The time is near when students throughout the country will struggle with pencil and paper to prove whether their school is worth the bricks it's built with...
It's been over a month since I was able to bring myself to sit and meditate on the nature of teaching and write a reflective piece like this. Why? The test. It's coming. The TEST is coming.
My state uses a diagnostic test to predict weaknesses on the annual, end-of-the-year, high stakes test that will largely determine whether we have lived up to the demands of No Child Left Behind (NCLB). We've had the results of that test now since early April. We know that many of our fourth and fifth graders don't, for example, understand the concept of elapsed time (or how to calculate it). I'll spare you other details....
Schools that reach the predetermined passing score on that TEST (whatever that test is called in your state) are said to have made AYP - short for adequate yearly progress.
Those words, Adequate Yearly Progress, are the mantra that school principals chant when they do yoga. Curriculum supervisors long for it. Associate superintendents travel their districts swinging a stick that has the words (or at least the initials - AYP) carved into its side. Reading specialists prowl their hallways stalking students who might hinder the achieving of it. Everyone from the Director of Technology to the district's head of Title I wants schools to make AYP. Even the Special Education Director. Perhaps especially the Special Education Director.
Just like all the people I just mentioned, I also want my school to make AYP. And for the last month I've been busy - busy trying to strengthen my students' skills in the areas where our diagnostic test says they are weak.
The goal of the TEST is to have a certain percentage of students achieve "mastery" on particular standards. Usually scores are used to classify individual students as novice, partial mastery, mastery, or some level above mastery on a variety of individual academic skills - like grade level vocabulary or addition of fractions. Special educators are usually faced with a dilemma: many of their students are so far from grade level mastery of some whole set of skills that no amount of work will carry a student over that testing threshold this year. The temptation is to focus on those mid-level students that who might could be push over that line and used to help the school make AYP. And to do it at the expense of the lowest functioning students who may never achieve full mastery of most academic content no matter how marvelously they improve.
A number of commentators and authors have claimed that NCLB leads to a "dumbing down" of school curriculum. I don't think that's quite true. But it does lead to a focus on the middle. Students who are already mastering the curriculum are given minimal attention because there's no real advantage for a school in having a student that did really well last year on the test do really, really well this year. The kid either counts on the mastery side of the column or on the non-mastery side - for or against the school's AYP. And because Adequate Yearly Progress is measured, well, yearly (instead of, say, every third year), school tend to focus on kids who are doing well enough to be pushed over the threshold into master this year. That works for now. But in a few years those school that pursue that particular strategy will be left with a bottom rung of students that haven't really improved much over the last several years and can't be brought to mastery in a single year.
I've made it sound a littl emore simple than it is. The truth is that there is now more emphasis on special education students achieving mastery on the TEST than ever before. Why? Something called disaggrate data. But I'll save that for another day. For now let's just say that I'll sleep more at night when the TEST is past...
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