Potential for direct Department of Education communication!

One response, from Ms. Sullivan. As she notes, it is not in their requested format, but it is pretty great!


Assessment required by ESEA legislation, the state of Nevada, and my school district from a Veteran Teacher on the ground in Las Vegas, Nevada:

I teach Kindergarten.

My students are five years old.

I have many concerns about having my instruction, my curriculum, my students and my professionalism only measured by a five year old's ability to choose the best answer from a multiple choice question and a bubbled response A, B, C, or D.

As a student of Early Childhood Development, I have found zero research that this type of assessment is effective in anyway.

As a student of Diversity, I have serious concerns about any type of assessment tool that has never been truly fair to minorities or students of poverty or limited language students. I teach a wide variety of at-risk students and measuring everyone with the same tool really does little after the initial assessment that they fail. Yet, I repeatedly assess and fail them over and over. It is a waste of time and destructive.

As a person who teaches in an at-risk community with two-thirds of students living in poverty, I'm worried about the amount of money we are spending on testing and failing nearly everyone. Money that could be used on wraparound services or meeting basic needs or a million other things. When students do not have their basic needs met, there is little a teacher or student can do unless those needs are met first.

____________==____________

As a teacher, I have little instructional time left. I spend 100s of hours testing, testing, testing at-risk students. I feel like my little students are tested to the point of being abused. Let me break it down:

65 students x 45 min CCSD individualized assessment x 4 times a year = 11,700 min = 195 hours = 49 instructional days

65 students x 20 min AIMSWEB assessment x 4 times a year = 5,200 min = 87 hours = 22 instructional days

65 students x 128 common core standards for report card (1 min assessment per standard) x 3 times a year = 24,960 min = 416 hours = 104 instructional days

65 students also take 3 hours of Launch Assessment on the computer as a whole group - 2 instructional days

177 days of assessment

I have 180 days

I'm left with 3 full instructional days to teach. Unless I get very creative and enlist an army to help me test, the entire instructional year is taken. This is abusive and destructive. There is nothing developmentally appropriate or informative or helpful when no instruction is provided.

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Research. There is no valid research that the way we assess and now punish public schools works. I see upheavals, stress, chaos, communities tortured. This is reform?

Experiment. This is an experiment on real people with no voice. I'm watching struggling students and struggling families and struggling families sink - while communities with more resources benefit. This system favors the already literate. It favors the majority that invented it and is biased. It is not supporting the at-risk, impoverished, or needy. I live in a community that has failed most of its students for over a decade. No additional money or support for failing kids - just punishment.

Qualitative versus Quantative. How would you like to have your personality ranked with a number? When students are small like mine - you are basically placing a number on their personality. Will they do their best? Will they participate? Will they learn how to take the test in time to do well? Aren't we really measuring ability to take the test instead of cognitive ability? With the invention of the computer there seems to be a race to assign numbers and crunch data in technology. This veteran teacher knows - my students are more than a score.

Authentic Learning. Unfortunately real learning is difficult to measure. Human beings are complex. People have different talents and multiple intelligences. In the interest of the business community, who wants a return on investment, we smash real learning, creativity, invention, innovation, and divergent thinking. If we only measure a person's ability to fill in a bubble, we will not measure their ability to sing, dance, discuss, debate, write, create, problem-solve . . . we don't allow the thinking process to show - which is often more important than the end product.

Business. I'm worried about neighborhood schools being closed and business models being favored instead of focusing on ALL students in every community. Nefarious forces lurk like no other time in history, not to help kids, seeking charter contracts and the privatizing dollars. Killing public schools is no good. We will regret it. We will live with unintended social and community consequences. Devaluing teachers with experience and education is crazy - not listening to real people with decades of education engagement doesn't make sense. If we allow those with money and only a business perspective to drive the education conversation - we will end up with schools great for people of the business mind and everyone else will wither and fail. Or we will privatize our schools into charters divided by race, interest, religion, and money - resegregating and exacerbating divides which already exist.

Human and Civil Rights. Public schools are important to communities. Access is important. Traditionally, public schools have been the keepers of civil and human rights. Schools will always be an expense because raising small people is costly. The American Dream is protected when motivated individuals can learn new skills and make advancements. I'm very worried about how we label and track people so young and still developing. The way we are assessing is destructive because it favors some groups while excluding others. Separating kids younger and younger.

Accountability. Most likely I will lose my job that I have loved and done well for 26 years. Not because of my teaching - because my students are at-risk. 50% of my assessment will be student scores next year. I work in an at-risk environment where I never teach because of mandated testing - I only assess. My students are 2 or 3 years behind the nation before they ever set foot in a public school. How do they compete with a student across the nation who had more access to nourishment and literacy? How can I succeed? The writing is on the wall unless something changes. I have taught hundreds of people to read and know I'm successful. I'm scared I will be replaced by a TFA teacher with 5 weeks of education crash courses. This is accountability or a kangaroo court?

Nothing about what is going on or legislated is making sense in my real world.

How to fix it? Stop listening to lobbyists and big money. Start listening to labor on the ground and at the front lines. Talk to all communities and the teachers with students in their rooms who work there. Read research not think tank spew. Realize that a generation of kids will be assessed so much and so hard that this will be their learning - because there wasn't time for real instruction.

Angie Sullivan

Indeed!


Karen Ohio Reading Teacher