I began every class with the Quote du Jour.

Whether handwritten on the chalk board or, thankfully, later projected from a laptop to a white board, these were quotes from the written and spoken word that the students had most likely already heard people say and would now know the source or, if hearing the quote later in life, they will know its source and meaning.

“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood….”

“The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.”

“When in the Course of human Events, it becomes necessary for one People to dissolve the Political Bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the Earth, the separate and equal Station…”

“Hwæt. We Gardena in geardagum, þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.”

The quotes were generally four lines, or sentences long that the students copied into their notebooks at the beginning of class each day. As they wrote I would explain the quote, perhaps something about the author, or use the quote to review material they should remember from the past regardless which class they had learned it in.

They were also random, so they were not necessarily part of the main lesson for the day but besides using the quote to educate and review, the simple task pf copying off the board got their minds out of the hall and into the classroom.

Because of the panicky need to test at every opportunity and if there weren’t any, one must be created, school districts learned the fine art of test manipulation. 

I taught in a district whose central administration, rather than admit that No Child Left Behind was new to all of us and we all had some learning to do, pretended, instead, to appear in total control having the knowledge to implement whatever was entailed when in public while they panicked behind the scenes.

Rather than look internally for teachers who had already developed methodologies that would be effective district-wide, the district, like so many, spent hundreds of thousands of dollars for experts to come in and introduce their consulting companys’ high-priced methodologies, and based on perhaps attending a training session, administrators who had no experience in teaching certain subjects became experts in the field.

The pressure was on to appear that all the new methodologies they introduced, no matter how useless or outlandish, were working, and that could only be proven by testing.

This district began the year testing all students within days of the beginning of a new school year to see what they had retained from earlier grades. This established where the students were at the beginning of the year and, added to the results of tests taken at each subsequent quarter, would be used as the starting point for any measurable progress.

I was teaching American literature to Honors Students and according to the district set curriculum was not to cover Walt Whitman until the second semester, but when a quote from Leaves of Grass popped up as one of that year’s first Quotes du Jour, I explained who he was and read some examples of his work, leaving the bulk for next semester before getting down to the days business.

Yet here, the first district generated districtwide Junior Class Benchmark test of the year had questions on Whitman the answers to which the American Lit students district wide would not learn until months later, and, as it was the district’s own curriculum, the test makers knew that.

Many of my Honors Students concerned about their grades told me they knew the Whitman answers whereas their friends in honors classes in other district high schools didn’t.

There is a whole lot of history between that accidental discovery and its being brought up in a district court case. Suffice it to say that it was clear that the district personnel who created the tests and chose what would be on them included questions based on second semester material on the first test of the year to give the impression that students were achieving great progress throughout the year as their test scores rose.

The reality was that the first test was based on what the students would learn not on what knowledge they were expected to have brought with them that school year, and the test creators knew this would mean that with initial low scores, as the tests began to align with the curriculum, the impression would that be that great things were being done and the genius of the administrators revealed.

Like any teacher I was aware that the all-important testing caused anxiety with some students even the good ones, like my Honors Students, who just had a problem taking tests, and I attempted to ease it. 

I explained my three simple rules to all my classes regardless of their achievement designation, Honors, Special Ed, and the general students if they found themselves panicking over an answer to a question or just the thought that they were facing a test and potential failure.

If they did not know an answer but had to answer as many questions as possible to get a good rating and, perhaps, the answer is on the tip of their tongue but just sits there,
1) the shortest answer is usually the correct one,  2) answers with double negatives are to confuse you. Ignore them, and 3) if you whittle your choices down to two, just pick one. Your 50/50 odds are better than Vegas.

This, of course, was after applying the important first step.

If students read the selection in order to answer questions, they will be attempting to take note of everything they read whether or not it is important. They will attempt to remember every detail as they read the selection which can increase test anxiety, or simply give up because it is just overwhelming.  My advice was to have the students read the questions first so they would have an idea what the test makers considered important, and this would automatically eliminate the detritus. They may not be word for word expressed a certain way in both the reading and the question, but the substance is there in both. 

A student may remember every detail about setting only to find the questions are about the characters, and, while the student could have answered any setting question did poorly with questions on characters.

These rules along with paying attention in class and doing the work will result in good grades as they will be showing what they know not how well they dealt with a test.

My students did consistently well.

