Testing fails students

Over the last 13 years, I have watched students take standardized testing as a teacher and never once felt it was worth their time. That sort of testing does not give an accurate representation of student learning ability or even what they currently know. It's a single test, on a single day.

When I was in school, I took the TAAS test, which evolved into TAKS, and then STAAR. As most people are aware, educators, or at least the people who govern them, enjoy acronyms. By somehow changing a few letters for the test name, education administrators promised to make the test better and more rigorous, but to what avail? Same creature...different name. Are we helping the students at all with this system? I argue no.

There has been a shift since I was in school that has only added more stress to the test. I could blame the teacher. I could say that if they would just teach and not emphasize the test, that everything would be okay, but the truth is...teachers have been painted into a corner, too. How can they not push the test? Their livelihood depends more and more on it with each passing year as education agencies tie teacher pay to the performance of 8 and 9-year-old kids.

I could argue a thousand reasons why, as a teacher, I do not support standardized testing, but it means so much more to me now. Now I'm a parent of a third grader. I sat in my daughter's bedroom until she fell asleep last night because she couldn't calm herself enough to find rest. Tears ran down her cheeks as a sense of panic kept overwhelming her as she worried that she wasn't smart enough, that she would be held back, that she wouldn't finish in time. She truly has nothing to worry about. She has been labeled GT, made straight As, and finished the benchmark practice test in about an hour, but all those things don't seem to matter when something like this is looming over her head.

STAAR will never be a measure of my child's ability or how well her teachers taught her. People complain that schools don't have a high enough passing rate and that schools are failing students, but have those same people looked at the material third graders are required to know? They are being introduced to algebraic concepts that her grandparents didn't touch on until high school. Rigor has replaced ubiquitous as the educational buzzword of the moment, and children are paying the price.

This test, and others, are part of my daughter's life, and it's my job to teach her how to cope. As a parent, I must be intentional in how I teach my child and relate things to her in a way she will understand...so we talked about facing the difficult math problem where she didn't understand what it was asking and how that was like missing the target with her arrow or hitting the wrong note on the piano. We talked about how that next arrow and how the next note had to still come, and how she had to refocus and let the last one go.

I will take this challenge she currently faces and turn it into a lesson that will impact her life with a skill that couldn't be matched by any number of Scantron bubble sheets. Instead of looking at the test as a way to measure her math and reading skills, I will use it to teach her how to surrender to a God who loves her. A God who will take all her worry and fear and throw it far, far away if she can only open her little hand and release it to Him. That's the skill she needs to know. Because, while this test, in the big picture of her life, is just a blip, I can use it. I can use it to equip her with a skill for later in life when there are even bigger obstacles that she must face.

But I still ask why. I still wonder what we are doing with education, because a child who loves learning, and reading, and school, shouldn't be consumed with fear and doubt because of a test.