CSAP (the Colorado State Test for Public School Students)

Oh joy, oh rapture, testing season is upon us, here in Colorado. For this reason, I may or may not have time to blog in the next few days. I have to administer the test all morning and teach classes in the afternoon. No accommodations are made for the fact that I’m supposed to be part-time. Really, that’s the least of my concerns. Anyway, I thought you’d like to peek in on what goes on in a school during the big test.

Today, we were allowed into “the bunker.” This is the super-top-secret room where the tests are stored and organized by two people hired to work full-time for several weeks before the test to perform this serious task. They have all the right security clearance. Teachers are to have absolutely no access to the test until the day before they administer it. We go in and check our boxes—big Rubbermaid bins—making sure that we have all the proper tests to match up with all the students on the list to be in our rooms on test day. We count little paper protractors and rulers, pencils, all that stuff. All this checking is done in the bunker under the watchful eyes of the security-cleared muckimucks. That’s OK, because they’re former teachers from our school and fun to visit with while we count.

It is very important that teachers have a minimal understanding of what the test is like. For this reason, we are allowed to see small, selected portions of previous tests, but we are not allowed to see any test in its entirety, ever. Not even after it has been administered.

Tomorrow, we will start later and feed the kids breakfast at school in hopes of insuring proper rest and nutrition before we start. We will do this every day that we test. When the testing begins, each room will have around 20 students and 2 test proctors who are supposed to spend the next 3 hours walking up and down the rows of desks non-stop—no reading, no grading, no taking eyes off of kids. We don’t do this. Jeeze, if you want to make 20 kids into nervous wrecks, that would be the best way to accomplish the task!

Actually, my co-proctor and I will take turns. One will walk around making kids nervous, and the other will get some work done, then we’ll trade off. This carries risks. Last year, my co-proctor missed the fact that a girl had gone on to the first page of the next test. Anyone who’s taken any standardized test knows what I mean. They give 40 minutes to complete test A. If you finish early, you’re supposed to stop until the proctor says it’s time to go onto test B because it’s a timed test. A kid who goes on to the next test creates a crisis. I had to go ask the super-secret muckimucks what to do. The offending student was pulled from the classroom and both test A and test B were invalidated. I’m not sure how going on to test B gave her any sort of advantage on test A, but that’s beside the point.

But get this: tests C and D, given the NEXT DAY, were also declared invalid. I should also clarify for you that invalid tests are not thrown out of the school’s overall test scores. They are averaged in as zeros, as if the kid actually took the tests and did not get a single answer right. That one page screw-up meant that this girl’s entire math test registered as a zero in the school’s state report.

Now, you may wonder why I turned the problem in, given the consequences. Well, if I hadn’t, and word had gotten out, all 20 tests in my classroom would have been declared invalid and we’d be averaging in 20 zeros. If a teacher screws up and gives the wrong test on a given day, the whole test, both days’ worth, will be thrown out for every kid in that classroom. If the school fails to report an incident like this and it is later discovered, the whole grade level’s tests are considered zeros for that school.

This is what my students and I will be doing for 9 hours this week. Then we go on spring break, get another week of school in, and the second week back, we’ll spend another 9 hours on the reading and writing portion. Again, we will be slipping in and out of “the bunker.” We’ll be diligently making sure that no student accidentally makes a mistake that invalidates the test that’s supposed to be helping improve his or her education.

Today, I was in the bunker with a colleague, both of us checking to make sure that we were fully locked and loaded. One student’s name had been abbreviated from Christina to Christ. It made me wonder what the world would be like today if Jesus’ performance as a teacher had been measured by how the disciples had done on the state test. Hmmmm….

tags: education