Provincial Achievement tests

 A Few Deviant Thoughts Concerning Standardized Testing

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Achievement Testing as Misnomer...

Each year, in the province of Alberta, students in grade 3, 6 and 9 are tested across the province, and on the same day, in areas of science, math, social studies and language skills.  The reasoning seems sound. Get base line scores on schools and students as to achievement over time. Perhaps, it makes teachers more accountable and raises standrads and improves learning.  Its for the benefit of students.  For a long time I bought into much of that line of thought until last week when I observed the grade three class at my school preparing for the PAT (provincial achievement tests).

When all attend, this grade three class numbers about 23 souls, many of them are coded meaning they have more severe learning disabilities and/or behavioural problems than the rest of their peer group.  Alberta Learning (Ministry of Ed) allows for students with special needs to have certain accomodations for writing the PAT and these could include anything from more time, the use of a calculator or the use of a scribe or a reader.  There are some in this grade three class who need all of these accomodations. There are 11 who need both a scribe and a reader and two who need readers.

As I absorbed these statistics and accomodations I began to realize the absolute stupidity and futility of this test writing exercise. What could it achieve? How could it in any way benefit these fragile, below grade level native students?  Who else in the province was doing what we were that day in way of preparation?

Rhetorics aside I helped the home room teacher prepare for the fateful day in such a way as to minimize the negative impact on the students and to possibly reduce the spectre and stigma that hangs over my school as the lowest achieving school in the entire province.  The low ranking is largely determined by the out come of the PAT tests.  My students, like the school they attend, are locked into a negative vortex of achievement and no amount of testing will change that reality.  We do not need more testing.

In preparation I arranged for 13 volunteers to come to class as scribes and pharacies to assist in the interpretation of the test questions.  We split the students into two groups, one brushed with Crest and another with a non-flouride toothpaste, if only it were that simple.  Our set up with scribes, readers, and students now totalled 36 and was a spectacle to behold.  I intructed the scribes and readers not to interpret, explain, cue, hint or lead the students in any way.  

The role of the scribe or the reader is to be a neutral robotic like presence who does not alter the purity of the student thought process.  That was the theory, in reality everyone, including myself, felt such an overwhelming pity for these students that we brain stormed with them, we enhanced their vocabulary, explained, hinted, cued and all the things I told them not to do.  We did these things with a tinge of guilt and with a freshness of hope to get through these pointless test exercises.  

As the writing began those with ADHD, fetal alcohol syndrom, opposistional definace, OCD, dyslexia and other issues, and depite the host of adults in the class with benevelent intent could not stop the anxiety nor the fits and tears.  One student, literally cried out after only a few minutes of testing, “I will never be good enough to do this.”  Another girl, prone to emotional outbursts, ran from the class where I found her banging her feet on the floor and the back of her head against the wall. She would not speak and she would not stop her self abuse until I physically intervened.  Testing at its finest.

I was working with an eight year old boy who I knew suffered from FAS but was never officially diagnosed or documented. How many parents, mother’s especially want to admit to drinking while pregnant. My student is a delightful boy who greets me in the halls with hugs. He does not have a coherent thought in his head and I was trying to focus him on a story starter about a flying saucer landing next to a camp ground where a family sat before a campfire.  You know things totally relevant to his live experiences.

From the picture cue my student was required to develop the elements of character, plot, and setting in order to make a story of some relevance and interest with a beginning, middle and end.  This of course was not going to happen. In the end the story he dictated to me in rambling phrases and mumbled half thoughts sounded amazingly like the animated movie UP.  What the two had in common I had no idea.  My little guy distracted by every item in the class just wanted to run free from his task.  He eventually did.

Next week we will assembly again for the “real deal.”  I feel we will accomplish some mighty things that the Ministry does not intend.  Some of my grade three students will discover through their frustration and growing test taking anxiety yet another level of failure.  They will realize that the only way they can preform a simple task is with a classroom full of adult readers and scribes.  They will confirm that they are different and eventually intuitively know, or be told they are years behind the rest of the province. They will surely reinforce their belief in their own lack of worth.  

In addition we will provide the Fraser Institute and others with more qauntitative irrefutable data that our school is and will remain the lowest achieving school in Alberta.  Because of this rating we will be further forgotten with the hope that one day we will disappear as an embarassment.

Teachers will also learn the necessity of teaching to the test and not the curriculum, or even better, to the interests of the students.  The Ministry will have its valuable data secure in the knowledge that high levels of accountability in the province have been measured quantified and eventually extrapalated to be used in effective progressive provincial educational policies which will be then be under funded, forgotten and ignored, but I am only a single alarmist and should be ignored.  My ideas are not statistically significant.

I am not against student evaluation, but I think it has to be meaningful and work within the context of the local school and culture. I could be persuaded to support a sampling technique across the province on a random basis.  This works in opinion polls used by politicians, why not in student testing?  It has the extra bonus of saving millions of dollars, some of which could be funneled toward schools such as mine so that at such a time they are randomly selected for testing they might actually do better than they presently do. Just a thought.

