Fellow educator Leo Kallis and I have misgivings about South Dakota's focus on more standardized testing in its implementation of the Common Core standards. Josh Verges, education reporter for that Sioux Falls paper, notes that Kallis and I are wrong wrong wrong! to gripe that Common Core will bring us more multiple-guess bubble tests. The Common Core tests, says Verges, won't come from the evil overlords of education privatization at Pearson but from the state-led Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, a state-led organization that is spending Uncle Sam's money to create the tests that 25 states so far plan to use to prove their fealty to Common Core. The sample test questions made available by SBAC show that students will get to write and explain, not just fill in computer-scannable bubbles. My bad!
Kallis notes with due umbrage that, in his Tuesday critique, Verges fails to mention the fact that Kallis corrected his post on Common Core last week to acknowledge Smarter Balanced's role in writing our upcoming Common Core tests. More importantly, Kallis maintains that, whoever writes the Common Core tests and in whatever form, Common Core threatens to focus on minutiae and remove meaningful fiction from our curriculum.
I find cause for new umbrage in Verges's following statement:
Actually, Smarter Balanced is writing both formative and summative tests. Formative tests will be administered throughout the year to show teachers which concepts their students - individually and as a group - are not grasping. In other words, those tests seek to get at whether students are really learning.
Only the summative tests, taken once a year in the spring, will be used for school accountability [Josh Verges, "No, the Common Core Tests Will Not Use Scantron Bubble Sheets," Not District Dialogue, 2013.05.28].
So we'll still subject our third- through eighth-graders and high school juniors to the usual battery of outside standardized tests during the last nine weeks of the school year. But Common Core will bring us more tests throughout the year, requiring students to sit up and bark at their computer screens to satisfy the standardization agenda.
We teachers already do formative assessment all the time, not just in formal quiz settings but in all sorts of activities. We ask kids questions. We look at their homework. We have them do rough drafts, group discussions, and impromptu presentations. SBAC appears to want to add a whole nother layer of testing throughout the school year on top the work you're already paying us teachers to do.
Of course, it won't be a whole nother layer if we teachers get with the program and use those Smarter Balanced formative assessments instead of our own ongoing formative assessment methods. And since there's only so much time in the day, and since we'll be expected to show our professional support for Common Core and our administrators' implementation thereof, it is inevitable that many teachers will toss their own useful methods and conform to the testing and teaching activities dictated from above. Teachers will surrender more decisions about what to teach and how to teach to the Common Core agenda. Teachers will spend less time looking your kids in the eye and more time reading the data points that stream out of the computers to whom students are writing and explaining things. Curriculum becomes more uniform, teaching becomes more button-pushing, and everybody's happy!
I'm not happy. As Verges makes clear, Common Core brings more tests throughout the school year. Those tests wag the dog and make education more bland and, I will assert, less inspiring and effective.
I was wrong about bubble tests. But I'm still right about South Dakota's misguided and increasing emphasis on standardized tests at the expense of the necessary freedom of teachers to practice their craft as they best know how for your kids.