Pulling Back the Curtain Bianca Tanis The more I learn about the new, Common-Core-based ELA exams

and APPR protocols, the more I wonder who, exactly, is running the show. Who is the man behind the curtain, and what is his real agenda? Certainly, it is not someone with a background in child or educational psychology, or even anyone competent, for that matter. As we head into the high stakes testing season, the utter lack of regard for developmentally appropriate content boggles my mind. Listening to the unpacking of the upcoming tests and scoring rubrics, I find myself unconsciously shaking my head in disbelief. We are accepting a new vision for education that elevates college readiness and data over child-centered learning and the development of a love for education. Although most students will not join the testing fray until 3rd grade, the effects of the new, NYS Common Core based tests are now becoming palpable in the lower primary grades. As teachers in 3rd, 4th and 5th grade come to terms with a highstakes-testing-based evaluation system, the pressure to prepare kindergarten students for the rigor of the Common Core is growing. In between learning to tie their shoes and hold a pencil, curriculum specialists assert that kindergarteners should be developing a common language to prepare for the work to come. The terms evidence, persuasion, inference, and authors purpose will soon be gracing the word walls of primary-grade classrooms. First graders, it seems, should be developing habits of mind now, so that test-taking-strategy-based thinking will be second nature by the time they reach 3rd grade. Its ridiculous, really. We can all agree that reading complex texts, giving evidencebased answers, writing from sources, and engaging in text analysis are important skills. But since when did college readiness become a valid instructional goal for children of 5, 6, or 7? Should we also start preparing them to shave and balance a checkbook in first grade? I would assert that the real foundational skill for college readiness is an intrinsic desire to seek out knowledge. After all, to succeed in college, one needs to want to be there in the first place. By foisting a developmentally inappropriate agenda on young children, we are creating burnouts. The curriculum becomes a droning, unintelligible noise that I would imagine sounds something akin to the whine of Charlie Browns faceless teacher. We call children sponges, but these sponges are being over-saturated. If you are a teacher, you probably took some grad school classes in child psychology and educational theory. Put them out of your head. Forget about teaching kindergarteners to solve problems and construct meaning through the use of play. We are now charged with encouraging them to engage in analysis and deep thinking using anchor texts at the 60% fiction and 40% informational text ratio prescribed by specialists. Last year it was OK to encourage our youngest students to draw meaning from a book or story by identifying text-to-self connections. But

this year, connections are out and inference is in. How we can assert that our teaching has any integrity when we are told that we must dismiss instructional strategies based in educationally and developmentally sound practice to make way for educational fads that are not based in science or research? When you look at what we are trying to prepare these young students for, the situation becomes even more depressing. The new ELA tests embrace a Darwinistic approach in which we separate the ones from the twos, the threes from the fours. This year, you will not find graphic organizers or the listening component on the test. They have been cast aside to allow for more rigor. For struggling decoders and auditory learners, this is a slap in the face. In the past, many students benefitted from these portions of the test and the modicum of differentiation and scaffolding that they provided. And wasnt the point of this whole circus to prepare kids for college? Last time I checked, listening for information and note taking were still pretty important college skills. They say these tests are standardized. If you are familiar with psychometrics, you know that standardized tests are normed on a bell curve. Scores should reflect some ones, twos, threes, and fours. If every student were to achieve a proficient score, the validity of the test would be questionable at best. Yet the message we are receiving is that all students should be proficient 3s, or else teachers must not be doing their jobs. The NYS ELA exam now contains questions meant to separate the 3s from the 4s (who needs names when a number will suffice?). For instance, there are questions that test makers have created with the intention that 95% of students will not be able to answer them. This is how we separate the men from the boys, the 3s from the 4s. This is also how we set our children up for failure. Unlike a standardized test in which the questions ascend from easy to difficult, the NYS ELA test question sampling is random in terms of level of difficulty. What this means is that the child who is nervous to begin with and perhaps not quite reading at grade level will essentially be defeated right out of the gate. Again, who is running the show? In the not-too-distant past, education was guided by common sense and best practice. The idea of knowingly presenting a 4.5 year old with a pre-test filled with questions that he or she cannot answer for the sole purpose of achieving a base line would have been considered borderline abusive. Teachers are already being forced to engage in this profoundly flawed method of introducing a child to school. Pretty soon, those bizarre programs with the infomercials that purport to teach 12-monthold children to read will be receiving multi-million dollar grants to create curricula and tests for preschools. Is this our vision for childhood education? Ask kindergarten teachers how much instructional time has been lost this year while they toil away assessing students at a table in the corner, or how much opportunity their students get to engage in unstructured playtime and self-directed learning. This cant be what we want for our children. As a parent and as a teacher, I believe in public education. It is up to

those of us who are on the front lines to educate our friends, family and neighbors about the real implications of high stakes testing, APPR and the Common Core for the classroom. If we want to save our schools, the time has come to pull back the curtain and reveal the true impact of the path that we are on.