When it comes to testing, listen to teachers
In my second year of teaching in the Indianapolis Public Schools (IPS), my principal organized monthly “data meetings.” The stated purpose of these meetings was to reflect on our classroom instruction and student progress in light of students’ latest results on district-created standardized tests. I’d always start these meetings with the same comment: “We can’t talk about what these data show if the test isn’t valid.” I know this sounds like something that a teacher who doesn’t believe in testing would say, but I’m not that teacher. I enter this conversation as a teacher who believes deeply in data. Through my work as a graduate student in teaching and a Teach For America corps member, I was trained to see critical analysis of student data as essential to my practice. Now in my third year in the classroom, I continue to rely on testing as one form of assessment, providing vital information about what my students are, and aren’t, learning. Although standardized testing has limitations, it needs to be part of a multifaceted picture of student learning. That said, I believe in testing only