Chapter 67: A Rant

New Mexico’s Public Education Department is trying to force schools to increase our number of instructional days by about 20% next year unless we manage to improve our ELA test scores by 8% to 15% overnight.

This would be a reasonable demand if not for the fact that A.) PED told some schools last year that a 5% improvement was an unrealistic goal, B.) the schools operating on four-day schedules generally perform better than the schools operating on the five-day schedule favored by PED, and C.) this policy basically forces teachers to commit to another year in our districts before we how many days we’ll be required to work, which I am pretty sure isn’t actually legal.

Politicians and bureaucrats would rather chew off their own legs than involve an actual teacher in any decision that affects schools, but if they asked me, I could tell them why ELA scores are low:

1. The questions are poorly written. I have a master’s degree in English and can’t figure out the answers to some of the released items from the state ELA tests, because they’re so convoluted and ambiguous that they sound like what you’d get if James Joyce wrote a parody of the SAT while high on psychedelic mushrooms.
2. The tests are poorly timed. Every year, PED tells us to give our end-of-year tests six weeks before the end of school, and every year, PED is disappointed that the kids haven’t mastered all the material.
3. COVID. Specifically, the cognitive and emotional impact of trauma, economic marginalization, and long COVID, all of which affect test scores far more than the loss of instructional quality and quantity caused by the shutdowns in 2020 and 2021.

If PED were serious about improving test scores, they would:

• Hire a team of journalists to edit the tests for clarity. This would boost scores instantly, because kids would understand what the questions were asking.
• Streamline standardized testing. We lose nearly four weeks of instructional time to standardized tests every year: a week each for BOY and MOY benchmarks, and up to two weeks for the EOY. Worse, the aforementioned timing issue leaves a lot of kids (and probably a few teachers) with the impression that whatever happens after mid-April isn’t really important — so we basically lose another six weeks to post-assessment apathy. This is both inexcusable and entirely avoidable.
• Reduce middle-of-the-year disruptions. Every teacher knows that students’ behavior and ability to focus deteriorate as their excitement about an upcoming break increases. They’re at school, but they’re not learning much. We could reclaim some of that lost time by dumping Monday holidays, inservice days, etc. and tacking those days onto our existing longer breaks. (And if we want to honor historical figures, we can study them on their special days.)

By my calculations, implementing my ideas would reclaim between 32 and 37 days’ worth of lost or compromised instructional time — significantly more than the 25 days PED is trying to add to the calendar.

Most problems have relatively simple solutions, but it’s hard to see them when you refuse to listen to actual stakeholders.

Emily