The most recent scores from the end of the year Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program (TCAP) sent principals and teachers across the state scrambling to provide summer school for students who did not pass the newly adopted third-grade reading gate. This is the first year Tennessee required schools to comply with the third-grade retention legislation, and it does not seem to be going well. In fact, only 40% of the state’s third graders scored proficient or advanced.
The new law seems to be an effort for Tennessee schools to find their own “Mississippi miracle”, hoping to mimic the rise in scores Mississippi saw after adopting their own third-grade reading gate a decade ago. However, there are some current factors that may hinder the much hoped-for climb in literacy rates.
One of the most obvious problems with a high-stakes test is that it pressures teachers to teach to the test, ignoring research-based best practices and perpetuating ineffective strategies that will, ironically, only lead to poorer test scores. Instead of offering rigorous curricula that engage students in authentic opportunities to read, write, speak, listen, and think around relevant and meaningful topics, we are forcing many children of our state to spend their childhood answering meaningless and decontextualized multiple-choice questions, launching a path of diminishing returns without preparing students for college or career.
Another danger we are facing but ignoring is the teacher shortage crisis. High-stakes testing adds stress to an already dire situation. Public schools are starting the year with unfilled teaching positions, putting further strain on the teachers that are working, escalating burnout. There should be a sense of urgency to create educational reform but it looks like something other than penalizing third graders with summer school or penalizing teachers with having to figure out a way to provide it.
An additional fallacy of the new law is that it requires students who score below proficiency to take four weeks of summer school. Four weeks of summer school provided by the same school that couldn’t get them to reach proficiency after an entire school year. How is last-minute instruction with ineffective curricula going to help anything? “New learning programs” were mentioned in the bill but those are pipedreams created by out-of-touch legislators who don’t have a clear way to fund these programs. Let’s not forget that everyone has an agenda, and there are those that claim the entire reading crisis concept is rooted in political and financial gain. The bottom line is that state-testing is a multi-billion dollar industry and what teachers are earnestly trying to do to keep up is actually negatively impacting all the stakeholders involved, especially our teachers and students.
We seem to have forgotten Winston Churchill’s words. Our buildings, our institutions, and the education system we have in place are already shaped and are now shaping us. Educators feel trapped, impacted by a system that they personally did not help create. Teachers are absorbing all of the effects of these decisions made by legislators who are building our institutions, allowing well-meaning yet impractical legislation to form their idea of education and therefore shape what they present to students. We must get off the carousel of test prep insanity.
Don’t get me wrong; I don’t mind having a state test. It’s a practical way to see if a school or state as a whole is headed in the right direction. The state test should be a low-pressure temperature check to see if what we are doing is working. The Tennessee Department of Education has wisely acknowledged that their scores will be low for a few years as they seek to align their proficiency levels with those of NAEP (slide 21), which I applaud. We do want to increase literacy rates and teach the children of Tennessee how to communicate effectively. The danger lies in the fallacy that teachers must spend the year in test prep or they’ll lose their jobs, making them feel obligated to curtail authentic reading and writing to focus on skill-and-drill. We know what it takes to get students to read. The Reading Wars are over. We have decades of research that clearly shows what is effective and what isn’t. We could use the research-based best practices that we know work, get students prepared for college and career instead of the state test, and get students engaged in learning relevant concepts that matter.
And guess what? Test scores would go up…
Do you know what research shows can help increase test scores in any area? Writing! Check out the Services page to see writing professional development options for this school year.
Would you like free literacy tips and resources? Subscribe below to never miss a post:
Leave a Reply