23 Signs Your Pet Is Actually Your First-Born Child

We are all so very guilty of it, including myself. Of seeing those most shocking headlines stories, and not allowing ourselves the time and space and presence to go just a little bit deeper into our thoughts—and ask, perhaps, those much harder questions...including, what can I do to help?

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Calm yourself, before you harm yourself.

Had a conversation with someone who shall remain nameless about motivating students to do better on the HSA (Hawaii State Assesments, which will be replaced next year by the Common Core Smarter Balanced test.) This person prefaced our conversation by saying that she also hates standardized testing and what its emphasis has done to our schools. Yet she says, but I do make a big deal out of it and I have had 90% of my students, some of whom were special education students, either pass or improve on their HSA. Perhaps this correlation can be made - I don't make a big deal of the HSA: My students do not score well on them. (We just took the first round of two). Therefore, If I were to become a cheerleader for the HSA, my students would score better. Why would I do this? Let me play devil's advocate to myself. If getting a proficiency score on the HSA meant that the student would come away with the experience a better person, a more confident person, believing that if they can get 300, they can do anything, wouldn't I want to gift them with this nugget of self-worth? Wouldn't I sacrifice my own personal beliefs about the fallacies of standardized testing so that students would receive this oh so valuable gift? If I don't, and can't make that sacrifice, am I being selfish, egocentric, disingenuous, a charlatan? I guess I have this thing about meaning. I abhor meaninglessness. I don't believe the HSA is meaningful because there is no way for us to know if what we are teaching is really matched to the test. We have to assume. We have to trust, without ability to verify. In this transition year to the Common Core, we were told that there was a different "Bridge Assessment" and that if we focused on these identified Common Core standards, this is what would be in the bridge. So, like good soldiers, we made these standards the focus of our instruction, and the objectives in our SLOs. (Hawaii teachers know this as the bane of our year). Come to find out, it looks like the same HSA test as before. This was confirmed by a DOE talking head who told us that it would have been better for us to focus on the old standards rather than the Common Core. And then we were given, during our duty-free lunch period (never again!), these color copies that are supposed to show student growth over time based on the HSA. Our evaluation is going to be based on how their scores improved or did not from year to year. Oh, the outrage. Generally, what most of us on my grade level see, is a decrease from third to fifth grade. Can this be because we are all terrible teachers? Is that the only variable? We only know that some of the high scores do not reflect the students that we know. But there is no way to validate. When we agreed to the new Educator Evaluation System, we agreed to fair, reliable, valid means of evaluation. This way of showing student growth is totally junk science, and our union had better make this clear to the DOE. Getting rah-rah about something that is so pernicious is like being forced to campaign for someone I don't believe in, is like marrying someone I don't love, like drinking whiskey that I don't like the taste of just because I've been told it's good stuff. I will keep looking for apt similes. I can see getting rah-rah about doing well in school, about paying attention in class, and participating to learn. About learning. About increasing knowledge and skills. About thinking. About communicating. About problem-solving. About getting along with each other. About celebrating and developing your strengths and strengthening your weaknesses. This is what is meaningful to me as a teacher. This is why I teach. But I do not teach to be validated by my students' standardized test scores. I am not done with this topic. I have not answered the question posed by my devil's advocate in my second paragraph. To be continued. Testing and all the other evaluation stuff is what I thought about when I saw this.

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