How does standardized testing forces teachers to spend all their time "teaching to the test"?

They have to teach common core and don't have time for things like subject-verb agreement.

from what my mom's experience has been it seems that the main problem with public education is that the schools are trying to keep up with the standards, but the standards are far beyond some (not all) of the students. like my mom is trying to teach kids basic reading and writing when they are being tested for more advanced reading and writing comprehension. of course they aren't going to learn much when you are not able to teach down to their level. lots of the problems are low-income poor quality family life at home too for her case.

What you missed is that you accidentally placed an s on the end of a word where it shouldn't be. As a result people are going to read the thread title and think your retarded.

Other than that, I think you have it under control.

Rupp, arguably our top distance runner can supposedly break 11 in the 100m. What if said AD wanting to copy the "expert" dropped the requirement to sub 11 100m and applied it to all distance runners at the program?

Bacon, lettuce, testosterone wrote:

What you missed is that you accidentally placed an s on the end of a word where it shouldn't be. As a result people are going to read the thread title and think your retarded.

Other than that, I think you have it under control.

This furthers my point. Even an idiot like me breezed through public school standardized testing without devoting one minute to "test prep." If a guy who can't even write a grammatically correct thread title can pass standardized tests, everyone should be able to.

Uh uh wrote:

Rupp, arguably our top distance runner can supposedly break 11 in the 100m. What if said AD wanting to copy the "expert" dropped the requirement to sub 11 100m and applied it to all distance runners at the program?

What would happen is that you'd have a situation that is not even close to analogous to standardized testing.

Bacon, lettuce, testosterone wrote:

your retarded.

Really?

What we've found in my subject and grade level (middle school math) is that the standardized state tests demand so many different topics to be covered in a such limited amount of time that we truly feel crunched for time. With some students who take longer to grasp concepts, yet expected to pass the end of year exam, it can force teachers to essentially teach the concept and practice how it may be tested before having to move on. In those situations, you lose the fun labs, hands-on activities, and projects that allow the kids to explore the concept more deeply. To me, losing out on those projects that are applicable to life outside of school and testing in order to practice test questions is the essence of "teaching to the test."

By the way, as much as I wish it were true, the tests are not easy for everyone. I have had 8th graders who count on their fingers and can't multiply who are supposed to solve a word problem involving a function. In terms of your analogy- try getting a kid who walks with a limp to run that 25s 100m.

low bar wrote:

The bar is set so low that if you just focus on providing the best education possible, the students will easily pass the test. A 180 day school year provides plenty of time to go way above and beyond the imposed standards. What am I missing?

Teachers complain, chaos reigns as St. Paul schools spend millions on ‘white privilege’ training:

UPDATE: More school districts report chaos after ‘white privilege’ theory influences discipline rules:

162430 wrote:

Bacon, lettuce, testosterone wrote:

your retarded.

Really?

Maybe.

Your welcome.

low bar wrote:

If an athletic director expects a track coach to demonstrate at the end of the season that all of his athletes are able to break 25 seconds in the 100m, does the coach have to spend his whole season "coaching to the test" to get his athletes ready to break 25 seconds? Of course not. The bar is set so low that he can just train his athletes the way he wants, and he can be pretty sure that everyone will meet the AD's standard.

Seems like the same applies to standardized testing. The bar is set so low that if you just focus on providing the best education possible, the students will easily pass the test. A 180 day school year provides plenty of time to go way above and beyond the imposed standards. What am I missing?

What you are missing is that you assume that all students are motivated and capable of learning. There are a lot of dumb kids and to get them to pass teachers need to devote most of their time to "teaching to the test".

At the end of the day, standardized testing is still just a crude IQ test. At some level, not all people will be able to perform at a given level. It will probably take 20 years for education policy experts to accept this. Yeah, maybe the standardized tests are easy FOR YOU, but for someone with an IQ of 80 (of which there are a lot....millions of people, in fact), moving from a 4th grade reading level to a 5th grade reading level will take MORE Than one year of instruction. For you maybe it took 2-3 months. "teaching to the test" by spending more time on things actually ON the test (vs art, music, etc) is one way to marginally improve test scores, but even then you'll run up against the IQ issue.

Canadian teacher here, but the single biggest problem with standrdized is a bloated curriculum. The various government agencies are an entity unto oneself (see create some make work project of curriculum and then find some way to make it legitimate by having standardized assessment).

I am not against standardized testing, but it should 1) part of the whole picture that is used to provide supports for students/teachers (egs if see low test scores then find some way to support that school, area, etc...) and not fire teachers 2) use a smaller curriculum that really focuses on the core issues and leaves the 'trick' trivia pursuit style questions alone. In that way you can have multi faceted instruction egs direct for the main content and then have the flexibility to try and create deeper thinking/learning

I teach two types of Social Studies course that have government exams and one has a bloated curriculum and the other a more reasonable curriculum. In one course I have to hammer the content and thus leave out more in depth critical learning and skills development (egs writing a proper history essay), while the other has a more refined curriculum (which I often teach through direct instruction) where I have time to focus on skills, debates, simulations, while also learning the larger content themes. In the other one I am lecture central.

