Ian and Jonah went through four days of state standardized testing this month.
A lot of suburban parents gripe about the lost days of learning during that week. The morning is spent with the tests and then they rest for the afternoon. There is no homework or school projects. The nervous kids leave for school with sharpened pencils and reminders from their parents to check their work.
I don't have a huge problem with Jonah's week of testing. It's a testing world, and he'll need those skills when he takes the SATs. I like to know how he compares with other kids in terms of math and writing. He is a good writer, but he writes very slowly. It will be interesting to see if he improves in that area this year.
For Ian, my special ed boy, these tests are torture. He and his classmates are not on grade level for learning, but they don't know that. Until they get these tests. For four days, they take standardized tests on information that they haven't learned yet. Ian is nearly on grade level for math. He could be on grade level, but he has so much remedial work in other areas that his teachers don't push the math. His language deficits are most obvious in the reading and writing section of the test.
There's no question that Ian and all his classmates will fail the test. And they know that. They come home from school that week, sad and dispirited.
One mom told me that she took her daughter on vacation for three days after the test to help her recover from that humiliation.
I suppose that there are good political reasons for testing the special ed kids. If those kids were released from the testing requirements, schools would put all the slower kids into special ed classes in order to raise overall test scores for the school. However, the result is a class of humiliated children. There has to be a better way.
Please stop humiliating the special ed kids with standardized tests.
Apt. 11d 
I guess without special ed kids, my thoughts about the NJASK don’t extend beyond finding out what the test is like, making sure they are well rested, and that they make sure to go to the bathroom before school (because the teachers say they won’t let us out of the room!)
But it sounds like the problem here isn’t the existence of the standardized test, but the way the test is organized. Maybe they could make it more like video games, in that if you “die” in the middle of level one, then you have to go through level one again, and don’t get to go on to level two until you win the boss battle.
If a first grader doesn’t get a “proficient” grade on the NJASK, then they should be given the same test again in second grade.
LikeLike
“Maybe they could make it more like video games, in that if you “die” in the middle of level one, then you have to go through level one again, and don’t get to go on to level two until you win the boss battle.”
Isn’t that more or less how the computerized standardized tests (like the GRE) work?
LikeLike
I cannot think of a good political reason to humiliate children. The fact is that special ed kids need to be considered differently and assessed differently.
Bureaucracies that force needless and senseless conformity to make their lives easier rather than to evaluate accurately and responsibly are performing their jobs poorly and undermining that which they seek to improve.
Poor Ian. Hopefully he’ll take it to heart when you tell him that he is a wonderful, lovely, talented, and smart boy and the rest can all go to hell.
LikeLike
This week I have read several articles about parents keeping their kids at home to protest the tests. Why not try that?
LikeLike
I think a limited amount of standardized testing is a good thing, not to judge the child, but to judge programs. And, as you say, exempting special ed kids (especially with the broad range of special education needs) might produce political pressures to use special education classification to exempt kids who might otherwise be able to learn (given the right program).
I also think that one of the few benefits that have come from NCLB is the knowledge of which children are being failed (and mind you, I do see it this way, that the children are not getting the education they deserve, rather than the children are failing).
But, I think there’s no good reason to humiliate children. Ragtime suggests something akin to threshold detection in psychology (where problems get progressively harder when you meet the standard so that you can figure out how well people are doing). The problem with applying the theory to education is the difficulty of ranking questions by difficulty, but some tests are using such methods (not sure about the GRE, but some of the computerized tests do, like the MAP).
I’m guessing the kids’ humiliation comes from having to do work that they just can’t do, and knowing they can’t do it? threshold testing should help with that, and using those tests might get better assessments of how the children/programs are performing.
And, isn’t it cool to know that I. is near grade level in math? That’s one of the reasons that I’m uncomfortable with just throwing out the testing whole sale.
(For an even more depressing assessment stories, read at “The life that chose me” about the assessment of high special needs children, assessing “reading” in children who can’t speak, sit up, or recognizably communicate).
LikeLike
What they could do is do what they apparently do in gifted testing, which is to test up to the highest level of their ability. http://giftedkids.about.com/od/glossary/g/ceilings.htm
This would be time-consuming, though.
LikeLike
This wouldn’t even be that hard, I think. Just test them at the grade level that they could be expected to do reasonably well. You just have to have your school’s performance grade factor in kids testing at below grade level and you would remove the incentive for schools to move kids around. I guess coming up with the right formulate to avoid abuse might be tricky, but I don’t think that would be insurmountable. But testing kids on material they definitely don’t know is useless. If they were tested at an appropriate level you could actually evaluate which schools are doing well with these kids.
LikeLike
“Just test them at the grade level that they could be expected to do reasonably well. ”
Grade level isn’t necessarily meaningful.We’ve moved away from the dark days of referring to people as having a “mental age” (mostly) different from their chronological age because it’s not meaningful, especially with children with asynchronous abilities.
“But testing kids on material they definitely don’t know is useless.”
But, this is definitely true. Seems like some form of adaptive testing would be the solution, but, it is time consuming and expensive.
LikeLike
“And, isn’t it cool to know that I. is near grade level in math? That’s one of the reasons that I’m uncomfortable with just throwing out the testing whole sale.”
Testing better than expected can get a child who looks slow noticed. If teachers think that a child has locked-up potential, they’ll try harder and get better results. (There’s also a famous experiment that found that that works even when the experimenters were lying to the teachers about who was unusually gifted.)
LikeLike
I have a friend who taught at an inner-city high school where students regularly came in at 3-4 years below grade level, or even more, and they experienced a similar level of humiliation every year. The teachers would try to prepare them for it, saying, please do your best, but we know it is going to be very difficult for you. This was a special school geared towards bringing kids up to speed, and no one was at all surprised by any of the results. It was just an exercise that served to prove exactly what everyone already knew, in the process making the kids feel like crap.
LikeLike