I admit that I have experienced a fair amount of self-loathing for the role I held in education the last 12 years of my career. The first 19 years, when I was teaching, were the most fulfilling. I got to work with some fantastic students. Even the unremarkable students were teenagers, after all, and I like to think that they all figured things out over time and became contributing members of society. I don’t remember having any students who I thought were actually terrible humans. I had some truly gratifying moments in my teaching years, because instruction – the teacher-student rapport that you build over a semester, a year, or even multiple years in some courses – is the literal backbone of education. To me, it’s sacred. As I moved into campus-level assessment, I actually experienced the best of both worlds. For 5 years, I still got to teach one class per day, plus I had the pleasure of supporting my colleagues as we navigated the nonsense of state & local assessment. And make no mistake: it is largely nonsense. These tests provide an illusion that we’re tracking student learning, but mostly we’re just adding a bunch of extraneous activities that intrude upon actual instruction and slowly drive teachers insane. My focal point on the administrative side of things was simple – my job is to help you keep your sanity.

I maintained that same mentality throughout the final 12 years of my career after I moved 100% into the realm of assessment. Whether we’re talking about the old TAAS or TAKS system, the current STAAR, or whatever TEA concocts in the future, the state assessment system in Texas is basically insane. We’re talking about a system where we give your son or daughter a single test each spring that is longer than anything they’ve encountered in an authentic classroom setting (also longer than nationally accepted standardized tests), from which we intend to measure whether that child has “learned” the content based on our arbitrary scale, and from which we also intend to determine whether that child has made adequate “progress” from the previous grade level. In multiple subjects. Then we’ll do it all again a year from now, even though the curriculum for those courses may be vastly different. Wow, for the system to work, that had better be one incredibly sophisticated set of multiple choice questions.

“Oh, but it’s not all multiple-choice anymore.” Yeah, sure. You can add in the choose-all-that-apply items, drag-and-drop, short and long “constructed response” items, but that doesn’t really make the test comprehensive. Those item types are ultimately window-dressing designed to suppress the notion that a given student has a probability of getting 20-25% correct simply by guessing. Any teacher can tell you a truly sophisticated gauge of student progress would track it class-by-class, if possible, on an authentic level based on the content. Instant, regular, consistent feedback is the most reliable. But fewer, infrequent tests with a greater number of items on each are always less valuable in tracking student learning and facilitating better instruction. Always. Regardless of the item types. While nationally accepted standardized tests, like SAT and ACT, are infrequent and extended, they are intended to capture a snapshot of a given student’s academic readiness for college, and schools consider them as part of a broader picture of the student’s profile because they know the tests aren’t perfect. No university in the world puts all of the proverbial student eggs in the testing basket.

And yet, somehow we do exactly this in the United States from grade 3 through high school. The current system has the federal government requiring states to use high-stakes, flawed assessments to answer the question, “Is our children learning?” Agencies like TEA spend millions consulting with testing firms to create these tests, which are then used for all the purposes already mentioned, and whose results then determine the majority of each campus’ and district’s accountability rating for the year (it will take a series of posts or podcasts to deconstruct what a mess the accountability system in Texas is). Now, I realize that certain statisticians or psychometricians may argue for the validity and reliability of STAAR, but this post isn’t arguing those issues, nor am I exploring the notion that the tests are inherently biased against certain demographic groups. For me, the bottom line is that the system as presently constituted is, on its face, detrimental to students and the teachers attempting to educate them because the very notion of an annual test for children simply cannot be considered the end-all-be-all in determining whether they are learning, whether they are making sufficient academic progress, or whether the campus and its teachers are meeting any practical standard of performance.