By all accounts are system is quite a bit different than the USA (more public schools, less class/social divides which IMHO appears to be a major problem in the more Darwinistic US system). Not to say our system is perfect (far from it), but more egalitarian (which ironically enough is the concept of the American Dream)

Well you have to keep in mind what "good" standardized testing scores do for a school: 1) public image 2) funding

I think John Oliver did a piece on this, and it will answer all your questions.

Income is a much more accurate measure of doing well on test than skin color.

Second year teacher here-the problem with standardized testing is that educational policy makers assume that every student has the same abilities. They are seen as numbers instead of people. Each student is different, thus will not achieve the same way. That does not mean that all students can't learn. It does however mean that there will be students that simply do not want to learn. Success or failure is a choice and when teachers are held to this testing standard while considering those kids, it proves to be very problematic. A more holistic approach focused on teaching students HOW to learn rather than specific what they have to learn would prepare students better in my opinion.

For example, as a social studies teacher government often is the focus of standardized testing. We can drill students all day on the logistics of the legislative branch and they may remember some of it in five years. Or we could have students develop truly well thought out governments based on models and present them with problems they have to solve. I believe the later will be more memorable and teach students how to think.

Just my two cents

Often the teachers are incapable of passing the test themselves. It's hard to teach to the test when you failed the test.

low bar wrote:

If an athletic director expects a track coach to demonstrate at the end of the season that all of his athletes are able to break 25 seconds in the 100m, does the coach have to spend his whole season "coaching to the test" to get his athletes ready to break 25 seconds? Of course not. The bar is set so low that he can just train his athletes the way he wants, and he can be pretty sure that everyone will meet the AD's standard.

Seems like the same applies to standardized testing. The bar is set so low that if you just focus on providing the best education possible, the students will easily pass the test. A 180 day school year provides plenty of time to go way above and beyond the imposed standards. What am I missing?

I think you have many misconceptions. The tests given this year are far different than 5 years ago. They expect much more of our students.

Try the practice Performance Based Assessment for Alg I:

.

While you are doing that, consider:

* the test covers the curriculum for the entire year, but is given in late February or early March. At that point, most Alg I students haven't been exposed to quadratic functions as that material comes at the end of the 3rd quarter and nearly the entire 4th quarter.

* there is a portion of the student body that may not have passed 8th grade math, but is moved on to the high school where the lowest level course offered is Algebra I. In fact, they may have never passed a math but are moved through the system since you wouldn't hold back a student due to failing one subject area.

* the results of assessments like this are now tied directly to teacher evaluations on a value-added basis.

I think every teacher has a good idea of what they would like to do to optimize learning and, possibly more importantly, to foster a love of learning. The practical realities of extremely high-stakes testing for students, teachers, and administrators mean adapting to the situation.

This is no different than any other profession. Most people are going to adapt to optimize their performance evaluations.

I think a better track analogy is coaching such that EVERY athlete can run 100m & 3200, throw the shot put, and high jump at a varsity level. I agree it may not be at a level to place in invitationals, conference, district, regional, state, or national level meets, but it's well above some kids' abilities and will naturally result in less coaching for other events not on the assessment.

In my situation, there are three levels for our teacher evaluation. In order to achieve the highest level, no more than 5% of my students can miss their learning targets. For the last two years, we set the targets for each student and we wrote the test - a ridiculous situation that meant setting low targets and the most basic of test questions. From this point forward we have no control over either. Politicians will essentially be in charge of that.

I should also note that we didn't have these practice tests until a month before the exam was given this year, so it wasn't really possible to teach to the test in any meaningful way. Our state legislature just decided to break our relationship with PARCC and will have another in-state group write a new test this year. I would be very surprised to see any kind of practice test until well into the school year, essentially eliminating again the possibility of teaching to the test in a meaningful way.

Our curriculum and assessment procedures have become a political football. Politicians create these high stakes testing situations under the illusion that it affects learning in a positive way. Unfortunately that isn't true at all. 5.5 hours of Algebra testing mean a loss of ~7 Algebra classes of instruction. That doesn't include the time necessary to get the kids acclimated to the software that will be used for the test or the pre-testing at the beginning of the year that was used to set learning targets. Some of our sophomores also had to take the prior graduation test that consumed another 2+ hours for just math.

I personally like our new state curriculum based on the common core standards for high school mathematics. I think it is far superior in it's expectations of students in each course than our prior state curriculum. Important concepts are tied together at a much deeper level. The testing situation has been nuts and continues to be nuts - I don't think that's going to change until people realize that politicians in state legislatures are not educational experts. What happens in the schools needs to be controlled to a much greater degree at the local level in most situations. Make state-level control the exception rather than the rule if you want to promote excellence.

Note the link in the previous message won't take you an entry point everyone can use.

Instead use this:

http://parcc.pearson.com/practice-tests/math/

Then choose "Algebra I" and then the computer based PBA exam.