There’s Got To Be A Better Way

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When your students complain about having to go spend two hours in the gym instead of staying in the classroom and taking a math test, you know the powers that be have not come up with the best way to handle the latest round of State Mandated testing. As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, the State Testing for certain elective classes was supposed to take place Wednesday. Due to unforeseen circumstances the testing was postponed until today.

This morning finds us, the whole 7^th grade, sitting in the gym, half the students on the floor, half the students in the bleachers, watching the movie PRIDE. Not the 2014 PRIDE about gays in Britain, the 2007 PRIDE about a black swim team from the Philadelphia ghetto. We’ve used this movie for several years as a character education movie. It tells an inspirational story, but I’m not sure it is interesting enough to keep the attention of nearly 200 7^th graders sitting quietly on the floor or in the bleachers.

These tests some of the students are taking this morning are known as CTE Tests. CTE stands for Career and Technical Education. Students who took the modern version of Home Economics, Computer Skills, and Science-Technology-Engineering-Math Lab, are tested with a relatively short, multiple-choice, online test. Like the other standardized test here in North Carolina, CTE Tests are not used by local or state administration to rate the students learning. Rather, the results are used to punish teachers if the scores are not high enough. If the scores meet or exceed expectations, there is no recognition given to the teachers involved. This is true of all Standardized State Tests given to students in North Carolina.

This is two weeks in a row we’ve lost half a day of instruction due to State Mandated Testing that, in reality, has no beneficial effect on learning because the students have no stake in the outcome so the results are not indicative of what they actually learned. Instead the results are indicative only of how much effort the students feel like putting into answering the questions.

This whole testing regimen just doesn’t make sense.