Matching Tracksuits

We’ve been in school for nearly two weeks now. It’s time for the honeymoon period to end, sending everything into a series of predictable unknowns: who is going to turn out the nearly-constant talker who, when redirected, grows aggressive and disrespectful? Who is going to become the example of a nearly-always bad mood? Who is going to start refusing to do much of anything?

Usually by this time of the year, I can see those students starting to let the cover drop and be their true selves. Last year was so tough there was no honeymoon period: we eighth-grade teachers could see it clearly the first day.

This year? I’m still waiting for them to appear.

I’m trying not to get too unrealistically optimistic about it. They’re sitting in my class for sure. They have to be: they’re always there.

But maybe, just maybe, not this year?

We all came back to school hoping this year would be better, hoping that some of the bureaucratic micro-managing the district is forcing on our school would lessen somewhat. Last year it was reports that disappeared into the netherworld, reflections that sat in shared Google Drive folders unread (at least nothing was said about them), data that was just useless numbers comparing (incoming cliche alert) apples to oranges. I wrote a sixteen-page document detailing all the problems with all the nonsense and sent it further up the food chain.

We thought — worst case scenario — that we would at least stay the same, that the bureaucracy would just level out and be consistent with last year’s level of paperwork. We hoped — best case scenario — that it would lessen at least a little. What we didn’t fear was that even more nonsense would get dumped on us, but perhaps we should have.

Perhaps I’m biased, but I feel the English department is getting the worst deal of all. We got new textbooks this year, and we were told we have to follow the district-provided pacing guide exactly and administer the district-provided final assessment without exception. We have to weave in other district requirements for our school without regard to whether the requirements help us become better teachers, without regard to whether the tool we have to use to do this is effective, without regard to any conflicts that might arise between this requirement and those thirteen-thousand other requirements.

Last year, we had two required “Common Formative Assessments” (God, how I hate that term now) each quarter. These were multiple-choice assessments administered through Mastery Connect (the worst program on the planet — a veritable cornucopia of bad design and worse implementation) that all grade-level English teachers had to give. They were to cover one standard. The problem is, all the questions from the district required question bank (we were told we were not allowed to create our own questions) accompany texts, so to get ten questions about one standard, we were having kids read five or six texts. An assessment we were told should take fifteen to twenty minutes invariable took the entire class period. Occasionally, the questions themselves were useless. If the standard was about finding evidence in a text, the question would often be a “Part B” question: “What is the best evidence to support the answer in ‘Part A’.” Where’s part A? Who knows? Buried somewhere in Mastery Connect.

This year, though, we’re required to do three CFAs (we love our acronyms in education) per quarter. That means three full class periods to administer an assessment that — here’s the real kicker — none of the English teachers even think is useful. It is, in short, a total waste of time so people further up the chain can write reports for people further up the chain from them.

All without asking for any feedback about the efficacy of the procedures we have in place.

Additionally, we now have a required CSA — Common Summative Assessment. We’ll just use the district required unit test the fulfill that requirement, but the first unit’s test is eighteen pages long. We estimate it will take at least two class periods. And right after taking that test, they’re taking a benchmark test (for which we shorten all classes that day to half an hour and give them the entire morning), which is essentially the same damn test.

And we’re to do that every single quarter.

That’s six or seven days per quarter just for assessments that we the teachers don’t even think are effective. That’s twenty-four to twenty-eight days of the school year. That’s 13-16% of the entire school year just for this asinine testing. And that doesn’t even take into consideration the other days for other alphabet soup tests. Taken altogether, we’re looking at nearly 20% of the school year spent taking useless multiple choice tests.

And when students don’t do as well as we think they should, do we step back and say, “Hey, what did we make the teachers do that could have contributed to this”? Of course not: teachers are the only variable in this whole equation that districts can boss around and legislatures can legislate, so we take the blame for everything.

If either of our children were thinking about going into education, I would tell them that I’m not paying for their college unless they do a double major and take a second degree in some other field so they have options for when they’re facing the situation that we’re facing. I’m fifty-one years old; this is only getting worse; I have few to no options but to keep plowing through it.

But after today, I’d almost kill for options outside the classroom.