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Anyone who has talked to me or read my blog knows I am not a fan of the emphasis on external testing that has become the norm in public education.
In the most cynical corners of my heart, I believe the entire system comes down to profiteering on a system that is meant to be a service to our citizens, and deep-seated misogyny that says we can't take the word of women (teaching is a woman-dominated field) regardless of their training or expertise.
Even in the less cynical corners of my heart (where I hope that we take on some of this in order to ensure equity for students), I still resent how much time we lose to it and HATE that it's always the LAST thing students do, so they leave for summer thinking school is an absolute grind designed to make them feel stupid.
Here are some older posts about testing:
In 2020, students and teachers in North Carolina received a brief reprieve from this system--one blessing among the curses sent by the pandemic--but it returned in 2021, despite the entire school year being a hot mess of constantly changing expectations. At my school, that meant that we gave every test three times: once to Week A students, once to Week B students, and once to Remote students, who were brought back to the building in person for that purpose.
On Friday, I was a proctor for three classrooms of Remote students taking their Math EOGs. Here's my completely subjective and biased description of what it was like:
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The stark, spare atmosphere of sad isolated desks scattered in an unloved room. Bright light reflecting on institutional brick and tile until it burns the eye. A fan rattles in the background and a fluorescent bulb flickers haphazardly, adding to the feeling of neglect and despair. We had to give each test three times this year, so this is already day seven, with four more to go, perhaps five or six with make-ups.
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They've been cowed by the threat of "having to do all this again" if anyone exhibits enough personality that the testing environment is compromised and we have a misadministration. Hoodies are worn like armor against the psychological freeze.
The caring adults who nurtured these children all year are forced to act as prison wardens--no quarter given. Discontent wafts from the room, a stench palpable as a heap of garbage left rotting in the August sun.
The kids want to please us, so they comply, even though it is confusing and alien--this impersonal silence. We love them, so we try to pretend that all this means something besides a money-grab by testing companies capitalizing on the culture of distrust they helped to carefully cultivate. We pretend the testing "data" provides insights that help with teaching and learning.
In our hearts, everyone knows we are pretending, but we do it all the same to protect ourselves from the truth and keep enough heart to go on in the face of abuse and gaslighting on a national scale. The best slaves beat themselves, and people who serve out of love are easy to manipulate.
Teachers and students. All feeling helpless and trapped.
The more competitive kids click through with brutal efficiency while others seem to choose answers through a process of divination, looking for signs in the words--a hidden code.
Memorial Day shines on the horizon like a rescue boat approaching the wreckage of the Titanic, an inadequate life raft that will offer only a few of us even a temporary reprieve.
We'll spend the next two months trying to repair the emotional trauma, medicating with games, sleep, books, or whatever dulls the pain, hoping to fill the well back to a level that will last all the following year. Those who survive enough times to be called "veterans" worry about the callouses they are developing over these wounds. Callouses that make it harder to onto empathy and stave off bitter cynicism.
And this is the last thing kids do each year before they are sent off for summer. Ending not with joy and accomplishment, but with cold silence and feelings of failure. How can this be what is best for kids?
