way #3: They've Got Street Smarts

Every year come February, panic sets in and school-wide initiatives are put in place to prepare students for the dreaded ISAT. Standardized testing is the much hated but inevitable part of a teacher's job. This year we spent days putting together a unit to teach testing skills to our students and help them to pass this test.

Some facts: in Illinois, the standardized test is the ISAT, or Illinois Standardized Achievement Test. It is required for all students in third through eighth grade to take these tests. The test contains reading, math, and science. Until last year, it also included writing, but due to budget cuts, writing is no longer assessed in Illinois.

Schools are evaluated based on these tests. Schools have to meet AYP, or adequate yearly progress, each year. The goal was for all students to be at grade level by the year 2014. Therefore, if a school missed AYP one year, the next year the bar is set even higher and the school is responsible for both years' growth. This is all thanks to No Child Left Behind. Obviously, all students will not be on grade level by the year 2014 and the result is the need for changes in the legislation.

However, despite the high bar of all students, the scary part is the low bar of what "meets standards" at a grade level. This year, if a student ranks in the 35th percentile for reading or the 27th for math, they will meet standards for grade level. I imagine that I am not the only person who is horrified both because of the low standards for meeting grade level as well as the low numbers of students who meet grade level given the standards.

However, I digress. ISAT prep time can be a nightmare. It is hard to prepare students to take the test while simultaneously trying to expose them to the concepts that will be on the test that are very often completely separate from their life experiences. Case in point, when teaching sixth graders, half of whom were English Language Learners, the reading passage they had to respond to was about loons. Not one student in the class had ever heard of a loon, as loons are not city-dwellers, and the students are hardly spending summers at their parents' lake cabins. (Coming from Minnesota, it made me warm and nostalgic.)

A colleague recently re-framed my thinking when she referred to teaching testing skills as a social justice issue, allowing low income, urban students to access the test material in the same way as their more affluent, less disadvantaged peers.

The good news is that the students come to the table with a lot, even if it isn't always the information you wish they would know. Students are often very knowledgeable about how to live, how to survive, and other street smarts. Students regularly get their "lick" back and punch someone who punched them, regardless of school rules. Students will cough or spit on food so no one touches it. All in all, it can be a little Lord of the Flies.

Then again, sometimes it can be hilarious, like the gem of this response. The story was Rumplestiltskin, and the job was for students to respond to whether or not they thought the woman was right in promising Rumplestiltskin her first born child if she didn't plan on actually giving her child to him. While many of the responses left a smile, this one made me laugh out loud. And let's be honest, she's got a point... even if she doesn't meet standards on ISAT.