Discovery Education is making millions off of DCPS to provide us with less-than-useless information that has had little to discernible and lasting impact on student achievement (and that is on their own scale, which I don't accept in the first place). Where is the data for how well our students have improved in college matriculation and completion rates? As far as I know, the only report I've seen from 2006 gives us an exceptionally low rating (~10% completion in 5 years), and somehow I don't see improvement on these multiple choice tests (which is negligible at best after years of obsessing over it) improving our students' ability to go and succeed in college and future careers which SHOULD be the main goal. I have talked to a lot of teachers, professional developers, instructional coaches, and administrators across the District about this, making it my personal mission to find one teacher who legitimately believes that the DC-BAS gives them useful information that they can use to help improve student achievement and isn't a waste of their time, and have not been able to find one. I know we have to take the DC-CAS to receive our federal funding, but I am also sure we do not have to take the DC-BAS to do so (having seen that other states do not waste their time and focus on tests like this nearly as much as we do, and those states are far more successful than we are). It is time to admit that Discovery Education is not working for us and move on.
The BAS is not aligned to our curriculum or the DC-CAS, it dumbs down education, it stresses out our students and I see it bleeding into larger and larger areas of our school as more and more students are tested and retested sometimes 4 years in a row! Our schedules get disrupted for several days each testing cycle, and as the testing date for the CAS nears, more and more students begin to disappear to drill for the test based on poor information from Discovery Education. And to what end? Not only do the students miss out on the real education opportunities in their classes, the school still doesn't meet AYP. The idea that a private company (whose only interest is in making a profit) gets to write our test, write our textbooks, our workbooks, and dictate our curriculum so that we can fail to jump through the AYP hoop for the 7th+ year in a row outrages me. I get more outraged when the District's administrative answer is to spend more time and money obsessing over this data. Hiring Instructional Coaches who then get sandbagged with dumbing down our education to drill our ever-larger cohort of tested students. Clearly Discovery Education and the BAS are NOT WORKING to improve our scores and meet AYP on the state tests, and they are most certainly not improving our students' chances of success in life outside of school and in college.
The fact that nobody on the administrative level is openly questioning the very validity of this test also outrages me. We tell our kids that we expect the best from them, that we are preparing them for college and then spend elementary, middle and 2 years of high school wasting their time and stressing them out on a lower-level test that most of them do not pass, while the real teaching has to get done on the side-lines. The most successful schools in our region do not obsess over the DC-BAS at the high school level (the top performing private schools don't even touch these toxic tests). But those of us whose students fail to meet "proficiency" "standards" over and over again get the extreme joy of restructuring - which so far I can safely say has NOT worked in the District.
I spend almost all of my free time reading education policy journals, news publications, articles and blogs (it is a bit obsessive some times). There are numerous studies, anecdotal evidence, and books that go against this narrative of 'accountability' and demonstrate the obvious fact that this is just a method for large testing corporations to bilk states for millions of dollars and get us nowhere. Where is the accountability for Discovery Education? Diane Ravitch who used to be a major proponent of these tests has come full circle and is writing and fighting to end this madness and move towards a curriculum that does not try and whittle down everything we do to a performance on a poorly written, graded and unfair set of tests. Others have written about how those who score our tests not only pay barely above minimum wage, but also change the scores if they deviate from the 'predicted' outcome. Making these tests a larger and larger part of teachers' and schools' 'accountability' is dangerous and only damaging our students' chances of success upon leaving these institutions. When our principals get ousted on a regular basis for 'failure to improve test scores' that disrupts our learning environment over and over again. When teachers get fired or told they are performing poorly based on test scores, it demoralizes them and makes it more likely that they'll either leave or begin focusing their curriculum solely on test prep (if they haven't already). It is time for our administrators to show some real leadership instead of following the real status quo which is the group that thinks that we can judge our schools performance almost exclusively on how students perform on a poorly written multiple choice exam.
If we want to seriously talk curriculum and saving money, and if we truly want to light 'fires in the mind' of our students, I say get rid of Discovery Education and stop letting them steal money from the District to give us useless information that we don't need and that dumbs-down our curriculum. Spend the money we would save by giving us real time and more support in the areas that we already know we are not performing well enough in.
Instead of asking kids to pick a 'theme' from a multiple choice test, have teachers actually discuss the themes and support their arguments with evidence from actual books (not just snippets and little poorly written passages) in class. Instead of having us spend countless hours and manpower 'analyzing' data and focusing on 'bubble' students in failed attempts to just pass a test, why not make education authentic and meaningful to their lives and accept that blatant test-prep fails our students on every level that matters? When you look at the best schools in the District and nation, they do not focus on lower-level testing as much as we do. We've been doing it since I arrived in DCPS, we had been doing it before, it is not working. It is time to re-evaluate what is going on here and try to change our mindsets and question the very box we are being put into. If my 10th grade student who can write me a 5 page paper analyzing human rights abuses in Guatemala and putting it into a global historical context turns around and fails the DC-BAS, then what is really going on here?
This is our chance to take some real leadership and make some real changes to what is going on. I know it isn't going to happen, that those in power want to hold on to it and keep their money, but it would be hypocritical of me to sit back and talk 'innovation' while really we are letting the status quo continue on and on and get worse and worse.
