Mixed Messages

For the past two years I have been teaching American Government to high schoolers. American Government just happens to be an HSA tested subject area in the state of Maryland. Maryland adopted the HSA and MSA test format in order to be in compliance with the famous No Child Left Behind Act, or as I like to call it “Every Child That Does Not Do Well On Standardized Test WILL BE LEFT BEHIND.”

So I sucked it up and tried my best to prepare my students for this large standardized test that they would have to take at the end of the year to determine whether or not they graduate…no pressure there. While I was trying to figure out what in the heck a good teacher even does in the classroom I was taking course work at Johns Hopkins to learn what good teaching looks like, and to refine my teaching, so that I could be the best teacher for my students.

For a long while I was bothered by the whole standardized testing craze that the whole country seems to be partaking in, and I could not understand why. I was sitting in one of my classes at Hopkins and my professor was talking about differentiating your instruction as a teacher to best reach all of your students, realizing students learning modalities and playing to them in the classroom, and using different kinds of assessments to allow all students to demonstrate their mastery. It hit me…if this is what good teaching looks like, how come this is no where close to how the powers that be test our students? I would hope that those that are involved in making education policy and those at the Maryland State Department of Education would have in this lifetime or another been an educator for a period of time, so how come they do not see that these standardized tests are not a good way to measure EVERY students mastery of content?

I am sometimes amiss as to why I as a teacher am checked on these aspects of “good teaching” on a daily basis, and yet when it comes down to it, my students will have to show that they really know how to take a standardized test? It causes me as a teacher to not only get the students the material that is on the test, but I also have to take a good amount of time to teach students how to take the test. I spend most of my days on BCR’s and ECR’s, which, lets be honest, students will not see again EVER!

I sometimes feel that I am doing my students a disservice by making lessons which cater to their learning styles and needs, when in the end the state will just look at all the students in Maryland the same and give them the same old test that they give every other student.

To make matters even worse, I have bought into the fact that my students need to pass this test to graduate and it is not going to change anytime soon. So I plug to my students every day the importance of this test and how well they do on it, just to have Nancy Grasmick turn around and say a month before the test is given, that in the end she does not think that they are going to hold students accountable for not taking the test because they have not planned on what they will do with the number of students that will not be graduating because they have not passed the tests! It sometimes makes you wonder if any of the people that are working in the administrative side of education have ever been in the classroom or sat through a Hopkins course as I have to really try and reach all the students in the classrooms across the county.