Yet here we are. And the fun REALLY begins when district administrators get a hold of some data points, develop an addiction to buzzwords like “data-driven instruction” and “rigor,” and decide they want more, More, MORE in the name of determining whether students are performing throughout the school year. Enter Local Assessment, a veritable obsession for many districts (my last district included) as they embark on a quest for – let’s be honest here – some kind of predictor of their accountability for the current year. Sure, student learning is an objective, but the real goal is the score and letter grade we can trumpet in board meetings, news releases, and social media. And it’s created an entire cottage industry: the “benchmark test” that attempts to imitate STAAR in content, format, and difficulty so that students can literally practice…testing. Not necessarily the skills embedded in the coursework, and certainly not skills that might work across different courses. Nope. Testing practice. Texas law currently limits districts from administering more than two benchmark tests in a given school year. (And, voila!, TEA developed their own “Interim Assessments” – two per year – whose sole purpose is to predict a student’s STAAR performance for the year. More on that sham another time.) But hey, that’s OK – your local school district will simply purchase and/or develop a series of smaller tests and call them something besides “benchmarks” – curriculum assessments (CAs), curriculum-based assessments (CBAs), quarterly assessments (QAs), insert your own title and initials here – these tests are all specifically designed to circumvent Texas law on benchmark testing. Sometimes these tests are actually quite short; other times they may require “shutdown testing,” as my last district called it, so a good portion of an instructional day (or maybe all of it depending on what class you teach) is burned away. Short or long, this testing is administered outside the normal testing that occurs in a classroom, meaning that instructional time is interrupted simply for the sake of district-level testing and data. Teachers and students become pawns for the central office bean-counters.

“That should be acceptable if the data is used to inform teachers about student performance and improve instruction.” Absolutely! As the great Kenan Thompson once said, “I mean…it should be.” And sometimes, it happens. SOMETIMES. When I worked under Dr. Teresa Stegall (see last week’s post), we operated under a mantra where “assessment should inform instruction.” But too often, the data is altogether ignored at the campus level, or worse, it’s used in a punitive fashion. Teachers are punished because of their students’ performance. Principals are called into meetings with lofty names like “Cadence of Accountability,” where they have to present their data on the most recent CBAs, defend their numbers, and lay out a plan of action if those numbers fall below expectations. Often, such meetings are incredibly adversarial, where central administrators are almost hostile toward campus principals. I know this because I used to support these principals as an assessment & accountability coordinator, either preparing them for an upcoming meeting or assisting them in the aftermath. The stories could be brutal and actually changed my perception of certain central administrators. The process often seemed like the old joke about “the beatings will continue until morale improves.” No productive or supportive environment, but plenty of accusations and ridicule to go around.

Do you really think, after suffering through such adversarial garbage, principals then go back to their teachers full of energy and support? Maybe the most noble ones do. But more likely, the message and tone received from central office is passed to teachers through badgering and negativity. Then we wonder why morale is down and teachers look to escape to other districts, or out of the profession entirely. But do we ever consider that “maybe this isn’t working?” Heck, no. “It’s what we’ve always done.” (At least for the past two decades.) This is the cycle that high-stakes assessment has begotten. And even as TEA, or the legislature, or the federal government, promise reforms and simplification, what I like to call the “testing industrial complex” (shout-out to the great President Eisenhower) continues to churn and roll along. And no one will have the actual courage to step up and admit that it’s harmful to students, that more and more testing literally crowds out time for teacher-student rapport, for teacher-teacher collaboration, for…you know, instruction. The politicians at the national, state, and local level would rather point to incremental gains that might be illusory and call them “miracles.” And the companies profiting from the system will be happy with that.

This whole sham lies at the core of whatever self-loathing I’ve experienced for the past dozen years. Yes, I tried to rise above the fray. I used hash tags like #respectinstructionaltime when communicating with teachers. I intentionally used humor to establish rapport with staff, letting them know that, as a so-called assessment professional, I understand how the proverbial “necessary evil” of testing was soul-crushing for them because it was sucking away time from the literal reasons they got into the profession. I even got into minor trouble at times for my humor (yet another story for another time), but I make no apologies, because my job was to help teachers, or principals, or fellow administrators, maintain their sanity. I stick by that. But I also stick by the belief that someone in a position of true authority needs the courage to stop this insanity. In the meantime, I ultimately decided that the grind was a bit too much, and not worth having it crowd out the time I wanted for other things in my life. No apologies there, either. And no apologies for using my voice to call out the system as the illusion that it is now that I am no longer constrained by it.

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