Exceptional students suffer under standardization

This article makes me really sad. Jayne, a mother of a mentally disabled 8^th grader named Sam, vents her frustration about standardized testing in her blog. The testing seems to go against everything that we are future teachers are being taught: every students is different and has different needs.

Doing the best you can
by Jayne
in her blog, Journey Through Grace

This coming week, kids all over America will be subjected to standardized tests to determine what they know (or how well teachers have taught to the test). We use the CRCT in Georgia. The problem is that the CRCT is very gray in its content and requires a good bit of inference. Not good when your child is more of the black and white persuasion. Just attending to three hours of testing a day is struggle enough, but imagine if you felt deflated from the get go because you didn’t understand how the questions were worded. Can you turn to the teacher for help? Nope, because then it’s not standardized. For a disabled perfectionist, it must be overwhelmingly frustrating. For my disabled perfectionist, it causes way too much undo stress. Oh, and did we mention that if kids in your school don’t do well, we’ll add you to our “didn’t make AYP (Annual Yearly Progress) list” because you know we are all about the current administration’s NCLB (No Child Left Behind) policy. So, consequently, teacher’s and school administrator’s jobs are dependent on how well their students do on this one test. It’s insane.

We have all sorts of modifications in place written into his IEP. Sam gets one on one monitoring, he’s able to take frequent breaks, the instructions can be repeated to him, and he’s able to answer in the booklet instead of having to bubble in an answer sheet. But still, he usually fails miserably. Doesn’t matter that he makes all A’s and B’s with his daily school work, only how he performs on this one test. If you opt out of your Special Ed child taking this test, they can’t get a regular ed diploma and truly are supposed to be so impaired that they require instruction in a self-contained classroom. Well, that’s not us either. It’s so very frustrating that there is no alternative assessment for kids like mine. I hate that his score will pull down the school’s overall rating, but what can we do?

I asked them if he does not do well if he won’t be allowed on to the ninth grade, and they all just smiled and said, “We as the IEP team determine his placement.” In other words, they really don’t care how he does. They’d love to see him meet the standard, but he’ll go on to high school regardless. So basically, I’ve told him, as he’s started stressing about Monday to just read each question carefully and choose what he thinks is the best answer. It’s all I can ask of him. Sometimes you just do the best you can.

link to blog

Jayne is absolutely right—students like her son, Sam, struggle immensely with standardized testing. They will usually fail miserably, be retained, and ultimately learn to hate school and learning. This is not the kind of environment schools are supposed to foster.

LauraHinNJ comments on Jayne’s blog:

I really think these tests are a waste of everyone’s time – never mind the stress on students and teachers.

Honestly, I think it’s a farce that educating children – any one child – can be standardized. Certain kids will fit into that mold, but the majority won’t. And shouldn’t be expected to.

GRRRR!

Hope Sam doesn’t stress too much.

Laura seemed to hit it right on: standardization implies that all students are the same! They all learn the same way, retain the same amount of information, handle test anxiety in the same manner, come from the same home life. It’s ridiculous. There has to be a better way of assessing what students know.

I can see this directly effecting my English classroom someday. Perhaps I will have some remedial students, students with ADHD, or just your general at-risk youth from poor home environments. Throughout the year, I will be scaffolding them. Modeling effective reading and writing processes and choosing books I think they will enjoy and that will allow them to connect to the text. I will be (hopefully) fostering in them a love for reading and writing, or if not that much, at least a functional literacy for adult life. But then the standardized tests will come, and exactly like Jayne said, there will be no room for questions, no scaffolding, and no teacher who’s aware of the student’s particular needs to accommodate them. It’s just the students and the test booklets. From there, the students will probably do poorly on the test, the scores will be reported to the parents, who will be angry about the scores—they’ll probably ridicule the child for being “dumb” or not “trying.” OR, the parents will tear into me, questioning my ability as a teacher for preparing their child. It’s a lose-lose situation for both the student and myself.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, I will have a few extremely gifted students in my classroom. Throughout the year I will be pushing them to think creatively, analytically, and “outside the box.” I will give them challenging books to read, and provide them with scaffolding to increase their literacy and comprehension skills. And then standardized test days arrives for these students. Some might do very well, if they are strong, level-headed test takers. Others might be very capable, but suffer from test anxiety, like most students. Or, these students might be punished for their creative thought in responding to the writing portion of the test, for example, if there answer doesn’t fit with the “norm” of students taking the test.

Again, it all goes back to the idea that each student is an individual. Why do we have to measure them all the using the same method across the board?

I believe every student learns differently; therefore, I will have to make sure my teaching style targets the many different angles of learning. Standardized testing only targets one angle.