CMS 'field tests' our patience

A one-question test on testing in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools:

How many hours does a typical fourth-grader spend on tests in a year?

We’re talking assessment tests – End of Grade tests, National Assessment of Educational Progress tests – also known as the only tests kids tend to like more than parents.

Kids like the tests because they’re not graded, and because their teachers often don’t assign homework the night before so students can be test-fresh. Parents, however, range from fretful to impatient that the emphasis on these tests seem to be leaving less room on the chalkboard each year for other kinds of learning.

This week, some of those parents – along with many CMS teachers – are spitting paper clips with the administering of 52 new “field tests,” which are part of a program that eventually will supply another measure of how well teachers are contributing to student progress.

Parents threatened to pull students from the tests. Teachers complained about the time spent on them. Even some test-weary high school students threatened to muck things up by filling in wrong answers.

Enough, everyone seems to be saying.

But is it?

The field tests, called Summatives, will be given in subjects that are not covered by N.C. End-of-Grade and End-of-Course tests, CMS says, which means that teachers can be better evaluated in most every class, not just the current 10 percent.

Plus, officials say, those tests will add only one to three hours of testing time per year for students – depending on grade.

Which brings us back to your one-question test: How many hours a year does a fourth-grader spend filling in the bubbles and such?

That number is 17, says CMS. Out of 1,035 instructional hours. That’s less time test-taking than some of us fourth-graders spent reading Sports Illustrated inside our textbook. (Sorry, Mrs. Berry.)

Except that 17 hours isn’t really what students lose to testing.

“It’s not even close,” says Jenn O’Kane Fenk, a teacher at Ardrey Kell High School and mother of a CMS elementary student.

What the 17 hours doesn’t include are those homework-less nights before and during testing days – or the intentionally light workload students get during testing days. It doesn’t include how some schools pretty much take the month of May to prepare for End of Grade tests – often at the expense of other subjects and topics.

It also doesn’t include the annual exhale near the end of the school year – the weeks of field trips and movies that fill the time after EOGs, when there isn’t a test to teach to anymore. I’m still trying to determine the educational significance my third-grader received from watching “Stuart Little” – twice – after EOGs were through.

Add to all that the new Summatives. “It pretty much kills your whole spring,” says Fenk.

Superintendent Peter Gorman and his staff say the numbers gained from the new tests are worth it – that they provide more precise insight into teacher performance. They have credibility here – the less talked-about CMS story this week is that the system again is a finalist for the Broad Prize, which rewards innovative, measurable achievement in urban school districts.

But Gorman and his staff also are data-driven people – and data-driven people almost always believe that more numbers are better than fewer numbers.

The rest of us? We appreciate the value of numbers, if they provide a sound and clear understanding of performance. But we know that even accurate numbers don’t measure all the other kinds of successes that come during a school year – a teacher’s well-timed nudge, the warm encouragement during a difficult moment. We worry that the more tests we have, the more evaluations are pushed toward uptown and away from the schools and principals, the teachers and parents.

CMS needs to make a better case of how more numbers will complement the classroom, instead of merely measuring it. Because the problem with numbers is that when you rely too much on them, a number is all our children seem to be.