We need to do less assessing and have more time doing...

because really, as a new teacher, I feel like there are so many more important things to learn from each exhausting, frantic school day than "oh good, my students can do some basic addition problems in less than 3 minutes". I'm a first-year teacher at a school that prides itself on being child-centered, community-oriented, and anti-standardized testing, among many other things. I was lucky enough to student teach at the sister school of the school I'm at now and experience the growing pains (or the blunt force-from-the-outside pains) of a school trying to maintain its vision and not succumbing the pressures of churning out high test scores while also trying not to get "in trouble". The school I'm at now is in essentially the same position, except that now, according to the NYC Dept. of Ed., we are a "failing" school. Yes, they now grade each school. And yes, the grade is based mainly on test scores (from 2 years ago...). Wonderful. Now we have parents who are rightfully concerned, children wondering why they go to a failing school, and teachers scrambling to calm everyone, including ourselves, down. This, on top of the fact that our school is part of a Design Your Own Assessment network that is now under scrutiny by the DOE and on top of the fact that 4 of us teachers are new, makes for a somewhat stressful situation.

Here's, to me, the rub: now that our school is in this position, everything we do is to prove to the DOE that we are, in fact, not actually a failing school. Sure, we have some things to work on but if you work with the children here I seriously doubt anyone would agree with that "grade". Our assessment team, which works to mediate the required interim assessments, is now overhauling their initial plans and giving us the "We just have to give them what they want" speech. And, what the DOE wants is numbers, reading levels, stats, stats, stats. And because we're implementing an assessment plan that was not created by the DOE, the DOE is more critical of the types of assessments we use. Now, that means we're actually doing more assessments than we were when we were using the DOE assessments. All of this to essentially get off of the radar so that the DOE will resume leaving us alone. We all know the assessments are not really for us (there's no realistic way to process all this data and even if we do, what would this info really help us understand?) and so, really, all of this crazed mania is not helping us to know our children better, it's all to get the DOE off our backs.

Now, I know our school is really not in a horrible position. There are so many schools that are being set up to fail. The attrition rate of teachers in inner city schools is understandable when you consider the daily challenges of working with children plus the pressures of "improving performance" plus every other thing that makes teaching tough work. In comparison, our school is in a much better place. But, as much as all of us want to fight all of this undue pressure, we know we have to succumb. And, after having many an after-school meeting, we came to the conclusion that in order to succumb, we're going to have to reconfigure, re-prioritize, and shift our focus. And even though our principal is saying it's only a temporary change, we're all left to wonder if that kind of a change can really be temporary.

Again, I'm an overwhelmed, exhausted, torn, wide-eyed first-year teacher. And this is an incredibly long blog about stuff most of you have heard before. My question, though, is: within the microcosm that is my classroom, how do I get around all these assessments, how do I negotiate the reality that I have to constantly "assess" and planning around what children need and want to learn, how do I create a warm, welcoming environment, esp. with a particularly tough bunch of children?? I guess that's always the question... I know it can be done... I think... right???