Every year at the first gathering of the faculty before students arrived, the principal would get up and announce those classes and teachers who had done well on the statewide end of the year tests the past spring. These were teachers whose class test scores had risen even mildly. The year my students had not only topped the school’s previous annual scores on the Junior Class level test but the whole district’s, this was not mentioned and later in the court case the principal explained that as my students were Honors Students, they were expected to be that good  but could not explain why in earlier years she had praised teachers with Honors Students who class scores only rose a little and were not what my students had done. She also could not explain why after my test scores were ignored by administration, I was not allowed to use my Quotes du Jour as I had been using them. but had to simply have the students write down what they thought the quote meant.

I continued using them for review and got reprimanded for insubordination.

The following year I was teaching English Literature to seniors. We had gone through all the facts about Shakespeare with the students having to learn the usual Shakesperean terms like soliloquy and aside, with the usual descriptions of the Globe Theater, and references to his most famous lines.

To bring meaning to all the technical jargon, I was about to play a video of a play by the Bard, when I was stopped by an administrator who had seen that my students knew the terms and Elizabethan details and that was enough to do well on standardized tests asking Shakespeare questions.

Taking time to watch the play would take away from moving on to learn more things that could be on the test and take time away from test prep which consisted of practice tests each quarter to prepare for the battery of district generated tests, a week’s practice testing to get ready for the state tests, and then the big weeks’ long practice tests period leading up to the End of Instruction Standardized tests.

Each academic quarter instruction time was replaced with practice testing. That was a total of four weeks each year for practice and another four for the actual tests. Instead of learning more things, the students practiced how to take tests on the little they were allowed to learn.

They could, however, answer all the meaningless questions on Shakespeare and graduate without ever having seen a play by him.

Teachers, like myself, collected the reprimands for showing plays or reading from a selection that would be interesting to students but wasn’t in the textbook.

I got to tell Edward Albee once that I was not allowed to cover him in class because he wasn’t included in the textbook so according to my school’s administrative team, he was not relevant to American Literature, the class I taught.

A signed copy of Who’s Afraid of Virgia Wolfe had an honored spot above my chalkboard and although never mentioned, Albee was a constant presence in my classroom.

And since every kid has to be convinced that they must go to college as opposed a school where they could hone their skills in a trade they are drawn to, and as school districts have to look good, a matter of image over substance, as long as the students bubble in the right answers regardless how rote that is and how soulless the students’ education, it makes the higher ups look good.

Every year the students in New York schools, which was my first fulltime teaching assignment, took the New York Regency exams, the end of the year standardized tests required to get a diploma. One go-around, my principal had been on the committee creating the high school language arts and literature section but quit with submitted complaint when the members of his committee kept coming up with questions on factoids that may have been mentioned in class or not that they knew the students would most likely miss.

Obviously, this was a flawed approach to such an important exam.

While people may lament the loss of elementary school recess time because it cuts into test preparation practice, and while still more lament the cutting of art and music classes, they can rest assured that these have actually been replaced, at least for a time, with the fun activity of first through third graders learning how to bubble in the correct answers on scantron answer sheets through fun coloring activities.

Having taken standardized tests as a teacher taking courses and exams to qualify and continue to qualify for certifications in various subject areas and grade levels, the need to erase any stray marks made by a dropped Number 2 pencil or a test-taker’s careless and unnoticed action of making a pencil mark that could be read as an answer, or a poorly erased corrected answer, I was used to the standard instruction to review all answer sheets for such stray markings and removing them before passing the test paper in.

Adults can easily follow this direction when reminded by the exam proctor if they do not do it automatically, but little kids below the age of 8 may need a little help.

One year in a district in which I taught a charge was made that the only reason tests scores had gone up at a certain school was not because the teachers had developed methods that resulted in higher achievement, a positive thing that showed the teachers’ effectiveness, but, because the teachers must have somehow cheated, most likely by changing answers. 

As she and many other teachers of lower grades knew that stray marks could influence test scores, one month before retirement, as she did with every test, a third-grade teacher looked over her students’ test papers before sending them to the office, erasing any obvious stray marks the children might have missed or a doodle they just barely erased. A parent passing by her room saw her. She was not hiding but sitting at her desk with the door open. The teacher got reported, and the district had found a scape-goat, and this actually allowed the administration to end any future discussion of the matter by agreeing with the parents and sacrificing this teacher on the altar of appeasement. The union had to fight to have her benefits restored or she would have ended her career with nothing having been “found” committing a crime that cost her her profession, her standing in the community, and her retirement and all related benefits.

