Simone Larson: Our kids are more than a test score

As a middle school teacher and perfectionist, it is way too easy for me to fall down the rabbit-hole of focusing solely on what is going poorly in my classroom. My internal monologue becomes: What are my students missing? What are they not understanding? What are they doing wrong?

Adding to this fear is an oppressive and ever-present pressure: the student achievement microscope. We, as educators, feel it constantly. Did our students, we ask, show appropriate growth on the latest mandated assessment?

When you, reader, hear the word growth, you might not immediately feel as though the walls are closing in on you. Hopefully your breath does not catch in your chest, like mine, upon hearing the word. And that’s because, to the general public, the word growth has quite a positive connotation. To grow is to evolve and change and morph into something incredible and unique.

But in education, we have taken the word and corrupted it. In our world, this word refers to one thing, and one thing only: our student’s standardized test scores, such as MAP (Measures of Academic Progress) or IAR (Illinois Assessment of Readiness) or whatever new test is currently perched in the wings, ready to leap onstage for its grand entrance.

As teachers, our practices are scrutinized, day after day, and the children in front of us are seemingly transformed into walking test scores. I fight against imagining each of my students as live-action-stick-figures with bolded numbers floating above their heads.

And what happens to children when we, as a society or a school district, focus solely on their testing data? I can tell you, because I’ve seen it in real time. We watch their confidence wane and their academic performance sink lower.

Standardized tests, in their very nature, are disconnected entities. These tests have their own week, their own schedule. It’s testing time, we read from a script, as we command children to put away all semblance of anything engaging or familiar. Clear all other materials off your desk and Take. This. Test. 

In District 65, our students completed the state-mandated IAR tests last month. These formal tests are a desolate, freezing island in the middle of the school year. If research shows the best kind of learning and assessing is connected to a rich and constructive curriculum, how are standardized tests an accurate reflection of what our kids know? 

This isn’t a new debate. My former colleague displayed proudly on her desk a little button with the message: “You are more than a test score,” printed in black and red. But why isn’t the idea more common – that a test on its own, isolated and imposing in nature, simply cannot tell us the most important information we need to learn about a child? 

Why haven’t the powers that be developed more authentic methods to evaluate and measure growth in writing? In speaking and listening? In creativity and critical thinking? Even in reading? 

Perhaps it is too difficult for them to even conceive. Also, there is no real incentive to make meaningful, systemic changes. 

Save me the argument that multiple choice tests are an important part of life. That we must learn how to take tests, because tests place us into college and graduate school and medical school and law school. This argument is comparable to the idea that we should all just be meaner to our children, because the world is cruel, and kids these days need to learn how to cope.

Instead, how about we change the world?

You can call me an idealist, I’ll take that. But what I can’t take is too much more of this pressure. This wildly inaccurate narrative that if my kids don’t excel on one standardized test, they are not worthy, and by default, I am not worthy to teach them.

Quite simply, there are things that happen in the classroom that cannot be measured or packaged for mass consumption. These are the moments that feel downright magical. 

Like the first time a student skips their pre-planned break in favor of finishing their copy of The Hunger Games. Or when I sit reading a student essay that is so beautifully crafted and organized it makes me smile at my desk. Or when that one child raises their hand, and I think they’re going to say something silly or ask to go to the bathroom, but instead they say something so completely profound that I’m literally speechless. 

These are the moments that cannot be quantified or presented in a data presentation.

An unrelenting, singular focus on test scores becomes utterly demoralizing and exhausting for students, teachers and administrators alike.

We know there is a powerful antidote to all of this, and that is when we, the educators, with administrative support, take time to celebrate students’ strengths beyond a test score. When we dwell, as a system, on the positive and acknowledge all of the ways our students are succeeding.

Only then will we see the results and changes we so desperately seek. Because to get the best results from kids, kids have to feel good about what they can do.

We must celebrate their strengths and cheer on their actual growth, first and always.

Editor’s note: A portion of this column was taken from the writer’s newsletter, Simone Says. Entry: A Map of the Universe.