Ten Infuriatingly Stupid Things About the Virginia SOL Test (Besides the fact that they actually use the initials "SOL" and they aren't being ironic)

Silly Season has begun.  I was an English teacher for most of the year, but now I'm a hallway monitor and baby sitter.  It's a full month before the end of the school year, and we've begun taking the state-mandated SOL tests. As a result, the computers have been taken from my classroom, and the attention of everyone in the school has turned from teaching and learning to testing, testing, testing. 

Politicians and bureaucrats love testing data, but those of us on the front lines in public education have a billion reasons to hate it.  For teachers, administrators, students, and parents, the state tests are little more than an aggravation and a distraction, taking up valuable instruction time, diverting needed resources, and draining students and teachers of their motivation and will to live.

With the coming of Silly Season, schedules will change, teachers will be taken out of classrooms, instruction time will be lost, and teachers will walk around in the hallways shushing students and trying to avoid walking too loudly, all because somewhere in the building kids are taking one of these hugely overblown tests. 

It isn’t easy to pare the list of idiocies down to a manageable number, but I’ve done my best to limit myself to 10.  Of all of the reasons we have to hate those god-awful tests, these ten are the most infuriating: 

1)   What kind of an idiot gives course-ending tests in May when the school year ends in June? Once testing starts, teaching becomes almost impossible. The tests disrupt everything and the kids tune out completely.  Schedules are altered, computer labs are off-limits, teachers are pulled from classrooms to proctor tests or monitor hallways, and teaching new material or doing major projects ceases to be an option. For all intents and purposes, the school year ends as soon as testing starts, and teachers go from being experts in their subject area to being underpaid nannies. Course-end tests have always been a part of education, but they should be given in June, at the actual end of the school year.  We shouldn’t have to waste more than a month doing nothing but administering tests. 

2) In reading, students get nothing for progress, only for passing. The reading tests are given on a pass/fail basis.  Students who fail one year aren’t rewarded for making a year’s worth of progress before the next test. Instead, they are somehow expected to “catch up,” despite the fact that they are reading below grade level and clearly struggling. 

It’s fine to monitor progress, and it’s necessary to provide extra help to students who are falling behind, but we still need to accept that students develop at different rates and stop punishing kids for not being “at or above grade level.”  To say they need to reach a certain mark in reading comprehension by the time they graduate is fair, to insist that they all progress at the same rate is not.

3) Schools are forced to focus on small groups of students, just to ensure the numbers come out right. Giving the tests on a pass/fail basis means schools typically need a relatively small change in passing rates to meet their goal, which means helping only a handful of struggling students pass the test.  This encourages schools to ignore the students at the top and bottom of the score sheet and focus most of the attention on those students who are “on the bubble,” investing our time and energy in helping a few students pass the test rather than helping all of our students improve.

4) Why would the state make tests harder just to lower scores? Two years ago, the state made the SOL tests “more rigorous” by adding questions that are not multiple choice, but that instead require students to possibly select more than one answer, or even move items around on the screen, putting story elements in order, for example, or placing items in the correct place in a sequence or list.  The expressed intent was to encourage “higher level thinking,” and maybe they do.  Some might say they're just more confusing, but maybe that's the same thing.  One thing is certain, the kids aren’t doing as well on the tests.  Scores have dropped across the state. 

Not that the state doesn’t have the right to make the tests harder, but it's hard on the kids who struggle.  A few years ago, I had many kids who worked hard and were proud when they managed to pass the test.  Now?  The kids who struggle most have been effectively eliminated from the race, and those who believed they could pass if they worked hard enough no longer see much hope. 

Which leads nicely into my next big issue…

5) A third of Virginia’s schools “failed” to make their goals last year. Making the test harder has increased the failure rate, causing the number of schools on “Academic Warning” to rise from 19 in 2010-2011 to 555 this past year. Next year, the number of schools who fail to meet their goal is expected to rise to more than 600 schools, which will be more than a third of the schools in the state.

This has no doubt been a boon for “educational consultants” and the people at the state department of education who desperately need a reason to continue being employed, but it has been a royal pain in the neck for those of us who work in the schools.

This is exceptionally irritating because…

6) Virginia’s remedy for a “failing” school is to send in “experts” to help the teachers learn to do their jobs right. If my school ends up on “Academic Warning,” you would think the biggest concern would be for the students.  What programs can we put in place to help?  Do we need to make more technology available? Should we provide better materials? Do the students need more tutoring or extra help? 

After all, we know the schools that fail are almost universally the ones with large numbers of minority and economically disadvantaged students.  What can we do to help those kids succeed? 

Of course, we all know it’s not about the kids.  It’s about the teachers, who are lazy shiftless gasbags collecting a state salary for doing nothing. 

So what happens if we go on “Academic Warning” next year?  

The state will send in a group of empty shirts to  “assist” us with planning.  I will be in my classroom, face to face with 30 students at a time trying to help them be successful not only on the tests, but in life, and these people will come in during my planning period and after school to meet with me and tell me that I’m not doing it hard enough.  Sometimes, they will even come in to my classroom to “observe,” which is all they will do.  They won't interact with my students, they won't offer to help, and if I fall flat on my face and my lesson doesn’t go well on that particular day, they will frown and make marks on paper, then tell me what I already know:  My lesson that day sucked. 

