We all make hundreds of choices every day. What will I eat for breakfast? What tie should I wear with that shirt? What radio station should I listen to? Should I get tested for Covid?
Most of our choices we don’t think too long before choosing. Maybe you just opened a new box of cereal and will use it every day until it is gone. I’d better make sure the tie matches my shirt before walking out the door. Many people listen to the same radio station on the way to work each day. The default these days is if you have any symptoms, you should get tested.
Among these many choices we make, there are new ones that come up from time to time. For our students in most grades, they get to make many choices as we’ve arrived at the annual testing season. That’s right, ladies, and gentlemen, it’s that yearly rite of trying to make sense of standardized testing!
A big choice from our government this year dealt with standardized testing. Does it really make sense to test students who have been through a pandemic and had their school year upended in unforeseeable ways? Since I think it doesn’t make sense to do these fershluggin’ things anyway, I think you know my answer.
The federal government gave a wishy-washy sort of maybe you don’t have to but you probably should because we have bigger fish to fry kind of answer. They left it to the states. Minnesota basically said full speed ahead.
But with that choice come stipulations. In a year where families have the right to choose full-time distance learning for their children, the testing rules stated that students had to be in the building in order to take the MCA tests this year. If you’re truly concerned with the virus and that’s why you’ve chosen distance learning, you’re certainly not going to come into a school building for a few days to test.
So parents, as they always do, have the choice to opt out their kids from these tests. And many have. I’ve had more kids opt out than ever before. Good for them.
But even this doesn’t make sense. With all we’ve learned from technology in the past year, we could have had kids take these at home under close scrutiny. I know it can be done because my daughter took an AP test last spring and has done some work at college that way. There is tech that will keep you on one tab at all times. This same tech requires students to have their cameras on while they test.
So if these tests were truly that important, the powers that be would have used that technology to allow those DL students to test at home where, by law, they have been allowed to work all year. The state knew the number of opt-outs would be higher than ever but plowed ahead with these expensive wastes of time.
Those who think we should test this year have said that it’s important to determine how far behind our students have fallen during this mess. I have an easy answer for you: A long way. But if you’re looking for a more concrete answer, you won’t find it from the MCA data.
Here’s how things are broken down for me as a teacher: how a student did on fiction stories and how they did on informational texts (non-fiction). Wow, that really helps. How about letting me know how a student did on inference or vocabulary or main idea? That would actually help me to figure out where we need to focus more time.
The MCA test scores will be bad this year. They will be bad next year and probably the year after. For a test that many middle and high school kids couldn’t care less about already, there is still no incentive to do well. And for those who do try and do care but have fallen behind because of the changes in school over the past year, a lower score isn’t going to help the mental health problems we have.
My students already took their reading test. I had some who didn’t do as well as they hoped and they were distraught. “But I really tried, Mr. Domeier!” I heard more than once. And I know they did. And I know what they are capable of doing when it comes to reading. But what I see every day in my classroom doesn’t matter to the people behind the tests. And that’s a shame.
Some kids chose to try hard on their tests. Some chose to whip through and finish quickly. Some chose not to take it.
My choice? I’m not going to worry about the test scores any more than I usually do. I choose to write my yearly column on the deficiencies of this flawed system and move on. There is still a lot of work to do this school year.
Word of the Week: This week’s word is enunciatory, which means declaring or pronouncing, as in, “The enunciatory press conference that canceled standardized testing after the Covid shutdown came too late for the teacher who always tried to get testing done early and had his students already complete them.” Impress your friends and confuse your enemies!