This article appealed to me because it shows just how emotionally and physically draining standardizing testing is on not only the students who take the exams, but also on the teachers who have to administer them. Kate Salerno has an even more difficult role. She is the designated “assessment coach”—or coordinator—of the all the standardized testing at Falls Church High School in Fairfax County, Virginia. The article explains how Salerno deals with testing, as well as describes a process they call “jamming” before the exams.
Assessment coach always being tested
article from The Washington Post,
published in The Citizen, Auburn NY
Friday, April 13th, 2007Once upon a time, each teacher decided when to give a test. No one ever thought of having a full-time overseer such as Salerno. But schools are bigger, courses are more demanding and teachers are resigned to the fact that if they do not coordinate every lesson and test, students will slip through the cracks and show up on test results as bad news. This school year, Salerno is supervising more than 4,300 state tests for a school of 1,400 students. Each test is a potential headache.
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For the past two years, Salerno has collaborated with 11th-grade English team leader Patrick Mohan in administering the SOL writing tests, completed earlier this year, and the upcoming reading tests. They agree on students having a 45-minute review right before every SOL test, which further complicates the test schedule.
“You might call it a cram,” she said, “but we call it a jam,” in honor of the school mascot, the jaguar. There are several jams, including a 130-minute review session for students retaking an SOL exam, listed on the two-page schedule she prints out for staffers.
The fact that teachers have to “cram” students for the tests literally right before them sounds horrible to me. All throughout my educational career I’ve heard “don’t cram!” and “study an hour a day—it’s more effective than the night before!” Yet here’s a school that’s literally reviewing/cramming students moments before the big exam. Using what I’ve learned in my educational psychology class this semester, students only have a certain amount of “working memory” space. Even if the students are supposed to have learned the information ahead of time, and this is just a “review” session, chances are as a teacher you’re going to overwhelming and cluttering the minds of several students.
It’s sad that teachers don’t get a say in what’s important and what’s not when it comes to teaching students. Standardized tests seem to mandate everything. If the national government really wants to hold education to higher standards, I think maybe they should hold teachers to higher standards. Now, this is not to say that I want my administrator someday breathing down my neck constantly about the quality of my teaching. I just think that our country should hold our educators accountable for educating students—I’m paying several thousand dollars right now to learn how to be an educator. In the end, I would like to think I will be able to perform my job responsibilities: educating my students in the best possible way to benefit them as adults. Standardized testing is not the answer…
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