The simultaneous advocacy for and complete misunderstanding of the way state standardized testing works never ceased to amaze me. Here's an explainer.
I am a seventh grade English teacher in Texas. That means my students have two state tests for my class - reading and writing. Allow me to explain just the writing test data, and how and why it is useless to me for any practical purpose.
The writing test has a multiple choice section and one essay. The last time my current students had a state writing test was the fourth grade, so the most recent data for them for that test is three years old. I can't and don't use three year old data to plan lessons.
The test is administered in the Spring and takes a long time to score - the essays for every single seventh grader in the state of Texas have to be scored by hand, so the results don't come until the end of the school year. I *literally* can't use that data.
The style and content of the test essay doesn't resemble writing students will use in any of their other classes. Time that we spend practicing test-style essay is time not spent learning to write research papers, or persuasive papers, stories, or information essays.
Because of the tremendous pressure on each district and campus to do well on the test, they give benchmarks. Administering them takes all day, and benchmark test days are a lost day of instruction, not just for my classes, but for all classes.
They don't happen til late in the fall, and I have to score them on top of my regular grading for actual essays for class. It's extremely time consuming.
Meanwhile: I teach writing. We practice many different kinds of writing. We edit, revise, share writing, collaborate with each other. That is time consuming, but it's also how they grow as writers. It's also VERY HARD TO DO when my instruction is interrupted with tests.
If you asked me right this second about each of my students, I could tell you their strengths and weaknesses as a writer and what they still need to work on. I would be using the *ample* amount of work we've done in class. I would not be using 3 yr old data.
That's just one test! There are many! Those data sets are meant for and useful to policy makers and school boards. Which is fine!!! But, it's a pandemic, my students are behind, and I need my instructional time to help kids catch up with writing skills.
I'm not saying I don't look at data! I do! I have many sources of data. I even look at STAAR data. But the classroom data I gather and have access to drives my instruction because it's immediate and actionable.
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