Benchmarks: standards by which something can be measured or judged

At my school, I have more of a home base than a home. I teach three classes on one day in the same class; well, four - if you count the fact that one of my classes actually has two different groups of students in it - but that’s another story. The other four periods I teach see me in different rooms around campus.

At the end of the day, I always return to my base to take care of whatever I can. There, I am surrounded by English and Reading teachers, some of whom were particularly frustrated today. It seems that it just came down the pike that they are to administer benchmark tests this Thursday and Friday. Benchmark tests, in theory, provide data on where the kids are; I say "in theory", because quite often, kids don’t take these tests seriously. It’s gotten to be so bad that teachers have begun bribing kids with extra credit in order to try to get them to try.

The benchmark tests themselves aren’t the problem; even though they duplicate a lot of the information that teachers can already get from looking at a student's F-CAT scores, they can be useful. Now, they are also being given earlier this year than ever before, and the teachers who have to administer them would have liked more than a 24-hour notice, but, like I said - if the kids try, they can turn out to be a valuable tool.

The problem is that the benchmark tests are coming on the heels of the FAIR test, which came on the heels of the F-CAT Writes test (and that’s just in English class - imagine all the tests the students have been taking in their other classes, too). If you have a high school student at a turn-around school, ask them. I'll bet you will be surprised. Think about this: by the end of the week, English classes will have met 7 times, and one teacher estimated 4 of those days were spent giving some kind of pre- or data-generating test.

In our zeal to collect data, we’re overlooking something very important, and that’s actual teaching. "I would really like to teach, one day..." another teacher said. Yes, folks - it really is all about the data and the F-CAT.

Another problem: I don’t think it’s a real stretch to think that if school becomes nothing but a drag for the kids, then the kids will tune out. They won’t try, they won’t excel and they definitely won’t succeed. When I was in school, I could pretty much count on the first day to be a bit of a free one; after that, we were off and running. Friends, we’re halfway through the third week, and with the massive schedule changes called for by the state along with all the pre-testing going on, learning has been, at best, limited in many classes. If a benchmark is a standard by which something can be measured or judged, surely the way we are doing things can’t be judged favorably.

"I would really like to teach, one day..." another teacher said. I imagine the kids, the ones who haven’t tuned out already, would really like to learn one day as well.