Standardize this, bitch!

Spring is a wonderful time of year. Flowers are blooming, animals are having their babies, "like" is in the air. Only one thing screws up the whole pretty picture. Fucking. Standardized. Testing.

As I sit here, watching my students take these things, I have to quell the urge to rip up all the test books and have the students write I AM NOT STANDARD in big red letters all over their scantron sheets. These test are the biggest load of crap.

I was listening to NPR the other day, and they were talking about a report that said achievement has gone up since NCLB. OF COURSE achievement has gone up. EVERYBODY AND THEIR MOTHER is getting tested, so they have a lot more data. It is really easy to improve from ZERO.

What really pisses me off is that none of the tests we take are aligned with one another. For example, as a Language Arts teacher in LAUSD, I have to give four (yep, that's 8 days of lost instructional time, plus one to grade the essay portion) periodic assessments. Granted, it makes planning easier to have set units, but the tests are not at all aligned with the state tests. NOWHERE on the periodic assessment did it say anything about teaching students to identify rhyme patterns in poetry (you know, aaabbca, etc.). But what is the first question? Of course, it was identify the rhyme pattern of a given poem. I wanted to throw myself out the window. The kids were frustrated, I was frustrated.

I believe in accountability, particularly in education. But this cannot be the best way to do it. It's like we keep floundering around, trying to apply different models to our education system. Now the new hot way to run a school district is to run it like a business. But what is our product? Is it measurable? The answer to that is no, not if the measuring instrument is a piece of crap. How do you measure development? How do you measure increased self-confidence, or a newly developed love of fiction? That's right smarty pants, you can't, but those things are infinitely more important than whether or not a kid in EIGHTH FUCKING GRADE can identify the rhyme scheme of an obscure poem.