Testing Week

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has a two-part series on Wisconsin's state testing, testing that began officially last week. In part one, Alan Borsuk does a good job of running down much of what makes educators wary of the tests:

Ask a room full of teachers at a planning meeting at a Milwaukee public school and you get an off-the-record round of groans that appears to represent the views of many educators. Schedules have been reshaped, curriculum changed, special procedures put into effect. The pressure is high.

Leaders of the state Department of Public Instruction aren't very enthusiastic. "It's not like we felt a need for more testing," said assistant superintendent Margaret Planner. [. . .]

Under the federal law, all third- through eighth-graders must be tested each year in reading and math, starting this year. The same is true for one grade in high school--in Wisconsin, it is 10th grade. [. . .] Thousands who have special education needs or limited ability in English and who would not have been included years ago are now taking tests, in many cases with special arrangements made to assist them, or with special tests. Schools face consequences if they don't have at least 95% of their students take the tests.

Add it all up, and it is a lot of testing--and money.

Wisconsin paid the private firm that handles the state testing program, CTB/McGraw-Hill, $6.6 million in 2004, and that's only a part of the total testing tab in the state.

It is worth noting here that McGraw-Hill posted a 17.5% increase in third quarter profits the other day. All purely coincidental, I'm sure.

I want to write much more about the testing, but, alas, since this is testing week, I don't have time right now to do it. Jim Horn at Schools Matter does some good commentary on this article, though. Perhaps later this week I'll have more time to say something.

In part two, Amy Hetzner writes about the effects of No Child Left Behind on special education students, noting that the law confilcts in many serious ways with federal IDEA (Individuals with Disabilities Education Act) legislation:

It is the testing of special education students in particular--along with the expectation they be able to match their peers without disabilities - that has been both one of the more controversial and celebrated aspects of the law.

All but the most severely disabled students are taking the same tests from third through eighth grade and in their sophomore year of high school. That means students who previously might have been exempted from state tests - or whose lower-than-average results might have been explained away - are being prepped, scored and compared to their classmates in regular education classes. And there are consequences for poor performance. Weak performance by a group of students in a school--such as special education students--can lead to sanctions.

The development has some educators concerned that students with disabilities will be taught fewer of the skills they will need to cope in life and a more limited curriculum. [. . .]

Glenn Schmidt, a longtime special education teacher at Northside Elementary School in Sun Prairie, calls the federal law "disastrous" for children with disabilities.

He complained about the time the extra testing takes away from instruction, especially now that students with disabilities can receive such accommodations as extra time to complete the tests. And he questioned the value of a fifth-grade reading assessment for a student already known to read at a second-grade level.

"The year before last, I had nine kids in here that were taking the WKCE and, at one point or another in that testing week, seven out of the nine of them really broke down in doing it," Schmidt said. "The whole testing situation tends to be very difficult when kids know they can't do it," he said. "These kids are sharp enough to figure out these are tests that, in many cases, are difficult for them to master."

Despite the fears of some, school leaders believe they can resist the pressures to narrow the curriculum to reading and math instruction and to ignore teaching life and work skills required by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act--or the pressures to pull special-education students out of regular education classes.

Last year at my school, it was our special education students who kept us from moving up on the sanctions list, instead of going further toward them. Four special ed kids, in fact--four who did not take the test. Had they taken it, whatever their performance, we would have made "safe harbor," as they call it, showing enough growth even without meeting minimum performance standards, and would not have fallen to another level of sanctions. I don't know who those four were, but I am guessing that they feel the same kind of response Glenn Schmidt's students do--that testing is beyond them at their identified disablity level, and, more importantly, that there is no life-skill purpose behind doing it. Even my regular education students feel that way about the tests sometimes.

Even I feel that way about the tests some days. Today is one of those days.