THE TEST

Are we all done taking THE TEST yet? My school has a couple of days of testing left. The students I'm proctoring seem to be at least trying, unlike many of the students at our school. I cannot comprehend what mental aberration keeps the test analysts from factoring into their detailed analyses the fact that many students refuse to even take the yearly test, choosing instead to "Christmas-tree" it--fill in random answer choices.

I gave as a journal topic just before our test, "How do you feel about TCAPs"? Of course the negatives were fairly universal, but some students were more perspicacious than others. One noted, "If the school would take all the time it spends in teaching us how to take the test and instead use it to teach us what we need to be learning, we'd be way ahead." Indeed!

I remember the days when test score printouts given to students to take to their parents contained the caveat, "These scores are to be used for diagnostic purposes only. Use of test scores to evaluate a teacher or school constitutes a misuse of these scores." I still think that is correct. It is preposterous to propose a pay hike for a teacher working with motivated upper-middle-class kids whose scores zoom ever upward while denying it to a teacher working with inner-city kids so unmotivated that if she can keep the peace in her room, she's doing better than most. If, in addition to keeping the peace, she brings up her students' reading level two to three years, she will have worked a miracle--but if the kids were four or five years behind to start with, her test scores will still be abysmal, won't they?

Miracles are hard to come by these days. The April 4 edition of Education Week tells about a major federal study which found that use of reading and mathematics software produced "no difference in academic acheievement between students who used the technology in their classrooms and youngsters who used other methods." I read the entire article and it is clear that the study was conducted thoroughly and with great care. So why wouldn't the use of this wonderful technology produce the hoped-for results? I have used one of the best reading software products, and it is exceptionally well designed.

But the best software is not better than an excellent teacher. Probably not as good. At best, it frees up the teacher to work some students while it teaches others. Educational software is simply one tool that we can use. To be effective, we need many, many more. We can never let ourselves afford to be fooled into believing that because we have a wonderful software reading program, we're home free.

The cards I've designed are another tool I use, and a very important one, because I can use it in such a variety of ways. But I would never try to teach reading with only that tool, either. To conduct a well-rounded reading program, we need many tools in our toolkit, and we need to know when and how to use them.