Inspection of her papers found a few erasers of stray pencil marks but no changed answers. 

I have seen standardize tests misused, results manipulated, exams created in such a way as to create desired results as part of a wider image creating tactic, results ignored for political reasons by administrators who had no idea how ignoring at least one class’s achievement of which they were proud resulted in their feeling like the school did not care.

I have seen and experienced the limiting of what students should and could learn because the powers that be assumed they had the best idea of what would be on the test and teachers must only teach that.

If teachers taught a hundred things knowing only some will be on the test, they know that while the kids learn a bunch of stuff, more than will be on the test, they could ace any test based on any number of those 100 things.

Limit what you teach because someone has decided what most likely will be on the unseen test and demands only that be taught, and you run the risk of a test based mostly on the things you omitted.

I have seen teachers, one a State Teacher of the Year because of her innovative approach to math and her having shared her methods with many other math teachers whose test scores went up, told they could no longer use their successful methods but had to use the one some consulting firm had come up with in theory, and because their test scores were not as high under the new prescribed method, they were put on plans of improvement for poor performance and failure to master the new method which in one case had been the bastardized corrupting of the teacher of the Year’s method.

She got a plan for improvement.

She quit.

Since Covid hit in 2020, the regular school schedules and the established assumption that all kids will learn the same things at or about the same time with no way to later show they have learned what they had not previously because all kids take the same tests with no acknowledgement that people learned at different levels and in different ways.

If the object is to get to the top floor of a building, it would be nice if everyone got there at the same time having taken the same elevator. But, in some cases along the way there might be too many people already on the elevator so some wait for the next one,  some use  the stairs as a good option, or, perhaps while ascending the stairs, the elevator door opens revealing some passengers had gotten off and now there is room for a ride. In any case, everyone arrives at the top eventually and they can all go on from there.

The expected foolish miracle after the closures of schools was that somehow, in spite of trying to teach and learn under never before experienced conditions that some actually pretended they were experts on handling, followed by obstructing teaching for political reasons, disrespecting teachers, parental attacks based on the baseless, and coming out of a 100-year pandemic and figuring out what needs to be fixed and how to fix it, has produced the desire to test the kids to find out where they are, put them all on some fast track, and test them periodically and often to see if the frenzy is working.

It is necessary.

Just ask the companies that design, print, and correct the tests at great cost and have a willing, multi-million dollar spending clientele who will pay anything to look good, and the consulting firms whose methods school districts can have their teachers learn at yet even more money that should go to books in the library and supplies in the classrooms.

In Massachusetts, to make sure students have caught up to some artificial number, the Board pf Education has raised the level of test scores required to graduate because college and all.

Not only is this an artificial move based on nothing really, but it will put stress on students and teachers to attain a created goal. Parents will assume the good grade their kid got before the artificial inflation is no longer good enough to get into college and they will go after the teachers from one end, while the logical under the circumstances poor test scores will be seen as teachers letting the parents, students, and districts down because they did not meet the requirement for Dorothy to now go and get the witch’s broom, and the district will come down hard on them.

I had a student transfer into my twelfth grade Language arts/English Literature class. Although he knew a lot about English Literature and was eager to let that be known, he was woefully deficient in his knowledge of eleventh grade American Literature resulting in a dismal performance on the seniors’ first yearly district generated test based on the curriculum as the district divided it through the grades.  ‘

The reality was that in his previous school district, Juniors took English Lit while the seniors took American Lit, so, although he was behind the new district’s expectations of where he should be according to itself, he was right at grade level had he stayed in the other district.

It took some work to get this reality accepted so the school allowed him to change his English class from Senior to Junior while retaining the rest of his senior schedule.

But as I said this was after some work.

This is gamesmanship regarding tests and the arbitrary raising of test score requirements for the toddler reason “Becuz” is not fair for the students, the teachers, parents, or reality.

Why not suspend the tests until all the “experts” decide the students have overcome all the Covid trauma they were told they were experiencing and have learned all things that are artificially placed on arbitrary grade levels so they catch up.

Slow it with the testing,

Even a dog gets tired of performing for a treat especially when the owner rips a large portion of the promised treat off for self-consumption.

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