Gov Martin O’Malley of Maryland said Wednesday in Annapolis that he is opposed to any legislation that would cancel the Maryland School Assessments in math and reading for the state’s third through eighth graders, Maryland Reporter.com reports.
Efforts had been under way, prompted by superintendents of schools, teachers and their unions, and other citizens, to seek a waiver from the federal government that would allow schools to cancel the test, many questions on which don’t address the Common Core-inspired curriculum every public school is now using. Any cancellation would only be for one year, since the state has already made plans to swap the MSAs for federal accountability exams made by the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers next year anyway.
The Maryland State Department of Education, which has admitted the misalignment with the actual curriculum schools are using but stood firmly behind the tests anyway, stated previously that the 2014 test scores wouldn’t be used to hold schools accountable, which naturally begged the question: Why should the state disrupt school schedules for about two weeks at each school if the scores weren’t going to count?
Addressing the misalignment concern, the governor’s press secretary said Mr O’Malley backed the administration of the tests: “The tests provide important information about where student performance is, and we will know which questions are aligned with Maryland’s college ready standards and which are not. This will help inform how we use the data eventually,” the news website quoted press secretary Nina Smith as saying.
Although I have also pointed out the misalignment of the test with the state’s adopted Common Core-based curriculum, known as “Maryland’s College and Career Ready Standards,” that has never been my chief concern with giving the tests this year.
Questions about misalignment concern policymakers and state and federal education officials, but they don’t really mean much to the professionals who work in our schools and with our children. At worst, a kid will encounter a question on a test that his teacher didn’t cover. He’ll get it wrong and may become frustrated at his inability to answer, especially if a lot of questions fall into this category. It will add a touch of stress to his life, but otherwise, he’ll probably just turn in his test booklet and go play soccer outside or his trumpet in the band room.
Nobody in that student’s community will put much stock in the scores, either, since they’ll all be working on the assumption that the scores on the tests won’t be used for accountability purposes, which were used to justify writing a law that required the tests in the first place. Communities shouldn’t pay much attention to any standardized test, but when MSDE says the MSAs won’t even count, a lack of acknowledgment on the part of communities is even more fitting.
No, the biggest issue I saw with giving the tests this year was the schedule rerouting that would occur in our schools. Right after the MSA testing window, the window for the PARCC field test begins in every single Maryland public school. Lunch schedules have to be reworked. Cafeteria workers’ contracts might need to be renegotiated. Other changes need to happen at each school during the testing window, including changes to security processes, libraries, and computer labs. It’s a hassle, but school employees put up with it because giving the tests has been valuable.
But this year, the tests aren’t being used for accountability purposes. That’s why we made the tests in the first place, and any other use is skating on thin ice. They had very limited value to parents and students before this year, but this year, they have absolutely no value to students or parents. The only exception might be for students with disabilities or English language learners, but even that is debatable, given the non-comprehensiveness of the MSA score report sent to parents.
So, if the test has no value, it amounts to little more than a waste of kids’ time and a waste of effort on the part of school staff members who have to make sometimes big adjustments for the sake of giving the tests. This was my main concern about giving the tests this year.
Our schools will do this dance one more time for the sake of a federal law that should have been fixed long ago. Everybody knows it’s a bad law and leads our schools toward irreparable harm. However, the political will to revisit the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and remove changes put in by No Child Left Behind under George W Bush and supported by Race to the Top under Barack Obama does not exist.
As a side note, I considered asking to see the questions the governor’s press secretary claims are not aligned, but that, I fear, would open up a whole can of worms with a bunch of people claiming to know that certain questions are useless or stupid when they really have no idea what alignment means. Therefore, I say students and schools, just start the music, as the testing window for MSA opens on March 3, then dance, and finally get back to your real work this year, like learning the state’s “College and Career Ready Standards” and having recess. Forgive the interruption, and rest assured: your legislators in Annapolis tried to make this right.
