Hello CTB Family,
Your friendly neighborhood self-appointed Bishop here. Today I’m going to get serious on you. It was a hard morning for my family. I want to talk about the MSAs, or the Maryland School Assessment test.
On a normal day of school my son’s classroom is focused on challenging the kids to create, discover, and problem solve. The teacher builds projects for the students based upon their interest. There is lots of group work. There is lots of hands on interaction. There are times of independent reading time. The arts weaving in and out of the day. The teacher does direct instruction when necessary; but more often she takes the role of facilitator, encouraging the children’s natural curiosity and passion. At one moment the classroom is full of laughter, in the next discussion, in the next a quiet hum of activity, in the next there is stillness. It is a living place of wonder.
It isn’t always perfect. In fact, some days it’s down right messy. Working and learning in a community with others is never easy. There are personality conflicts, times when misbehavior makes it hard for the rest of the room, times when engagement is difficult, times when a few children’s struggles cause chaos. Add to this that it is an inner city school and the kids wear on their backs all stresses, frustrations, and problems common to Baltimore. My son’s class is just like the city – all different types of people mixed together striving to grow, learn, and succeed together. It isn’t always neat.
This mix is one of the reasons we keep the classrooms small. Twenty-two kids. One teacher. Personal aids when kids need them. As a result the teacher knows each kid backward and forward. She is constantly assessing their progress, tailoring each child’s education to their needs and level.
On a normal day our school is a beautiful place bubbling over with life, creativity, laughter, struggle, and most importantly – learning.
But this week my son will go to school, sit at his table, and fill in a scantron. There will be no room for creativity. There will be no thought given to his passions or individuality. There will be no attempt to inspire his intrinsic desire to learn.
There will be right answers and wrong answers. There will be an intense demand for him to focus for a long period of time on something fairly boring. There will be a clock and time limits. There will be bubbles to color in just the right manner or he will get the question wrong even if his answer is right.
Amusingly, my son doesn’t care. For him the test is a new adventure. It is a quest to take this week. It is a new challenge to master…because that is how his school has taught him to approach education.
But I care. And my heart hurts for him. Because today I send him to take a test I have not prepared him for. It is never easy to send your children to do a task they most likely not succeed at.
I could have prepared him. I could have spent the last several months drilling him with sample questions. I could have given him practice test after practice test. I could have built his test taking stamina over months and months of repetition.
But I am not raising a drone who knows how to follow directions.
I am raising a leader who knows how to problem solve, think outside the box, and create. I will not sacrifice the kind of thinker I want him to become so he can pass a standardized test.
And what is all of this for? What is the purpose of this bizarre exercise that has no parallel in the adult world?
The outcome of the test will have no direct impact on my son. If he gets a perfect score no one is going to pin a medal on him. If he fails he is not going to be held back.
No. This test is not about my son.
The purpose of this test is to rate our school. We are a charter school. When the time comes, our request for renewal will be based on three things: our school climate (25% of the renewal score), our school governance (25% of the renewal score), and our school’s MSA scores (50% of the renewal score).
I understand. They have to hold us accountable someway to universal standards. I am a huge fan of accountability.
Forget for a moment that the test measures how well a child can regurgitate information, not how well a child learns or thinks. Put that aside. By using this form of test in a school the size of ours they place an unfair burden on a small sample of students. What if five of the twenty-two kids in the class have a terrible day? What if they had a rough night at home (’cause that never happens to kids in Baltimore City) and bring that into the test with them? What if they simply have a cold today and struggle to focus? In a small sample size each individual carries more weight. So today I send my son off not just to take a test he is unprepared for…I send him off to do battle for our school.
I’m not afraid our school won’t be renewed by the way. We are an amazing place of learning. There is no doubt in our mind that we will far surpass any measure they want to hold us to.
But it still sucks.
Something needs to change.
There has got to be better way to do this.
“Standardized testing has swelled and mutated, like a creature in one of those old horror movies, to the point now where it threatens to swallow our schools whole.” – Alfie Kohn
Bravo. I am of the opinion that informed parents should be in the streets overturning cars and lighting things on fire because of the out of control focus on high-stakes lowest-common-denominator testing regimes. These assessments have, in my opinion, done real damage to the US educational system. In particular, since the tests themselves are not comprehensive (only math and language arts are tested in grades 3-4) they have encouraged many schools to eliminate subjects that are not tested or tested less frequently (science, social studies). In addition they have shifted priorities away from higher-order thinking toward rote calculation and mechanical aspects of language. They say Common Core is meant to fix this, but I am afraid that it is just an excuse to continue and expand a flawed regime of high-stakes testing and apply it with more granularity at a level where the statistics are meaningless (i.e. rating a teacher of a classroom of 22 students). We need to focus on excellence in learning and authentic measures of student capability in all areas of study. And, even more importantly, we must devote our resources to supporting our dedicated educators in educating, not burdening them and our kids with onerous testing regimes.