CMS Field Tests Flunk
Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools launched its first salvo this week in a barrage of new tests that central office administrators and educrats hope eventually to incorporate into a new teacher performance pay model being pushed by Superintendent Peter Gorman.
The uptown paper’s Ann Doss Helms unwinds one teacher’s assessment of both the process and the tests. The early grade appears to be epic failure:
*Tests did not arrive at school until Friday, April 1. School administration did not have time to train test administrators enough to feel confident about giving the test.
*I have 50 kindergarten students to test this week. That is about 20-30 minutes per test, times 50 students. It’s mentally exhausting for me. I am wondering how much time the final summative tests will be. We have to administer those next month. We are looking forward to having to cancel instruction for a week then as well. 10 days of instruction lost, out of 180 instructional days. That’s a lot.
*I could write about 5 pages about how poorly constructed the test itself was but I’m not sure how much that would fall into breaking test security. I can say anecdotally that I have administered many different types of tests and this is about the worst test I have ever seen, as a “standardized” test. I don’t know how much CMS spent just getting this field test version, but it appears to have been a complete waste of money, at the same time we are decreasing services and planning to lay off hundreds of teachers. The wording of the questions, the graphics that go along with the questions, the instructions for assessing the student’s answers… It’s not good. That is worrisome since these will (perhaps) eventually be used for Pay for Performance. How can we respect a PfP model if it is built on faulty testing data?
*I work with a lot of highly-educated, very intelligent teachers. We are all terrified of these tests being used to judge our “performance” because they are not indicative of what goes on in the classroom. They do not represent the interesting and innovative teaching that goes on across CMS. They are wasting our instructional time and it will be wasted again in May. These tests will not be used to “drive instruction” unless we begin teaching to the tests. And it’s sad because we are convinced that the CMS central office has decided that this is going to happen TO teachers and TO students, not matter what anyone on the ground, in the classroom has to say about. Downtown knows best and no teacher is going to be able to tell them otherwise. They will ram these tests down our throats until we give up and quit.
Yes, this is just one teacher’s view; but it’s coming from the frontlines, not from central command’s Ed Shed bunker. Odds are that assessment of how the tests rolled out will be very different, packaged in glowing press releases.
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