It was the fourth week of school—day 21, to be exact—when the kindergarten students of a veteran teacher I’ll call Donna Reed finally completed round one of their standardized tests.
Perversely, the testing craze hits hardest on the kindergarten kids. There are four standardized tests two or three times a year. Apparently, it’s part of the larger education-reform goal of improving schools by making children hate them at an early age.
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“This is what we did for the first 21 days of the year,” says Donna, who, like other teachers I spoke with, asked that I not use her real name because she’s afraid of retaliation from administrators. “We also have to take these tests in the middle and end of the year.”
The purpose of PERA, passed in 2010, is to hold teachers accountable for how much their students learn—or at least how well they score on standardized tests, which is not always the same thing. But the idea is that high-scoring “good” teachers will keep their jobs and low-scoring “bad” teachers will be fired, presumably to be replaced by the thousands of “good” teachers eager to come to Illinois to give more tests.
Nevertheless, in order to comply with PERA the students of Chicago are now stuck with something called the Recognizing Educators Advancing Chicago—REACH, for short. According to the CPS website, it’s “our new, comprehensive teacher evaluation system.”
Some of the questions are tricky, like the one that asks how the bug feels in the middle of the day. The test guide says the correct answer is “anxious.” And that’s what the kindergarteners are supposed to say.
When asked why, the girl responded: “I thought the bug might get hot and want to go swimming. I thought he might get hungry.”
