Initial blog of the GVWP…I feel like my students: “I don’t know what to write. How will I be judged? And boy, I hope I don’t make any major mistakes!” 

I am happy to know that I am among friends when I hear the recurrent statements about too much testing, prescriptive lesson planning and the big bad publishing companies who seem to be the ones truly running the show in education. In many ways this past school year proved very disempowering to teachers and school districts, in general, as any local power was ripped away and little to no guidance was provided ~ except that everyone will be reduced to a number and you better provide “evidence” according to whichever rubric your school district bought into.

Anxiety swept across local districts as well as our state this year and I have yet to receive my end of year “score” because my state exams have not yet been normed, (as they are done annually by the NYSED). So as all of my colleagues were able to bring the school year to an official close 2 weeks ago and received their “grades” as effective or highly effective, I have to wait until the end of July or August – or whenever the New York State Education Department has decided it has tinkered with its psychometrics enough to release the NYSESLAT (New York State English as a Second Language Achievement Test) scores. Each of my immigrant or refugee students will be scored on reading, writing, listening and speaking proficiencies, but his/her American-born peers  were  only  tested on reading and writing. I think if we are to truly assess students on language, it stands to reason that all parts of language should be taught and assessed. If the Common Core Learning Standards, higher education and the private sector require higher level 21^st century skills, then why are speaking and listening disregarded  when they are the initial modalities of language that are acquired? If people do not possess these first basic communication skills, we all know what the results are- as history books are chock full of the end results.

There are too many paradoxes in education right now… we are tested to prove that we have learned, yet there are innumerable things that we learn that can never be tested. How can the desire to read or to know more be measured? How can a number be assigned to a painting, symphony or piece of architecture? We can know and admire greatness, but can we reduce this to a number? Should anyone ever be reduced to a number? How can one think and create outside of the box if a successful score is  based only on getting the right answer in the same way that everyone else arrived at it?

I am reminded time and again of this when I see my students who represent every part of the globe complete math problems. There are so many ways to arrive at the “right” answer, but because English Language Learners did not learn their initial math skills in the United States, they are continuously penalized for arriving at their answers in a different way. I also think of past student writers over the years and how the art of circumlocution and poetic responses to very matter of fact English Language Arts questions were not “acceptable” or devalued and disregarded because the student didn’t think or write in the American linear fashion of a five paragraph response. I think of those students often and although they learned to master the equations of math and writing by American standards, what was lost in the process? They fit into our nicely shaped boxes of “Do it this way” at a cost of doing it differently -their way , and perhaps even more thoroughly or through an innovation that would help everyone ~ and that is a tragedy for all of us.

Harvests and factory output are reduced in terms of data, but I am not so sure that human beings should do this to children, educators, or their own species in general.

J. Wheeler-Ballestas

7/8/13