State Testing: An Education Super Fail

It's 4:16 AM.  Instead of sleeping, I'm here drinking coffee and blogging.  Why?  Because today was absolute utter hell in my home, and my daughter just got to sleep about two hours ago.  I'm still running on pure adrenaline and righteous anger.

Let me back up a bit.

Last year, I began homeschooling my children.  The reasons are many, but it mostly comes down to my belief that education is not one size fits all.  My children are both diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders, and my son additionally has a diagnosis of expressive/receptive speech disorder.  Both of them also have sensory processing disorder.  Mostly, in everyday life, this means little.  They have coping skills, they are really great kids, and they deal with the things that pose challenges like a couple of champs.  We realize, though, that it is having the freedom to be who they are in a supportive and loving environment which allows them to really shine like they do.  A public bricks and mortar school was not that environment.

K12 seemed to be a perfect fit for us.  I loved the curriculum.  Yes, I am using past tense words here, because I am beginning to realize that K12 is susceptible to the very same pitfalls, in terms of actual education, that any other public school suffers.  Perhaps it hit me extra hard this year because the language arts curriculum reading materials were severely slashed in terms of quantity, while at the same time we received a pile of test preparation materials which seemed more than a bit over the top.  The only reason I can think of to remove so much of the reading materials is that kids struggled with the amount of it, and spending additional time working through it would mean less time spent on test preparedness.  It also affects the kids' grades, and thus the school's reputation.  Now, I'm not blaming K12 for this at all; the state regulates their schools just like any other public school.  If anything, I think K12 is fucntioning exceptionally well given the circumstances and all of the red tape.

I wondered to myself, what would a curriculum look like if the schools were not being judged and the children were not being dragged through this nightmare known as state testing?

Today, I sat beside my daughter as she worked through a math Scantron assessment, her eyes welling up with tears, shaking with frustration, rocking back and forth.  She is good at math, but she hates it.  Her mind is definitely geared more toward right-brain activities than the logic-based, left-brain activities involved in math.  She hates math that is typical for her grade level, but this is the type of problem she had to work on:

Forgive me, since it's been quite some time since this was first introduced to me, but isn't this something you'd expect 7th-9th grade students to be working on?  I know a lot of adults who would struggle with this.  I almost wonder if they gave her the wrong assessment or something, because the problems were almost all at this level of difficulty and this was complete and utter torture for a 3rd grade child who detests math to begin with.

I have no idea what is in store on the actual state testing, but if it's anything like this, I have no idea at all what the goal is.  This is ridiculous.

I hope I feel better about things at some point, but right now I've had a rough day and I'm not feeling very warm or fuzzy about any of this.  Kids should not have to go through what my daughter went through today.  And you know, I'm quite sure that these state tests and district scores won't mean a damn thing in 100 years, but the contributions these children make to the world because of actual knowledge and experiential learning (read: not from tests for pretests for pretests to prepare for the pretest for the actual test) will.  Einstein, Tesla, George Washington, Hippocrates, and Galileo did just fine without all of this state testing crap.

Alrighty, then.