Ah, spring. The time when all Kentucky public schools turn to thoughts of…testing. The infamous Commonwealth Accountability Testing System, or CATS (obviously named by a Kentucky fan, not a Louisville one).
While the scores mean nothing to the students, they mean everything to the schools. Do well, and you get bonus money, which you may choose to spend on the school or distribute to the staff. Do poorly, and the state may take over control of your school.
Needless to say, the schools take it quite seriously. All students in grades 3-12 are tested from anywhere from 90 minutes to over eight and a half hours. Fourth and fifth grades fall into the over-8-hour category. The testing period lasts for 9 school days. Okay, you think, they spend an hour a day testing and have the rest of the day to learn. Ha!
For starters, teachers spend a great deal of classroom time preparing students for the tests, including pretty much the entire week beforehand. And during testing “season”, there’s not much learning taking place. We can’t have hungry students doing less than their best, so the day starts with snacks in the classroom. I was there this morning, having been asked to help. A cupful of trail mix, half a banana, a slice of cheese, crackers, and a cup of juice. That’s not a snack, that’s a meal! It made me wonder why I’ve been giving BD breakfast for the past week and a half. After testing, the kids deserve a break, so they might watch a video (educational, of course, I’m assured). And once the testing is over, they need a day or two to celebrate that fact.
I’m old enough now to use phrases like “back in my day.” As in: back in my day, we spent a few hours each year taking standardized tests. The only preparation was to make sure that your number 2 pencils were sharp.
3 Comments
I hear ya sister! Here they are called CSAP’s and they do all the same things as they are doing in KY. A couple of weeks of prepping students, 2 weeks of tests, snacks, a good breakfast, celebrating. Back in my day, a sharp #2 pencil was all we needed too…maybe we were asked to bring a few pencils, so we didn’t disrupt the testing by sharpening our pencils!
Hmmmm…. maybe that’s why I didn;t do so well in my exams, not enough snacks and mollycoddling.
Hm. Makes you wonder if the kids have to suffer for the schools’ ambitions. Incidentally, I take it they weren’t named after you.