Testing without investing perplexes me beyond measurable amounts. What is it the tests are truly trying to measure, student success/failure or teacher success/failure? To ease my students test anxiety before the ISATs, I tell them to do their best, it is not a measurement of their knowledge, but a tool to help me know how well I did my job. Sometimes I feel as though I am deceiving them intentionally and other times I feel this statement is brutally honest.

When politicians jump up and down, getting all frothed over low or high test scores, do they really know what the excitement is being attributed to? Is it the competency of our educators, the test was too easy or difficult, the new curriculum is to blame or praise? Can a three day seminar fix this issue we have in reading, math, or language usage?

The school where I teach has the lowest proficiency in the state, but we have some of the most phenomenal growth scores. We are having success with whatever we are doing in our classrooms; however, it isn’t about growth, but about benchmarks. Too bad for my kids, because a majority of them are three and sometimes four years behind grade level. Standards are what I teach, state and common core, aligning them as we go through this transition process. I feel the common core will make it easier to attain the goals set before us, because I feel the freedom will be there to do whatever it takes to achieve the desired result. It looks scary and daunting, but, as with all uphill battles, you just have to put one foot in front of the other and sometimes not look too far ahead.

I spend a week prior to ISATs teaching my students good test taking skills. In fact, my principal has asked me on numerous occasions to give a tutorial to the rest of the staff on this preparatory endeavor in my classroom because of the growth I get out of my students. Some of the teachers who take this to their students report back mixed results. I know it is not the test taking skills that enable my students to do well on the tests, it helps, but I actually teach them the content they need to know in order to be successful. I am looking forward to not wasting a week on teaching those skills, because the assessment with New Balance should look like their daily assignments.

Every time I assess my students, I am very careful to make sure that the test is reliable and valid. Unless it is a pre-test, I had better be assessing what it is that I taught them. Assessment should drive instruction, curriculum should support the instruction that is driven by assessment, and all assessments should be reliable and valid. Then the sign of a true educator is when they evaluate the results of the assessments and reflect upon whether the material needs to be retaught or if it is time to move forward.

I don’t believe our testing (ISATs) is a good measure to dictate what we need to be investing in. Multiple choice? I heard it said, you could answer “B” on every question of the SAT and have an adequate score and even possibly doing better than trying to work out every problem. Open-ended answers provide us a better picture into the minds of our students’ capabilities rather than rote memorization and lucky guesses. That is what we need to invest in, valid and reliable assessments that will drive our instruction with curriculum that will support it.