Another Year, Another Test

For the past two years, I have been supporting teachers who have been preparing students to write the OSSLT. I have encountered the expected beligerance concerning the nature of standardized testing and how unfair and punitive it is. I have been shocked on occasion at the number of teachers who themselves have struggled to complete some of the tasks that students are asked to complete on the test, which according to my colleagues, tell us absolutely nothing about what students can do. I'm not quite so sure...

The OSSLT is a BASIC FUNCTIONAL LITERACY TEST. In fact, students should be able to complete it by the end of their grade 9 year. Granted, it is crafted in such a way that it isn't a total cake-walk. The instructions require students to read and re-read what is expected of them. The tasks themselves reflect work that students have been working on for the large majority of their academic career. The problem is that we don't teach our kids to name what they are doing. Admittedly, where the kids are disadvantaged is in the language of the test. What's particularly comical about that is that the test highly reflects the typical language of assessment in the Ontario classroom. Think about it: summarize, compare, list, describe, define, determine, explain your thinking, identify, justify, support your answer... I have often asked teachers, "do you teach your students EXPLICITLY what is expected of them when you asked them to do any of these tasks?" Typically, the response includes the assumptions that by grade 10, students should know what is expected of them. Do I really have address what happens when we assume? Let's face it, when it comes to preparing kids for this test, we spend more time blaming our colleagues in the elementary panel for not teaching the kids well enough instead of being accountable for our failure to be thorough enough in our on-going assessment, that is, if we ARE in fact assessing on an on-going basis. Another posting for another time...

As far as I'm concerned, this test demonstrates if our kids can read and write at a level where they can simply function in the world. Sometimes, the results force us to look really hard at what we are doing and NOT doing in our schools. Trust me, I know the limitations of analyzing this sort of statistical data. It does not present a complete picture. But our schools have those missing pieces. Our schools have access to attendance records and credit accumulation reports that can give some indication as to how some kids could potentially fare on this test. Instead of looking at the data after the fact, we should be using it to be proactive. The reality is that this test is not going anywhere. We can blame the previous administrations all we want about bringing this testing into the province but it seems that their predecessors don't have much of a problem with keeping it around. Funny, we never hear about that. I'll admit that I vote for Mike Harris. I liked how he thought and frankly I think he's been given a bum rap for the work he did in attempting to clean up a disaster area of a system. I'll take the heat for my politics, but I won't make excuses when kids can read and write at a basic level when they still manage to graduate from high school.

Yesterday, thousands of students across the province were dry-heaving inside while they wrote the OSSLT. My heart goes out to them, really. I appreciate the stress that goes along with writing this test. They're told that it's a high-stakes situation, and it's true. This is the one thing that technically stands in the way of graduation. I would assert, however, that the daily work in the classroom in becoming even more high-stakes. Again, another posting for another time...