The G.O.A.T.
My school district has set before us a goal of 90% pass rate on all general education students and 75% on SWDs and ELS on the big standardized test that haunts us at the end of the year.
It seems like just a few years back we were riding high with extremely high pass percentages as well as extremely high scores. Until the year of rigor arrived. We were doing too well, the testing center said. It can't be that the teachers are doing their jobs. It must not be hard enough. We will lengthen the test passages for middle schoolers to be as long as twelfth grade AP Honors English passages. We will make it interactive with multiple answers but will not tell the students to look for 3 answers instead of one. We will not release an old test for seven years which would give them an idea of how they are going to be tested. This will leave the students practicing on the original less rigorous ones that were deemed insufficient to begin with.
And it worked. Pearson held its head high as the grades plummeted -- but not because they did not know what a simile was or couldn't recognize a compare and contrast article, but rather because it was just long enough to challenge an 11 year old's patience and stamina with 7 page long articles and tricky unclear answer requests that tested how to read ambiguous directions instead of standards. And yes, we teachers were blamed for the lower grades across the county. But we rose to the occasion and within a couple of years, our scores were back which proves it was the test and not the children's competence that had lowered it.
Fast forward and this time, we are being blamed for our percentages lowering in the EL and SWD categories. "What has changed?" they ask. What are you doing differently? What can we do to raise it back to 90% making us higher than most in our division? However, there is little mention of the huge influx of students with these classifications and the district's refusal to increase the support. Last year, I had a class with 15 IEPs and 11 without. Instead of a consistent co-teacher, the position was split between two every other day which prevented them from participating in the planning and kept them confused on the lessons as well. On a side note, one was brand new and spent the majority of her time on the computer trying to navigate and complete reports for her huge caseload -- at times not noticing the student beside her having meltdowns and running at other students. Sorry, I digress. Being that the law restricts a mixed class to less than 50% special needs, I was upside down and they had to fix it. (I don't think they thought I knew -- Okay, I didn't, but one of my every other day co-teachers did, and she got them to address it -- much to the chagrin of my poor neighbor whose class went up to 29 because of it when they could have given me five of her non-IEP students to balance it.
Look, this is not an attack on my students and their needs, nor is it a direct attack on my district. I am a competent veteran teacher who is still here because I actually love teaching and teaching my babies no matter their abilities. My complaint is the fact that when these babies come into my sixth grade class reading on a third grade level with gaps in education or with reading disorders, I do not appreciate being asked what happened and what can we do to get the school's percentages back up to 90% without any regard for reality and understanding. I don't want us to be used as the scapegoat for lower percentages instead of the G.O.A.T. that most of us truly are. Find another way to measure success for the district other than basing our district's success on an unfair standardized test made by an outside company seeking its own glory by garnering high failure rates.
