Frozen Standards - Essay #2 - Final Draft

As a teacher aide at my community's school one of my responsibilities is to be a math tutor for one eighth grade girl. She has tested out at a fourth grade math level. Everyday as I prepare our tutoring session I wonder if she will even show up. She was supposed to take a standardized evaluative test last week, but she wasn't able to take it. She decided that she didn't want to. This sort of thing is typical of our student body, and it throws a wrench in the results calculated by the standardized testing system we use. Although standardized tests are used religiously by my community's school they should not use them as frequently because the questions asked are easily interpreted as biased, the tests force the teachers to teach to the test instead of the student, and the students most times have no idea what they are being rated on.

Standardized tests are used to design a base level of information knowledge. They are utilized as a tool to make sure all children are aware of what government and educational authorities find useful and necessary. Luckily, we have a benevolent government that thinks baseball is as important as freeways. Of course it is an established fact that in Anaktuvuk Pass, AK the two things that best uphold the Inupiaq Traditions are baseball and freeways.

The lifestyle of the Nunamiut is centered around the Inupiaq Traditions. These traditions cultivate an arctic subsistence way of life. The children grow up going camping to hunt bear and caribou. When going by land they travel in eight-wheel Argos, four-wheelers, and snow machines because there are no roads outside of the city. Construction of the longest road ended three years ago. It is two miles long and ends at the landfill. The standard information utilized by pop-culture Americana is a mere fetish icon to my community’s children. They play baseball, virtually, on Nintendo’s Wii gaming console. After taking a standardized test in which a freeway was referenced, a student confided that he didn’t know what a freeway was. The test would mark his answer incorrect. His progress graph will lose at least one point. Now that his graph is showing a decrease it will be believed that his grade level aptitude is lower than his actual grade level. A declining aptitude causes need in the system for more frequent progress testing, and raises administrative flags that the teacher should change their method of instruction. As a consequence of doing all of these things there is an increase in the teachers overall written workload, and an increase in the teachers data-entry workload - not to mention they have a class to teach.

This system causes excessive time to be taken out of class schedules that are already stretched thin. The school in my community has about 80 students, begins instruction at age three with Early Childhood Education, and continues through the twelfth grade. Staff and resources are limited. The teaching positions are outsourced almost exclusively to non-Alaskans. They are brought in by the community and the school district, and are then expected to teach and prepare Anaktuvuk Pass' children to become future leaders of Alaska. Teachers are also expected to find time to keep up with the workload associated with standardized testing. Teachers are forced to sacrifice vital classroom instruction time to shepherd each student, one at a time, to a quiet testing area, and then sit with the child as they take the test. Each time a standardized test has to be taken the classroom routine is disrupted, and the children loose out.

All the while that the testing system is in motion, the students have no idea. They know they are taking a test, but that is all. They do not know that graphs are being made; initiatives and interactions are being planned; teachers are scrambling, coordinating, and adjusting. All of these things happen so that maybe, just maybe, a student can get one on one instruction with the special education department. That office is held by one person, and she is a first year teacher. How much of a workload could she realistically be able to complete? Certainly not the whole school. The tests however show my school district that she should have nearly the entire student body on her roster. The test scores are skewed. At a certain grade level the students understand more or less who uses the test results. They will intentionally answer test questions incorrectly, or even refuse to take the test altogether. In the junior high and high school ages they know that passing or failing most standardized tests has no effect on their day to day lives. The students are told when the end of year state qualifying exam is, and they know that before they can advance to the next grade or graduate high school they must pass it. They don’t care about a series of them that the administration in Barrow wants them to take throughout the year. Though the tests include information taught in class, there is inevitably much that is not. In fact, topically, a teacher might be somewhere in his or her lecture that is a hundred-eighty degrees away from what the standardized test is rating that day.

After a point it all seems to bog down progress of each class and student, and just confuse more people than help. Having more permanent resources like qualified teachers, or certified testing proctors would help the system function more smoothly. But how much money does it take to prove that we cannot depend on standardized test results as a reliable measure of educational needs?

If the most important thing in a young person’s life is passing their senior year state qualifying exam, then micro-managing every tiny detail of teacher/student interaction through ceaseless program testing is a workable solution. This is not a true statement though. Government and the administration act as though it is and they act as though resources are not in question and are endlessly available. The testing program used by my community’s school is not effective, the results are not accurate, and the confusion it creates is not good for the school. The school should drop its aggressive testing style, return control of the classroom to the teachers, and concentrate on core grade-level coursework.