aftselakhis-shaladin:

fandomsandfeminism:

kereeachan:

fandomsandfeminism:

As many of you all know, I’m a public school teacher in Texas. This post will be heavily Texas centric, since this is my experience. But this past school years STAAR Standardized Test results have been released, and, well, the entire state did worse than ever. 

This is troubling. 

First, we need to acknowledge something really sinister about standardized tests: they don’t actually measure the quality of a school. The biggest predictor of standardized test results (not just for STAAR, but the SAT and ACT as well) is the wealth of the child’s family. There’s a lot of reasons for this- wealthy kids are given access to more enrichment opportunities at home, wealthy kids are given better nutrition and healthcare, and wealthy kids go to better funded schools. 

In Texas, our schools are paid for, primarily, with property taxes. Which means rich kids in rich neighborhoods go to rich schools. Poor kids in poor neighborhoods go to poor schools. Does that sound unconstitutional? It might be! 

But here is where it really screws people- All schools do get some funding directly from the state. And now, how a school performs on the STAAR affects how much money the state gives them. Yes, schools that do well get MORE money than schools who struggle. So rich kids at rich schools get MORE funding to do even BETTER, while poor kids and poor schools have funding taken away. It’s a system that directly worsens the achievement gap here. 

Now, the reasons why we have standardized testing at all is a long and complicated story, but a big part of it is this: It’s profitable. In 2013, Texas gave the testing company Pearson a $500 million dollar contract to write and score the tests.  There’s money to be made in supplemental materials and teacher training and remedial curriculum. 

But why tie it so directly to school funding? 

Because the conservatives want public schools to fail.

They want public schools to look bad, to be underfunded, understaffed, and threatened with closure. Because if they do, they can push, harder and harder, for school vouchers, because they can make money on private schools. 

Break the public school system, push for vouchers, turn education into a privatized, profitable business. 

This is not a conspiracy theory. This is happening. 

As someone who took Florida’s FCAT every year it was a thing, a huge reason for this is because the tests often have wholly separate textbooks from the curriculum. Third thru fifth grade we had separate reading and math textbooks just for the FCAT. I went to an elementary school that could afford to do that, an elementary school that tends to score best in our county (though was once penalized for “not improving” their ranking one year when they already had the top rank and I shit you not lost funding anyway). A lot of places can’t afford that. Nor should they have to.

Another reason is this: standardized tests change their standards every year or two. This makes it utterly impossible for teachers to teach kids how to best take them without purchasing materials from the test-makers because by the time the teachers know what strategies produce the best result and what the kids need to know, it’s been changed again. My father was so outraged on behalf of my mother and her fellow teachers dealing with that shit that he hunted down a study where a state–I want to say Michigan but I’m not 100% sure–decided to see what would happen if standards stayed the same for five years solid. Test scores improved, grades went up, and graduation rates increased. Because teachers knew what they were doing and were able to teach kids better because of it. Also money was saved since they didn’t need to buy new shit from testing companies every dang year.

It is a system set up for failure.

THIS. They change our standards CONSTANTLY in Texas. They change the order things should be taught in, they change what GRADES certain things should be taught. It means that teachers are NEVER able to master the material and the school has to keep buying new resources. 

It’s a profit game. They are deliberately screwing over children’s education for money. 

And here I thought Polish education was shit…

Also from Texas, and my sister teaches middle school. Some of the questions she’s showed me from practice STAAR tests are infuriatingly meaningless. Like, “read this long-ass paragraph so we can ask you a question that doesn’t even require you to read it”. She’s in a poorer district and a lot of these kids have reading levels below their grade level. Like yeah, sometimes the answers she gets on tests are genuinely stupid, but when the QUESTION AND THE ANSWER CHOICES ARE STUPID, it’s not the kids OR the teachers that are at fault. And believe me, most teachers I’ve known think the whole thing is bullshit, too. A lot of times the decision makers know jack shit about teaching children and that’s how you end up with such absurd rules.

Apparently making a profit is more important to people than TEACHING OUR FUTURE GENERATIONS.