Thousands of Colorado students are tested – and their schools then held accountable – on knowledge they glean in the first six to seven months of the school year.
The Denver school board, however, would rather give students a whole year to learn before they take the annual Colorado Student Assessment Program tests, commonly known as CSAPs.
“Why would you give a test in the middle of the year?” DPS board member Jeannie Kaplan recently asked.
The school board will ask state lawmakers and Gov.-elect Bill Ritter to push back the annual CSAP testing date from early spring to sometime in May.
If CSAPs are going to continue to carry as much weight as they do know, it only makes sense to give students and teachers as much running room as possible.
Kids in third through 10th grade now take state assessment tests, which gauge proficiency in reading, writing, math and science, in the spring. Third- graders are tested for reading as early as February.
The CSAP test scores are used to not only gauge how much a student is learning, but also to determine a school’s overall “ranking” for School Accountability Reports.
State Sen. Sue Windels, D-Arvada, chair of the Senate Education Committee, isn’t too keen on the idea of pushing back the CSAP date.
“There’s a mentality that we have to use every second of time to work on CSAPs,” Windels said, adding that some teachers spend the last few weeks of classroom time on “enriching” lesson plans. “I have a fear if we move the test to the end of year we’ll be in a drill-and-kill mode for the whole life of the student.”
Drill and kill, or “teaching to the test,” shouldn’t be the mode for any period of the year, regardless of when the tests are administered.
“You either have to move the tests, or you have to say the standards have to end with what students need to know by March and not test them on something they haven’t been exposed to,” Windels said.
If lawmakers decide to move the testing dates back, it also could give local districts more flexibility in scheduling and deciding when the school year begins. Now, DPS feels compelled to start the school year early, when classrooms are still boiling hot from the summer heat, because of those early CSAPs.
It’s certainly a debate worthy of the legislature’s time, and we would urge leaders from more districts to weigh in with their thoughts.
