The toll high-stakes tests take on non-traditional learners (and their teachers)
Bobbi Snow is the co-founder of The Community Public Charter School, an arts-infused, literacy-focused school for non-traditional learners in Charlottesville, Va., open to all Albemarle County middle school students. Snow wrote the following piece while recently proctoring Virginia’s high-stakes Standards of Learning exams, which students took over a period of three weeks. The tests about which she writes were math and science, each with 60 questions. At Snow’s school the tests are untimed. Students, who get lots of snacks to fortify them, take the exams in small groups, though Snow wrote in an email, “they still get so disregulated.”This piece describes in painful detail how the high-stakes SOLs affect the non-traditional learners at Snow’s school. But, of course, the students at Snow’s schools are hardly the only ones who have trouble taking high-stakes standardized tests, non-
