By Kristin

Every summer, we go to the lake to swim, and my daughters have to pass a swim test before they can go beyond the rope to the deep water, where it's fun.

Like being able to swim, and not drowning in deep water, being able to read and do math to a certain level of aptitude is important in our society.  Tests were written that measure whether or not a child has basic skills at certain points in her school career.

In the hysteria and panic following our realization that children who live in poverty, predominantly children of color, aren't meeting minimum standards of skill, we've focused more and more on the test.  That's unfortunate. We haven't lengthened the school day or year, reduced class size for those students, or put any money into summer training of teachers.  Instead, we're simply told to test more, and we're told the test results have real consequences.

The recent efforts to revise the evaluation system in Washington State for the fourth time in order to make test data a bigger part of a teacher's evaluation is misguided.  It's misguided because measuring growth early May- early May in no accurate way measures a teacher's impact on her students from September-June.  It's misguided because focusing on test data is not going to increase student learning.  It's misguided because the test is not the point.

The swim test, even if it's one with increasing levels of difficulty, is simply a gate.  It's a test designed to measure whether a child is ready for what lies beyond the rope.  It would be ridiculous if every day my daughters had to pass the test in less time in order to show growth, but that's exactly what we're doing when we measure a child's "growth" from May to May on the state standardized test and we make that "growth" the objective of a child's time in the classroom.

The state test gets harder every year.  When we say it's not enough a child is continuing to meet standard on increasingly difficult tests, but in fact she needs to meet standard and earn a higher score than the previous test, we are abusing the purpose of tests and are wasting scarce resources on meaningless data gathering because gathering data, any data, has somehow been mistaken for accountability.

Can you imagine telling Esther Williams or Duke Kahanamoku the most important part of swimming was doing better and better on a test?

They would laugh at you.  The real tragedy is that our students who live in poverty, and their teachers, are being told the test is the point.  Those students are being denied all the experiences that lie beyond the rope, like messy exploratory learning (too risky in limited time!), or civics, or tech., because with the very limited time and resources schools have we have to focus on passing the test.  The Washington Legislature and Ed-Advocacy groups who push the test without pushing for any additional resources are denying our students a meaningful education, and replacing it with the lowest possible skill set.  

It is a crime that a first-generation American student is denied electives like history and computer science because in her too-short school day she also needs to take intervention math and intervention reading in order to pass the tests.  For all the talk about "status quo" and reforming the system, there has been an inadequate effort by our progressive legislators, school boards and ed-advocacy groups to fund a different school day that would meet the needs of our struggling students.

South Shore K-8, a high-poverty school in South Seattle, is tremendously successful.  It also receives additional funding, a grant from the League of Education Voters, to supplement its programs every year.  Pre-K, extra training for teachers, smaller class sizes, and a longer day all result in high student success.  We have this model and yet we are failing to replicate it in other high-poverty schools.

Every single child in our state could meet basic standards if we could adequately meet their needs.  These children need more than one teacher, 32 students, and 180 7.5 hour days.  That recipe is clearly not working. It will never work, even if you fire every teacher who doesn't have 100% of her students pass the test.

A longer day.  A longer year.  Fewer students in the classroom.  We can spend the money to get the job done, or we can spend more time testing, blaming, fretting.

Testing, blaming and fretting are easier.  They allow the legislature to say, "We're not spending more unless you show better results." They allow ed-advocacy groups to say, "If teachers were better, kids would learn more." Common sense says we need additional educational supports for the group of children who live in poverty and who are not meeting standard.  We need to supplement their educational lives, we need to spend the money to do it, and we need to remember that the point of a test is to be able to enjoy what lies beyond the ropes.