We have to stop allowing people who have never done our jobs to dictate how we should do them. We have to stop operating within a rigged system and acting like the system is fair. We must stand against the systematic dismantling of public education at the hands of modern-day robber barons and their legislative cronies. We have to stop pretending that our jobs are not political. If taxes pay for it, government agencies regulate it, and legislative bodies craft policy for it, it's political. We must no longer be silent!
While I know that correlation is not causation, it is increasingly difficult to ignore what 15 years of consistent data have shown: poverty matters. Poorer students do not perform as well on standardized tests. Standardized tests are more accurately a measure of student poverty than of student learning (1). When the game is as rigged as standardized testing, the failure is on the part of the system, not those forced to operate within it.
The current system artificially creates winners and losers. The catch-22 is that if I do my job, and so do the state's many other teachers, and our children succeed, that is not a success; instead the rhetoric is that the test is not rigorous enough. When too many of Oklahoma's students passed the biology test, the cut scores were rigged upward, which created more failure. This was done after tests were scored and after those manipulating the data knew what that manipulation would do (2). When my students do not score as well on those same tests, the failure is said to be mine. When the data is so easily manipulated, and it is manipulated, those are not my students' failures, nor is it my failure. Such an artificially created failure rests squarely at the feet of those who created it.
We can no longer allow the rigged and manipulated data to be used for high-stakes decisions. Third graders are held back on the basis of a single test score on a test that is not designed to measure their ability to read. It's a language arts test! Eighth graders are told they will not be issued a driver's license if they are unable to pass the 8th grade "reading" test, which is also a language arts test and is not designed to measure their reading ability. High school students are not allowed to graduate if they do not pass the required number of tests, which have already been shown to be easily manipulated by simply raising the passing score after students' tests are scored. Teachers are evaluated, in part, based on the same manipulated data (but only if they teach a tested subject).
On top of that, schools are given a grade which does not reflect the true value of the school. The top performing students are often exempt from the end of instruction tests. Because they are exempt, their scores on the alternate tests do not count in the school's A-F data. You heard me correctly; the top performing students do not count in A-F if they are exempt from the EOI tests. If the district is lucky, an exempt student may count in the bonus section for AP or honors classes. Meanwhile, most of the bottom 25% of students count three times: once in whole school progress, once in the bottom 25% improvement, and usually in one or more subareas. A-F scores are skewed downward. Enough already!
Who does this system benefit? Testing companies who make billions of dollars in testing contracts with state departments of education, charter school companies who cash in on the rhetoric of failure, politicians whose campaigns receive donations from those companies and who gain campaign points by promising to "clean up public education and fire our way to the top." One thing is certain; children do not benefit from misguided, high-stakes test driven education reform.
