What the second-grade chair went through
They’d also retaliated against her, she said, by ordering her into the grade-changing project — making her print out tests where the children had gotten questions correct. Thus, she had been present during much of the “re-manufacturing” of the children’s grades.
First, it had taken the administration’s crew almost a month, she said, to search through Infinite Campus to find all the previous test problems that the students had gotten right. The idea was to make tests — which they’d call “tests on Standards” — that only asked questions the students had already gotten right, and for which they knew the answers.
Of course, these weren’t real Common Core standards tests.
A “Test on Standards,” under Common Core, is a key test intended to allow students to demonstrate that they’ve mastered, at their level, learning essential for success in college, career, and “life in today’s global economy.”
Tests on Standards can be given with three, four or more problems on each test, but not with only a single question such as one test Treem’s administrators came up with. (Evidently they did that because, on one “standards” test, the whole class could only answer a single question correctly — despite taking it over and over again for an entire month.)
According to my second-grade chair, the administrators would examine different math or reading tests and, when a student would have gotten a question right, they would put that question on a separate, fake, test overlay. And if that same student got three questions right on maybe seven or eight of the frequently repeated tests, those questions too would be added to his alleged “Standards Test” score — and then go into the grade book.
But even when that search was completed, she said, the kids’ tested performance was still far too low.
So the Treem bosses started drilling the kids, giving those same problems over and over again till kids could get three, four, or even eight right. That drilling is another reason these were not real standards tests. Real standards tests are given but a single time. The one exception for giving a test again is for a student who was absent on the test day and is taking a make-up test.
But even then — with all the repetition — all the students still couldn’t make better than D’s.
Finally, Treem admin gave up. It was then, it appears, that they erased all the Infinite Campus grades in all subjects, going back to the start of the school year. That appears to have been preparation for simply inserting completely new grades that would falsely portray a happy, progressive mastery leading up to the A’s and B’s they’d just sent out to parents.
The real problem at Treem, of course, was that few of the second graders had actually learned much of anything.