And it's NECAP time again!

As it just so happens, amid the nation's most heated debate in (as Ed Brazee says) maybe the last 40 years, schools across Maine are about to engage in our State's most important educational assessment of the whole year: the New England Common Assessments Program (NECAPs for us "in the know")! This (as our principal and many others proclaim) is our Superbowl! The NECAPs dutifully test our 3rd through 8th graders in all that is important in education in a modern, democratic, society: discrete reading and math skills. Oh, and basic essay style writing skills if you're a 5th or 8th grader. I am sure you have caught on to my sarcasm by now and, in an effort not to be a total cynic, I think that standardized tests can have a place in our educational structure. Tests like the NWEAs and even the NECAPs can give us, as teachers, a lot of information about skills our students may be struggling with or excelling at. When looked at as a small slice of the total profile of a student, a standardized test can allow us to truly help students. But, as we all know, far too much emphasis is placed on these assessments.

There are so many reasons for this and so many things wrong with this. I loved the blog discussing "Waiting for Superman" by Valerie Straus (http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/guest-bloggers/what-superman-got-wrong-point.html) that pointed to a few of the problems with the movie including its ridiculous assumption that standardized testing was, in fact, a valid way to compare students, especially students from impoverished families. Or that standardized tests actually tested student knowledge or perhaps intelligence even though the tests in Maine and other states test nothing but a few sets of (as I already lamented about) discrete skills.

The other piece that I struggle with is the fact that these tests are testing our kids on knowledge that they learned in the previous academic year. They test our students on this knowledge after an entire summer away from school (and tests) and after a month in a different educational setting (for some, a whole new school). To me, this is so counter-intuitive on so many different levels. I firmly believe that standardized test taking is its own discrete skill set that some have a stronger grasp of than others. We can teach these skills, but that takes time and is not the center piece (for good reason) of most of our curricula. Now, we could take a page out of New York's public schools and directly teach to these tests for the majority of the year, but if that was the case, we would only be teaching math and reading for 175 days of the year. Oh, and some writing to 4th and 7th graders. I'm also so skeptical how realistic it is to expect our kids to know these skills, and how to use them, after summer break. My students, even the highest achieving amongst them, struggle with capitalization for most of September. Eliminating incorrect multiple choice answers and remembering how to turn a fraction into a decimal and showing all of their work, in the first week of October, seems like a bit of a stretch to me.

But, then again, it's all about comparing our kids to others and if they're all doing these tests at the same time, then I guess it's fair. Not to the kids we are comparing, and not to the teachers and parents that worked so hard to create a successful educational experience for them, but it's a level playing field.

This is a little disconnected, and a little negative, I apologize. I swear that next week, I am going to write a beautifully positive blog. And I am going to give my kids candy tomorrow while they take their NECAPs!!