Testimony to the Board regarding Common Core testing

To members of the Board of Education,

My name is Diane Aoki. I am a 5th grade teacher at Kealakehe Elementary School in Kailua-Kona, on the Big Island of Hawaii. I understand you will be discussing the Smarter Balanced Assessments at your Tuesday, May 6th Board meeting. I am submitting testimony to ask that you seriously consider the harm being done in the implementation of the Common Core Standards and it's accompanying "Smarter Balanced Assessments." 

As you evaluate the implementation of Common Core in our school system, I ask that you consider the reality of life in the classroom versus what you have been told should be happening in theory. I ask that you not base your decisions on what some highly paid "reformer" lobbyist has told you (someone possibly funded by the Gates Foundation), but consider in your heart of hearts, what type of education you would want for your own child. 

Wouldn't you want your child to thrive in a school that offered small class sizes, a well-rounded education, a school with a mission to encourage social and emotional development, that offered art and music, that made sure science was inquiry based, that put a high priority on civics and civic engagement. That's what I would want for my child, and it is not happening in our schools. The reason it is not happening in our schools is because of test-based accountability. Test scores go up when the test is made the priority above all else, above a well-rounded approach to education.

I have seen the released items for the SBAC. I can only imagine, since my school did not pilot the test this year, how most students would have done. Very few would have done well, even my good students. Most would probably have turned off just glancing at the wordiness of the problems. You may say that it is something they need to learn how to do. Who says that these tests correlate with anything worthwhile ?  Who says that they are valid in anyway? And perhaps with enough training, we can get some improvement over time, but at what cost? 

The cost is a well-rounded education. The cost is time, energy, and money going into test prep, when it could go into assuring that all children are valued and nurtured for their individuality, be it in art, music, science, writing, or academics. 

The only people who are advocating for staying the Common Core SBAC course seem to be people who don't have their heart, soul, and their own children in the system. Isn't that ironic? Isn't that telling? People, like business folk, who tell you to stay the course, ask them what school their child attends. If they say a private school, then ask if that private school has adopted the Common Core. If not, why are they trying to tell us what is the right thing to do? Oh, they're trying to make sure they have a skilled work force. If that is their answer, don't take it at surface level, ask them what skills they need. And then think, is this Common Core and SBAC, really relevant to those needs? 

Too many decisions have been made without this type of relevant analysis. What was the debate in the adoption of the Common Core? Was it pressure from the federal government, in securing Race to the Top funds? Or was it the Common Core public relations rhetoric that convinced you? It definitely was not brought to public forums for debate and discussion. 

You, Board of Education, have the power. You have the power to turn this ship around. After a decade of test-based accountability, you must realize that it does not work. You may say that it's not the same as No Child Left Behind. You may say that now that you are making teacher evaluation tied to student test scores, it will be a tactic that hasn't been tried yet, in Hawaii. Yes, it will be different, it will be worse. You will have spent all this time and resources, on something that is doomed to fail. 

End this madness. Open up the adoption of the Common Core to scrutiny. Consider that it may not be in the community's best interests to forge ahead. Standards themselves can be helpful, but tying it to high-stakes testing destroys any possible positive benefits.

Be brave! Make the implementation of a well-rounded education for children the priority. 

Progressive educator, John Dewey, said it best in 1900 and it remains true today: " What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all of its children.  Any other ideal for our schools is narrow and unlovely; acted upon, it destroys our democracy.“

Thank you for seriously considering my thoughts, 

Diane Aoki

Kona, Hawaii

Small Kine Protest Regarding the SLOs

Note: This was written on Wednesday morning.

 It's 3:00 in the morning. I woke up with my brain churning with all the things I have to do, deadlines I have to meet, tests I have to prepare for, and somewhere in there, a gnawing insistence that I need to do something to put the joy of learning into the day as well. For the past few weeks, everyone in Hawaii has been going through this stress and anxiety due to the SLO (Student Learning Objective) and Core Professionalism deadlines looming along with the high-stakes standardized testing as the year comes to an end. 

I just finished summative assessments for SLO 1, on decimal operations, which was pretty grueling. It was not a standardized test. It was curriculum-based, standards-based, and grueling for even the best students. The test anxiety was palpable. Yesterday, I did a formative assessment on SLO 2, adding and subtracting fractions with unlike denominators. Oh, and this after a lesson on volume in preparation for the "test," and also because it's in the curriculum and we have so much to do, so little time. I had set fractions aside a couple of weeks ago to focus on the SLO 1 assessment. So when I went back to fractions, most students appeared to have not remembered anything. Fractions have always been hard, but I have in the past made conceptual understanding a priority over using an algorithm to solve it. This year, I taught according to the Common Core aligned curriculum, which seems to make solving it via an algorithm the goal, even if there is no conceptual understanding. Result: they can not do either, for the most part. 

My dilemma, since the data is due 2 days in advance of my meeting with my administrator, I need to give them their summative assessment today. This I hate - giving a test knowing that most of them will fail, for the sake of the data. Here is the twisted part. We have to do two of these SLO projects,  but only one needs to be turned in. My decision: I am not giving the SLO 2 test at this time. I will continue to work with my students on fractions, and go back to developing conceptual understanding. They may not master it by the end of the year, but we'll keep working on it. My rating for SLO 2 will be "ineffective," and that is just what it will be. I'll use the SLO 1 rating to report to the DOE. 

It feels so radical, but it's really not. Other teachers have done much more radical and braver things like refused to administer standardized tests they believed were harmful to their students. But today, I made a decision that I will plan a day in which the goal will be joyful learning. I want to hear the sounds of students engaged in inquiry, in making things, in collaborating, in problem-solving. Screw the SLO 2, the EES, the data. Let hands-on science reign! 

Update: my appointment with my vice principal was rescheduled to Monday, and I thought I would know the outcome by the time I posted this, but I don't. As you see, I did do science. I blame myself for not doing enough of it. Teamwork and following rules of a lab setting is a challenge, but they are important learning opportunities. One never knows if test prep really helped my students in life, but I will never doubt that team-based science labs contributed to their social and intellectual development.