Teachers Need Tests — Just Not Common Core!
Combined, we have over 41 years of experience teaching. Marla is a National Board Certified Teacher with 29 years of teaching in middle and high school. Melissa has been in education for 12 years, mostly in special education classrooms. We have used testing “data” for a variety of things throughout the years. In the good old days, teachers used testing outcomes to help kids, in fact, many still do.Let’s take a simple spelling test that a teacher may give. The teacher gives the words out for a child to study that may have a certain trend. For example, kids may need to study words that have the “ph” (phone) sound. The teacher would give the kids a list of words to study that contain that sound. When the child takes the spelling test and does well, this outcome tells the teacher that the child will be proficient when it comes to spelling words with the”ph” sound. If a child does not do well on the test, the teacher will design some intervention strategy to help the child master that set of words.
The intervention strategy could be to have the child restudy just the words they missed and retake the test. The teacher could have the child use the words in a writing piece or sit with the teacher in an extra help session to go over the words. The great thing about the “good old days” is that the teacher got to decide the type of intervention strategy and tailor it to the child. Those days are long gone!
Let’s now examine how high stakes state tests are used by teachers. In the state of New York, currently, students are required to take and pass two history Regents exams to graduate. The two exams they must pass are the U.S. History Regents (Grade 11) and the Global History Regents (Grade 10). Both of these tests are 50 multiple choice questions, a thematic essay, and a Document Based Essay. The students have 3 hours to take the test. In the good old days, before “accountability” in New York State, teachers scored all parts of the test, and the data from those tests was kept available, in the school, for teachers to use to help children. By keeping the exams in school, teachers had access to them and could use them for remediation.One New York teacher shared, “I had a young man about five years ago who had failed the Global History Regents, and he was due to take it again in June. He needed to pass it to graduate from high school. I was able to access his old Regents exam that he failed because we could keep the exams in the school to access. I was able to analyze his weaknesses, and work on that with him Teachers Need Tests:
