By: East Side Staff
Just last month children in New York State from grade four through eight finished taking their New York State Math and ELA tests. Almost all the students here at East must remember participating in this testing, and we all agree that it made almost no effect on our high school careers. It may have mattered in middle school where receiving a grade lower than three would result in placement in academic intervention services or AIS. Which is why many parents have pressured their kids to work extra hard in order to do well on these exams even though they have no effect on our futures.
A large majority of students have began to opt out of these exams with parental support. Even parents have become concerned with the amount of stress this testing is placing on their kids who have not even reached high school. This is largely due to the unreasonable test questions and passages that have been asked by the state in the past couple of years. Many of us can surely remember a test where we were completely confused, and for the seniors that test probably included, “The Pineapple and the Hare” a reading passage so confusing that the moral of the story was that pineapples don’t have sleeves. When the state is asking such complicated questions parents are going to see an effect on the students. Especially because these tests fail to accurately assess skill level as shown by the fact that students placed in advanced math and English classes are also forced to be in AIS due to low standardized test grades.
This has become even more aggravating as the students’ tests grades have become tied to teachers’ evaluations. This system of value added analysis has hurt many teachers due to the difficulty level of so many questions. Also, some students who take these tests choose to give up on specifically the ELA exam giving one sentence responses for essay and short answer responses. Thus, the teachers are inaccurately judged leading to possible unemployment.
The state should not be pushing tests preparing elementary and middle school kids for the stressful life of high school, but they should instead be reducing the stress of high school. Yet, that does not mean eliminating these tests but instead reforming them. We need to look at the majority of the students and create questions that would accurately assess their skills and where they need to be, according to each grade level.
These tests, if administered properly, hold the potential to benefit the students in providing students who truly require AIS to receive it while students who excel to be challenged in advanced classes. If teachers are judged based on these exams then students must be tested based on what they are required to learn during the year and the tests should not place any high stress on the students or cause discouragement. The primary objective of these tests should be to allow the students to gauge their basic understanding of concepts, and receive help accordingly in order to better prepare them for high school.
