Parents, I have a confession to make: I love tests.
I’m a third-grade teacher at a public school in Brooklyn — a school where kids do well on the state tests. This is my tenth year in the classroom and my ninth as a teacher in a testing grade. And I just love tests — or, in education speak, assessments.
Why? They help me do a better job teaching your kids. They show me what’s going well and what’s not, which kids are learning concepts and mastering skills and which ones aren’t. They even show me whether or not I’m being effective as a teacher.
But while my love for tests is true, it isn’t unconditional. Far from my affection are high-stakes, developmentally inappropriate exams that neither reflect the teaching and learning in my classroom nor allow me to better understand my students. This month’s English Language Arts (ELA) exam — and other increasingly prevalent high-stakes tests in New York City and beyond — are these types of tests.
This month’s ELA exam asked our third-graders — 8- and 9-year-olds — to sit for 240 minutes of testing over three days. This meant that kids had to sit still without a break, without speaking, without getting out of their seats, for 80 minutes at a time.
Jean Piaget, one of the godfathers of cognitive development, is likely rolling in his grave knowing that New York is asking kids equipped with 45-minute attention spans to focus for almost twice that amount of time.
It felt cruel to ask students to go back and check their work after the 60+ minutes many had already spent reading and then re-reading passages, writing and revising their responses.
One of my students mused, “Why do they put the extended-response questions — the longest writing parts — at the end? That’s when we’re most tired.”
Compounding the problem, the exam content itself was often beyond the reach of most students’ cognitive skills. While third-grade standards suggest that students should read at a Guided Reading Level-equivalent Level P (on a scale from A to Z), several of the exam’s texts were Level S or higher. One of the texts was actually an X, a level of text complexity two years beyond grade-level expectations.
During the third day of testing, one of my students put his head on the table for about 10 minutes. When I asked him if he was okay, he looked up at me and said, “I just don’t know what’s going on in this passage. I can’t understand it.” At the exam’s close, two other students said only, “I couldn’t do some of them — I’m bad at writing.”
As an insightful student told me, “It feels like the ELA tests us on what we learned during test prep, not what we do during real reading and writing.”
Liz Phillips, the widely-esteemed veteran principal of Park Slope’s PS 321, said that students had been “asked to answer questions that had little bearing on their reading ability” and that “the tests were confusing, developmentally inappropriate and not well aligned with the Common Core standards.”
As a teacher, I might be able to stomach the lengthy sessions and high-stakes nature of the exams if the results helped me better deliver the instruction that enables my students to grow. But teachers don’t get their students’ test results until August or September — when their kids have already moved on to the next grade.
Furthermore, because New York deems the tests “secure,” teachers are prohibited from talking about the exams and can only view previous years’ tests during an administrator-supervised, timed session the following school year.
Remember what I said about loving the ways assessment enables me to better serve my students? This one may as well have disappeared into thin air the day my students were done with it.
Administrators and teachers throughout New York State understand the problems with the state exams: Last November, 545 principals went on record opposing the high-stakes nature of the tests. During the last two weeks, hundreds of teachers and administrators from Districts 2 and 15, two of the city’s highest-performing districts, protested this year’s flawed ELA exam.
Fortunately, Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña has heard those cries. Last week, she modified the student promotional criteria to include more than just state tests.
But that’s not enough. Parents, we need to make clear to our city’s leaders, and to lawmakers across the state, that there are better ways to educate, assess and promote our children than these exams.
Our public-school system boasts countless teachers who, like me, love assessment; we’re ready and able to show evidence of student learning and growth.
I can’t wait to be done giving New York’s tests under these untenable conditions. On May 2 — and with your help, for the foreseeable future — I’ll be able to go back to giving my own.
Brunski teaches third grade at PS 29 in Brooklyn. She’s spent 10 years in New York City’s public school system, teaching students from second through fifth grades.