Across the board, standardized tests which include outliers such as my school do more damage than good.  Our low achievement has been adequately documented, now please just provide us the resources to do something about it.  Provincial Achievement Tests, a misnomer at best, are not progressing our cause.

toys and technology

Our Fate

I still marvel at the wonders of technology, and it is often during that same moment of wonderment that my kids give me that “duh-whatever-are-you-new” look at my naivety. Call me simple, but when I am sitting in a truck stop in rural Alberta looking at a picture on my Blackberry taken just seconds before at my grandson’s birthday party in Waterloo, Ontario and then in turn be able to forward that very same picture wrapped in a microwave signal to a communication tower, then ricocheted off to a satellite in a geostationary orbit around Earth, shot back to the Earth’s surface and on to my sister, also in Waterloo, all in micro seconds, well, that to me is mind boggling wonderful like a hand dipped ice cream cone. Technology has its place and I love my Blackberry like my first car.

When Bill Gates went to high school, computer programming was still in its infancy. He was lucky though, according to Malcolm Gladwell author of the Outliers, Gates went to a school that had a remote computer terminal with programming capacity, a rarity at the time. Access to this terminal and the opportunities for practicing programming was one of the initial factors, along with a measure of talent, dedication and a little OCD thrown in which turned Bill into the successful billionaire that he is and may explain why he does not return my calls.

As for me, I was born five years before Bill Gates and by the time I went to university my first programming course was completed with a relatively crude programming style using Fortran on a key punch terminal. My clumsy programs would then be presented to a computer operator as a thick stack of cards bundled together with an elastic band and God help you if you ever dropped that deck because numbered cards had not been invented yet.

Now I’m not saying that had I been born a mere five years later into an upper middle class family in Seattle Washington, and had my dad been a lawyer and my mom a bank official, and if by some fortuitous chance my high school had better computer technology, maybe, just maybe, well, I’ll just leave the possibilities to you. As it is now I still struggle with technology. The gods and fates are so fickle.

I marvel at the technology that gives margarine a yellow colour and allows us to make twenty different mustard brands, and aluminum pop cans so thin you can crush them against your forehead with minimal cranial damage. I marvel at pop tarts filled with mystery chemicals, “wonder” bread that never gets stale, hybrid cars that seemingly run forever, electric razors that clean themselves and Nair, a hair removal product for women. But In my excitement, for all the good things in life, I am getting ahead of my story.

I have to admit to a certain degree of humiliation, or a strong sense of my mortality, when I tour a museum and witness on display, for the world to see, artifacts that had been created during my own life time. This occurrence surprises me because I’m not that old, really, even though I can get senior rates at most movie theatres and have for some time, I am really not that old. I guess I said that already. Items from my childhood, like metal toys built before the days of plastic, now sell on e-Bay for amazing prices. And I have seen displays of antiquated computer technology dating back as far as the early 1980’s.

I think fondly of the metal friction engine powered toy cars and trucks I had as a kid. I was the proud owner of a Rolls Royce Silver Cloud and a 1954 Cadillac. I had a blue one my brother a red one. I also owned a Rexall friction engine powered tandem transport truck. As a result I have favoured Rexall products well into adulthood, a tribute to the power of advertising.

On a recent shopping spree through e-Bay I managed to pick up an antique, vintage cast metal toy race car for $95.85. The identical one I had as a child probably cost my mother $1.47. As a footnote, do they have to use such a pejorative term, such as antique, when referencing my childhood toys? I take offence.

I also found a set of three Branchline HO scale railroad box cars, still in the original box for $58.87. I think whoever could keep a toy in a box for 56 years is a master of delayed gratification and deserves the asking price. My favourite find was a 1950 dinky toy, a scale model metal toy of a Borden’s milk delivery truck at 1:24 scale for $67.00.

The Borden milk truck for me is a trip down memory lane to a simpler age when guys in white suits delivered milk right to the house from trucks parked curb side. There were even little doors on the side of the house into which the milkman could place a range of dairy products. When I was in high school my cousin John hired me as his assistant to deliver milk house to house from a milk wagon pulled by horse. I think the horse knew the route better than we did. We would get our deliveries together in a metal basket, step from the wagon and as if on cue the horse would pull the wagon up to the next house.

Although the days of milk delivery, even during that summer in the 60’s, were drawing to a close, the dairy thought it would revitalize the market for home delivery through the nostalgic use of horse drawn vehicles. It was not to last. I had my summer fun. Today, with improved technology and in our modern ways, we drive miles to a gas station to get those same products.

My last find on e-Bay was the one closest to my heart, a Dinky matchbox 1951 Volkswagen deluxe bug for $27.27. My first car was a similar model only a few years older. I drove that car until it was destroyed in an accident along with my heart, for that VW bug was my first car and my first love. I was side swiped making an illegal left turn into a farmer’s lane and the car, but not my life, was taken from me. I still keep my VW matchbox bug on my night table to this day and gaze at it with fondness.

The sad thing to day with kids and technology is that it is now all electronic. Seldom do I see kids outside playing Cowboys and Indians, Cops and Robbers, hide-and-go-seek, frozen tag and other outdoor pursuits because more likely than not children today are on their X-box, Wii or looking at a screen of some sort playing a game in a darkened basement recreation room and playing that game alone, or worse, with a partner on another continent who they will never see or meet.

I’m not trying to imply that life “back in the day” was better because it was simpler. I just prefer to see kids playing outside with balls and skipping ropes, playing tag, baseball or touch football in the rain or sunshine and certainly there is nothing more comforting and reassuring that certain childhood traditions will live on then when watching children playing out on school yard with their skipping ropes during a warm Spring day, as in their happy sing song voices I hear them say, “Strawberry shortcake, huckleberry pie, whose going to be your lucky guy?” The enders then up the pace and rush through the alphabet until the skipper misses the rope and it is at that very letter of the alphabet when the rope and skipper stop that fate has been sealed forever in play.