The Tri-Caucus Love Affair With Testing

Now that the final stretch of the Illinois 2010-2011 school year is in site, I wonder if teachers and students agree that the sky did not fall without the writing portion of the ISAT. In fact, while it's fresh in mind, I wonder if people think that the net effect was positive. Nobody had to waste the day giving this test, and nobody had to shoehorn her students' minds into the the production of the formulaic claptrap that this test requires. 

One of my favorite conference speakers is Nancie Atwell, the great writing teacher, who tells her audiences that she has come to terms with standardized writing tests by teaching them as a genre-- a genre that only exists in schools. With her wisdom as guidance, I used to take this approach as well. The problem is that it is all such an inauthentic writing experience that it requires a great deal of prep work to get kids to set aside good practices for a while-- so that they can write something that will gain the approval of a stranger, in another state, working a temporary job, with no sense of context, with possibly no credentials whatsoever, chained to an ironclad rubric and a production quota.

It all looks very important to people who think we're measuring something here, instead of what we're actually doing, which is re-drawing the maps of where the poverty is. Lawmakers love and worship tests-- testing makes for a "strong" law, and anything else makes for a "weak" law.  That said, here's the Tri-Caucus Letter to all of the committees involved in the ESEA re-up.



The Edweek reporters have chosen to go with the pro-testing sniglet as the lede:

but I think the juicy part is here, in Point 6.

They could have gone further with this statement, in my opinion. It's a pretty comprehensive letter; you should read the whole thing. If they want more testing, they're definitely going to get that. They might also get some of the sub-group restructuring. The rest-- the things that affect learning--- they're not going to get any of those things.