who need that attention. Of course, that costs money.
On the other hand, we also have students who do try and just need a little extra push. The government has gifted us with the Common Core Standards and said we should teach all of that. That’s simply impossible, but teachers do the best they can to address math and English standards. And you have to get to a point where you move on in those standards, even if not every single student is proficient.
Every school could use reading and math specialists to find those students and provide some extra instruction. These could certainly be full-time jobs in districts our size. Again, I think any school district would tell you these would be great positions to fill, but they, of course, cost even more money.
The governor is proposing more money to districts, and some of that might be earmarked for some of those motivation interventions, at least in the form of more social workers. But I think it has to go beyond that to find educators who have a passion to help at that level and can find ways to make those connections and to dig to the root of the problem.
Until the government provides money, and until they hold schools accountable to use that money for interventionists and specialists in subject areas that are tested, I refuse to acknowledge any legitimacy in the MCA tests. I teach the standards and do my best to prepare my students for what they will see through my overall curriculum. I throw out some incentives to try their best, but every year I seem to see more and more students care less and less. The tests are a joke, and some of the kids do their best to prove that.
Okay, we’re done with that for another year! Next week, I’ll resume some of the interesting topics I saw in student essays and see if we need to make any more change in our world!
Word of the Week: This week’s word is omphaloskepsis, which means contemplation of one’s belly button, as in, “The student would rather engage in omphaloskepsis than lift a pencil to complete a vocabulary worksheet.” Impress your friends and confuse your enemies!