Quit your job before you get fired!

I thought I had found the perfect new job this year, but learned the hard way that it was not to be. My dear friend Linda, with whom I taught at my last Minneapolis school, was kind enough to help me get the new job, which involved testing kindergartners and first graders in all the city schools. The tests are academic benchmarks given three times during the school year, beginning in September. Retired Minneapolis teachers line up for this job, which is full time during the months of September, January and May.

When I started the job after Labor Day, I immediately felt the excitement of being back in the Minneapolis schools with all their diversity. I was sent to three different sites, the first school being in the Northeast Minneapolis neighborhood where I grew up. The majority of the students at Pillsbury School are now Somali and Hispanic. My second school was in the opposite corner of the city and most students there were white. My last school was Windom, where I taught for five years, back in the nineties. Windom is now described as a "dual immersion" school, and I am not quite sure what that means. I heard the adults in the building speaking mostly Spanish and I did not see any English reading instruction going on in any of the kindergarten classes. The students are Hispanic, white, and African American. Some of the Hispanic students are bilingual, and some speak only Spanish. The white and black students who make up about a third of the population are English speakers. If you were a white family who taught your kids to read in English at home, and who wanted your kids to speak fluent Spanish, this would be the school to pick.

The job of the tester is precise and scripted, so that the results can be considered valid no matter who does the testing. If the child can speak English, it takes about 15 minutes or so to go through the battery of tests,which are administered one on one. At the mostly white school in South Minneapolis, I found some of the first-grade students showing signs of test phobia. My boss came to evaluate me while I was testing two such students. I immediately hooked into the way they were feeling and modified how I was administering the test to try to relieve some of their anxiety. My boss, a former teacher, was exasperated with me, saying she did not notice the children were nervous and that I was talking to the students too much. I questioned how one could not notice that these two children were definitely showing a great deal of test anxiety, but she disagreed with me in no uncertain terms. I felt as if I were back in my student teacher days, except that then I knew that the teacher evaluating me saw things I did not. (It takes a few years to grow those eyes all teachers have in the back of their heads.)

I was then sent to the Dual Immersion school at Windom after undergoing my second one-on- one training session with the boss. She told me in clear, direct language that I was to stick strictly to the testing script: four pages of single-space instructions which tell you what to say word for word. As a teacher, I never followed the teacher guides exactly either. I nodded in humiliated silence. The truth was that once those little bright kindergarten eyes were staring up at me questioning what the hell was going on, I would be making the test into a fun little game. After testing my first few students, I felt very strongly that to get the best and most accurate test results, one needed to get to know the students a bit and make them feel relaxed, even if that meant you did not exactly follow the script.

My boss came out for the second time to see me in action. She immediately looked disapprovingly at the little teddy bear I had sitting on my testing table and the stickers I gave to students when they finished the test. She had said to all the testers that these sorts of things were not necessary. She now knew for sure that I was a subversive . She sat down with her note pad to observe me. Let's face it, it gets pretty boring doing the exact same thing over and over again, day in and day out, but that is what you sign on to do. The kids, however, never get boring: they are all unique and that made the job bearable. After watching me administer the first part of the test, my boss was once again irritated, and for good reason: I was once again off script. I would argue, though not with her, that I was getting accurate results. After a few minutes of disapproving looks, I took Mr. Buchanan and the stickers off the table and politely asked her to step in and show me how it should be done. She jumped at the chance. What happened next I found very enlightening.

The child being tested was extremely bright and he immediately found her rote style irritating. He began standing up, and refused to sit down, even though she told him several times to sit still in the chair and do what she asked him to do. He had lots of questions and he began grabbing at the sheet of paper she was taking notes on trying to see what she was writing about him. On several parts of the test, it was clear his behavior was drastically clouding the results she was getting, but she continued at a smooth clip, reading frequently from the script. She was clearly embarrassed that things had not gone very well and when the the child left she gave a huge sigh, telling me what a difficult child he was. I told her I really hadn't noticed.

I knew what was coming next, so I quickly asked her if she had read the email I had sent her the previous day. She had not. I explained in the email that though I had tried, this job was not for me. I then told her that I would, however, finish up with the kindergartners at this school unless she had someone else who could take over for me. She was delighted to hear this and said another tester could be brought in on the following day. So I packed up Mr. Buchanan and my stickers and headed out the door.

At the training meeting for all the testers, the boss told all of us that these tests have been given in all of the Minneapolis schools for the past 15 years and that they have been shown to predict accurately which children will fail their MCA tests in 9th grade. I guess it's good to know early on who will be the academic failures. Schools are all about testing nowadays: teaching children, especially those who most need our help, seems secondary.