April is upon us (not to mention a week of vacation next week), and I’m ready for my TAKS rant. Please ignore any praise I gave the test before, I’m taking it back. Maybe I’m a little wound up, with the test just around the corner, but how would you feel if your administration was telling you to stop doing your job and just teach the test?
Perhaps I’ve been living under a rock, somewhere in idealist lala land, but I really thought my principal and leadership team were different than the others in the district. I thought I could finish my first year of teaching confident that I’d stuck by my guns and taught only engaging, creative, and relevant lessons all year long. Instead, I’m strongly advised (as in “send me your lesson plans so we can ensure you’re doing this”) to spend more than half of each block going over TAKS problems with the class. Basically, they want me to just show the kids test questions and make them work them out while offering up test strategies if they just don’t get it.
So besides the obvious boredom of going over TAKS questions everyday for more than an hour each period, I’m frustrated about what this test is measuring. I do believe standardized testing is useful—it helps me hold my kids to a high mastery standard and it theoretically measures what my kids know at the end of the year—I don’t think the test was created so that teachers would stop what they were doing in February and teach nothing but test strategies until April. I keep hearing “X middle school, which has the same student population as our school, was recognized for the last three years…we can do it too!” When I asked a teacher from that school what his secret for 87% passing rates he just said “I dropped everything and drilled them on TAKS for 3 months. You’ll need to do that too.”
Based on this, I feel like the test is a poor indicator of student success. They could ace the TAKS test but they have no love of learning—they fail to grasp the relevance of the material they learn, it’s just a means to an end for them. So the horrible teachers, the ones who are really good at handing out worksheets and drilling kids all day long, are praised while other teachers who bust their ass creating a great classroom environment risk loosing their job because their test results may be weaker. Can you tell I’m stressed, and angry, and ready for April to be over? Who knows, maybe my kids will blow the test out of the water, I’m just frustrated that students at my school see learning as a way to pass the TAKS, not as a means to understand the world around them.
There must be a way to measure teacher effectiveness by more than just numbers. What if you could get rid of all test prep materials so students are forced to learn how to apply everything in an open-ended way, and be so ready for the test without having to swallow it down every day. What if you could measure how students’ attitude toward learning had changed, or measure self-confidence? What if you could measure student engagement, and how their study skills and organizational skills had improved immensely? But none of that will be measured. And I’m angry. And that concludes my official TAKS rant.
