This Will be a Nice Waste of a Week
October 6th, 2008NECAP tests are this week.
There are several different perspectives, several different reasons for my despite. Like many teachers, I hate state testing, though not just for the usual (although good) reasons. Like every other teacher, I hate losing a week of instructional time—we only get 180 days with the students to cover a lot of ground, and losing four solid days is huge. For those classes which last only a semester, the loss is even greater.
But I can swallow that loss, as irritating as it is. I can also swallow the effect it has on the students—barely—and mostly because of the efforts made to alleviate the negative atmosphere in the last few years. Feeding the students a good breakfast, moving some of them out of the cafeteria, and giving them more information about the tests all go a long way to making the tests much more palatable.
Still, it does nothing for my central reason to hate the NECAP: It’s completely useless.
It’s a different test every year, so there’s no comparing one year to another. We could improve every aspect of instruction, we could have a much better group of kids take it this year, and still end up scoring lower than we did last year—only because the test was harder.
Or they could score much better, and it will have nothing to do with us. It’s useless as a means of telling us anything about the students, and therefore completely useless as a tool for improving instruction. It does nothing but determine rankings in the newspaper.
Very helpful for politicians and political fodder, not much good for anything real or useful.
I’m all for effective evaluation of students—but this isn’t it. This is stupid—the first question asked was about what the world was like 12,000 years ago. Ridiculous—who cares? How is that helpful to the world we need to train our students for?
Even if it somehow is… well, I’m not expecting to see anything too great from scores this year. My sense is that they’ll be up—students took it much more seriously from what I could see, and our biggest problem last year was that the students just refused to care.
But really, until we stop looking at a single test as the primary measure of student achievement and improvement, we’re not going to see what’s really going on in our schools.
All we’re going to be seeing is what kind of mood they were in that morning.
