Yesterday I omitted my thanks for the compliment that you paid me. What you said is perhaps the most appreciative thing that anyone related to education has ever said to me as a parent.

Thanks so much and enjoy your holiday!

Hostility much? Wow…

So the principal instructs the teacher to teach at the students’ level, and the College Board (who audits the AP courses and administers the AP tests) insists that the material be taught at that level. And the kids, who don’t really want to be there anyways, certainly aren’t interested in spending extra time in the classroom catching up.

Tracy–Placement tests are a beginning (teehee), but only one part of a really meaningful set of summative evaluations–that can be used to guide individual instruction, but also to point up weaknesses in either the curriculum or teaching methodology.

Ray–I think that we have unwittingly expected far too much of annual state-administered tests. At best they can sample the material–which provides good data for what they are intended for, which is an accountability system that gives across-the-board information. Where we fall down is trying to work backwards from that necessarily limited information to make individual or classroom level decisions.. While a repeated pattern of weakness (or strength) in a particular area is certainly helpful information, it may lack the detail needed to improve curriculum. And because schools have overlooked the more important issues brought about by having standards (ie: what should children be learning) and instead focused on shortcuts to doing well on tests, the formative testing that ought to be more helpful tends to focus primarily on those things likely to appear on the summative test. In other words–if the end result is to have built a building, and in the end all we know is that our building won’t stand–we don’t know if we need to work on better bricks, more I-beams, fewer windows, stonger mortar or revising the building schedule to better sequence the assembly.

I do have one quibble. I have tried to include the skills that my students are required to know for the state reading test in my classroom assessments. This works very well in reading because there are really just a small number of challenging skills that are tested. A student needs to be able to make inferences, understand figurative language, write a summary, and use information from the text to support assertions that they make about the text. I can teach the basic skills early in the year and spend the rest of the year helping students improve the quality of their work. By testing the students about once a month on these core skills, I am able to see their progress and make adjustments for individual students. While it’s true that interim tests that are similar to the state tests can turn in to a form of mindless test prep, this does not have to be the case, especially if the state tests are of a high quality.

I can only imagine what some kid like me would feel like if singled out for testing that wasn’t being given to everyone.

One of these days, the honors students of this country are going to realize that they really do, collectively, have school administrators by the balls.