Airborne

 A couple things happened this week that knocked me off my feed. Normally I am a very good soldier. Teacher, actually, but with a sense of duty that borders on the compulsive. Okay. Not so much "borders" as "defined by." I am very well suited for this job in public education which runs on a schedule. A great many of them, in fact. A bell schedule. A weekly schedule. A monthly schedule. 

A testing schedule.

The past year has presented all kinds of challenges to those schedules, perhaps none as much as the way we coordinate assessments. As we meander through the early part of the twenty-first century, the onus of this portion of education has fallen squarely on the shoulders of technology. Last spring, as we struggled to connect with students and families in this new-fangled enterprise called "distance learning," the focus on assessment drifted away. Creating this virtual schoolhouse was a big enough test for all of us. A third grade colleague suggested that we were "trying to fly an airplane while we were still building it." 

And to our satisfied surprise, it flew. Not high. Not strong. But it flew. Our kids were attending class online and learning. Our teachers struggled and raced around trying to find ways to keep their students in attendance, and on a path of learning. There was great relief when the district announced that it was not imposing the ritual standardized tests that usually close out a school year. This was survival mode. We were just trying to keep our metaphorical plane off the ground. It was our hope to avoid any sudden deceleration trauma.

Well, now it's another year. The district and state have higher expectations of us all this year, especially for those kids who have been sitting in front of screens for months on end. Some of them have made heroic strides. Showing up on time ready to learn is still a challenge for many. And so will the proposed return to "normal." Even as we attempt to imagine herding kids from the playground to the classroom to the bathroom and to lunch and back again while observing strict COVID protocols, there is a move afoot to reinstall that battery of standardized tests. 

For a moment here, I will say that as a veteran teacher, I have struggled with the idea of high-stakes testing of eight to twelve year olds for decades. No one likes to be tested. Some are better at it than others. It was the saving grace of my son's high school experience, for example. The high school experience that was not marked by the interruption of a global pandemic. 

What exactly do we hope to discover with this barrage of assessments? That our kids have fallen behind due to the extraordinary challenges into which they were dropped over the past year? Maybe that the gap that was supposed to be closed by providing all those Chromebooks and hotspots have not, in a year, been closed? Or perhaps we will discover that on this sliding scale the kids who have had computers in their homes all this time are still the ones who have an advantage when it comes to measuring their learning? And those that have been hardest hit by the disease and the economic and social devastation are going to show up as "below grade level?" 

I could fill in the charts and graphs ahead of time and save everyone the implementation ulcer. Meanwhile, I know how hard our kids have worked to stay in school, completing assignments and participating in seemingly endless Zoom meetings. I know what they have achieved.

They are flying.