I made two kids cry this week. I’m not proud of that. Both the children and I have to deal with it. I know that I can repair the relationships, but you’d like to think the benefit was worth the cost. It wasn’t.

If you read this blog, you know that my goal is to create a classroom community, not unmanageable stress. Both crying incidents came from kids who had to take the MAP (Measure of Academic Progress) tests. One, through tears, said: “That test is EVIL! I’m not coming to school if I have to finish that test on Monday!” He’s a boy who has become our go-to class expert on whales, despite serious learning disabilities. Another, while sitting in his chair, managed to put his head on the floor (imagine an inverted U-shape, or a wilted flower) and let out a plaintive cry: “But Mr. P, you didn’t teach us this stuff! How am I supposed to answer this question?!” He’s a boy who writes immensely interesting graphic stories, and struggles mightily to control his anger.

I kind of felt like I didn’t want to come to school either.

While mandated by the State of Iowa, these tests don’t give me much useful information. Like, for instance, it’s hard to take the test score of a boy with his butt in a chair and his head on the floor seriously. What might that tell me about him, other than that he is much more limber than I am?

Thankfully, now our classroom is finished with our year of standardized testing: MAP testing for math, reading, and language in the fall and spring (about 8 hours total testing time) and one round of IA Assessments for reading, math, vocabulary, science, and social studies in January (about 5-6 hours of total testing time.) Total standardized testing time is about 12 – 14 hours.

That amount of time doesn’t begin to touch the amount of instructional time that is lost to testing. Testing always disrupts the day in various ways. Testing parses up the day into less than ideal chunks and affects our instruction. Our classroom is weighted with kids with special needs to allow our wonderful special needs teachers the opportunity to serve more children, better. I love working with both the kids and the teachers, but at testing times I lose almost all special education support because their time is taken up reading tests and providing cheer leading encouragement for children whose needs are already very well-known. We adjust our learning for 3 weeks in the fall, 2 weeks in the winter, and 3 weeks in the spring. Learning happens. Just not as much, and our projects slow down tremendously.

For all that time and effort, I don’t get much useful information from the tests. They are billed as being diagnostic, even precise. They are supposed to give exact areas of need and clear “skills” to teach. Supposed to.

I’ve never found them to be helpful.

Some students do well on them, some don’t. But I know what they can do and what their next challenges are because I’ve had a bazillion conversations with them about books and ideas, seen their writing, watched them develop interests and self-motivated learning, and seen how they interact with others and the world around them.

If I don’t get information from the testing, and if the kids don’t learn anything from them beyond what they can tolerate and what they can’t, then the only reason we’re giving them is because someone, somewhere doesn’t trust me or my administration to build our capacity to know kids, develop learning opportunities and deliver instruction, and provide useful feedback to parents and children about the learning that is happening.

Ironic, isn’t it, during this week when indictments were handed down in the Atlanta cheating scandal and questions have been repeatedly raised about the Washington DC “school reform miracle” under Michelle Rhee, that at the root of this testing craze is a lack of trust and a belief that bad teachers are the problem; the answer seems, unimaginatively, to come back to “objective tests” with high stakes for kids and teachers.

There is a better way. Together we can build the capacity of educators to create environments where real, important learning occurs. Many conversations are already underway. Let’s keep them growing.