What I need, and what every teacher in this state needs, is help making sure students succeed.  I don’t need people to tell me I need engaging materials, I need engaging materials provided to me.  I don’t need people to tell me when my lesson isn’t working, I need people to have my back.  I don’t need people to sit in my room frowning at my “classroom management” skills when a student is being defiant and disrupting the class, I need someone to deal with that student so that I can go on doing my job.  

Most of all, we all need fewer students to manage.  We need smaller class sizes and more opportunity to interact with each of the kids we teach.  To have that, we need more teachers in the classroom, not more consultants to help us plan.  It’s that simple. 

7) Testing ensures that students in class do not have access to technology in the classroom. This year, all of my assignments are posted on-line and I have used computers for every assignment, which is a good thing since all of these kids will use computers once they enter the working world.  Now that testing has begun, however, all of my computers are gone. English class has gone back to paper and pencil, which is good because it's always possible that it will be 1950 again.

It should go without saying that we are training students to be useful members of a 21^st century workforce, but that doesn’t stop politicians, talking heads, and educational “experts” from saying it with every other breath.  I guess the assumption is that the crucial skills needed involve taking multiple choice tests and filling out worksheets in pencil.

Or that we're all SOL.  

8) Virginia provides the tests, but not the materials for teaching the standards. The state requires the tests, but does not provide schools with useful reading materials or practical state-aligned textbooks.  Instead, they provide incomprehensible standards, which say helpful and interesting things like, “students will extend general and specialized vocabulary through speaking, listening, reading, and writing” and “students will draw conclusions and make inferences based on explicit and implied information.” Believe me, one of the most rewarding parts of being a teacher is spending my time trying to figure out what that means. 

If the state is requiring us to comply with the standards, they need to write them in a language that resembles English.  It would also be nice if they would provide us the materials to teach them, which means textbooks and workbooks that are aligned to the state-approved standards. 

And since the powers that be love to preach the importance of using materials that are engaging and relevant, it seems to me the state should be working on providing that as well, because it’s not that easy to come up with materials when there is no approved source to draw from.

Of course, having the materials to teach according to standards doesn’t really help if the tests aren’t actually any good, but we have no way of knowing that, because we aren’t allowed to see what is actually on the test.  In fact, the tests were changed three years ago, but no tests in the new format were released until this March, conveniently late enough to ensure that we wouldn’t be able to actually help our students prepare. 

Not that that matters either, since…

9) There is no real incentive for students to pass. Students are required to pass the reading test, but until a student begins high school, the tests aren’t a pre-requisite for passing on to the next grade.

Nor can they be in any practical sense.  Kids develop at different rates, and it wouldn’t be fair to hold back every child who isn’t reading at grade level, especially considering that most of them will catch up at some point. 

At least, they would have, back before the state made the tests harder.  Now, who knows? Many of them may never get to where they can pass the tests consistently, but it doesn’t matter because holding back 25% of Virginia’s students in any given year isn’t a realistic option anyway. 

Students who have historically done poorly, though, have little incentive to care about passing anyway, because other than remedial classes and after school help, there really isn’t any consequence to failing.  For most of them, it’s easier to just give up, and a lot of them do. 

All of which leads to the  biggest problem with these tests:

10) Testing has become our main priority, and everything else has become secondary.  There is nothing sacred when it becomes time to administer the tests, other than the tests themselves.  Teachers aren’t even expected to teach much anymore, and many of them turn to giving students busy work or to simply showing movies.  For those of us who do our best to stay productive during testing, it is a challenge to maintain any rigor in the classroom when students are constantly being pulled for various tests, schedules are disrupted, and there is almost never a time when you can hold a complete class. 

And the great tragedy of this is that no one seems to care.  The tests have to be administered, and whatever inconveniences or consequences that may bring about are irrelevant.  We all complain, but we go along with it anyway.  

It’s frustrating and stressful for everyone involved, and everyone is on edge, from the students all the way up to the principal, and nothing of value is accomplished. 

Except that we get those numbers that everyone wants to wave around as if any of it really relates to what teachers are paid to do. 

Testing could be used to help determine how we dedicate resources and how we identify schools and students who need additional support.  They could be used as a positive way of targeting areas where students may need additional support, or, at the very least, of simply determining that students are on track with their learning and ready to move on to the next level. 

Instead, the tests are a disruption to instruction used to condemn the efforts of teachers and encourage schools and districts to worry more about numbers than about kids. They are about politics, not education, and they need to go away. 

For the record, I'm not even opposed to testing. Tests are a reliable way to measure learning, and even help ensure that students are learning what they need to know.  There's never been a class that didn't end with an assessment of some sort, and that almost always means either a test or a research paper. Besides, if our students aren't performing at grade level, that is a problem that needs to be addressed. Tests will show that.  

Except that we’re not addressing the problem; we’re just giving more tests.