Dear State Superintendent Burmaster:

This is just a brief note. Given how little I've slept this week, you'll have to wait at least until this weekend for the long, perhaps profanity-laden screed.

But I wanted to remind you that I support you, I voted for you, I campaigned for you, wrote nice things about you (and bad things about your opponent) on my blog.

I've celebrated the new and recent vigorous enforcement taken against dangerous and unaccountable voucher schools wasting taxpayer dollars.

Yet, your office has me very, very angry this week.

This is state testing week.

And I'm very, very angry.

This year, the 10th grade WKCE was expanded to over 8 hours long. (And I know we have it easy--the 8th grade test is nearly 9 hours.) The test book is more than an inch thick, frustrating and intimidating for even the best students. Following the test administration timeline provided by DPI requires between 30 and 60 minutes of testing every day for three weeks straight.

The testing window--the time frame within which schools must test students--is situated just right so any school on a four-by-four block calendar has final exams smack in the middle of it. Without three weeks straight to pull our sophomores out of class to test, the test lasts a solid day-and-a-half at our school (though it didn't quite work; you'll have to wait for the long version to hear how ridiculous the procedure is getting after the FUBAR week we've had), the week before final exams. That leaves us a spare handful of days to do make-up testing to try for that magical 95% mark for number of students tested.

Who has time to organize all of this? Our guidance staff this year dropped from four couselors for 1500 students to three, and the level of testing compliance required only grows every year.

The teachers may yet mutiny tomorrow, but I consider our school lucky not to have dissolved into a puddle of frustration and chaos.

I know that you are as much at the mercy of George W. Bush and his band of merry privateers itching to take down the public schools. But your office keeps inflating the test. Your office tests sophomore-level knowledge of students who have only finished 9.25 years of schooling. You could be joining Connecticut in a lawsuit, or taking other action to ease the demands on students and burdens on schools, districts, and teachers.

This week I am not a happy teacher. I am not a happy voter, either.