I have been teaching for 18 years, most of which have had state- and federally-mandated “standardized” testing. I have been a parent for 13 years and I now have two kids who are taking the MN Comprehensive Assessments, or MCAs. Anders has taken these tests every year for five years. This was Annika’s first year. I have more experience with these tests from more angles than most of the legislators mandating them, so it’s time to talk about testing.

These tests are bullshit. I spent hours on Tuesday trying to help 10th graders get set up and take their MCA reading tests. The tests are on screens, so students had to access the test using their iPad or, if that wasn’t charged, a Chromebook from the school. They also had to use headphones to listen to the instructions, so if they didn’t have headphones, then they had to check them out from the school. I read the script, handed out their testing tickets, and told them they could begin. Ten students immediately had apps that wouldn’t work. We did what we could, but nothing worked. They had to have replacement devices delivered to our room. Then, after a bit, the testing app, created and managed by Pearson, started kicking kids out left and right. It just stopped and exited the test. In order to sign back in with the testing ticket id and password, I had to “resume” their test from my computer. Then, they would try to sign in to the test again, only to be booted out after completing one question. I had a few students who were literally kicked off of their tests more than 10 times. I’d guess one of them had to restart almost 20 times in order to complete the test. Over half of my students were kicked out at some point during the test; they’d raise their hands at first frantically, asking “will I have to start all over?” I’d reassure them that, no, the answers were saved, and we’d get them back into the test. After a while, the frantic waving turned to resigned sighs and half-hearted waves at me to let me know that, yet again, they’d been booted from the test that was supposedly evaluating their reading ability.

Yeah right. The test might be evaluating something, but it’s not reading ability. It might be evaluating how much a kid can put up with before they give up and start putting C for every answer. Maybe it’s testing the educational system to see just how much we will put up with before we all start rebelling, throwing iPads out the windows and getting our pitchforks and torches to march.

I asked Anders if he had gotten kicked out of his math test (he had been taking the math MCA on the same day I was giving the reading MCA). He replied, “Yeah. I didn’t get kicked out that much, but some kids got kicked out a ton.” He went on to explain that he had been told that his school had the most problems in St. Paul, but that the teachers had told him that other schools outside of St. Paul had problems too.

With the number of distractions, restarts, sudden crashes, and other problems, the test is unreliable. Unfortunately, thousands of parents are going to receive reports that are fancy-looking and all colorful and are going to say “your child is…” What it won’t say is “your child is kind.” “Your child is imaginative.” “Your child is very persistent.” (Annika would get that one). Another thing it won’t say is how well your child reads, or does math, overall. It’ll say how they did on one test, one day, that was poorly delivered by a company that won’t let anyone see their test and (probably) won’t admit that their app and equipment has not been working effectively, resulting in overly-anxious kids and invalid test results.

You know what else it won’t say? That colorful, fancy test result letter is not going to tell you how much money Pearson made from the taxpayers of our state. It won’t tell you how much money that could have gone to actual educational activities and materials instead of their corporate profits.