Janelle Renee Mault

Janelle Mault's Response:

My goal as a 5th grade teacher is to foster a love of learning in my students. I do this by providing them with meaningful, challenging assignments, preparing them for middle school, and recognizing the "whole" child--giving them opportunities for them to practice kinesthetic, visual, auditory, and physical skills. I follow the California Education Standards in all disciplines for my grade level, as well as the local district ones. In doing this I maintain a successful, positive classroom. My students and I work hard everyday, but never has my goal been to teach to a test.

I work at a high performing school. Many of my students enter my classroom with scores already at the proficient and advanced level. It is not uncommon for some to have perfect scores of 600. Should these students maintain these scores, I would be considered an average teacher because the student did not improve. If a student misses even one or two questions (dropping to 580 or 560), I would be considered to be doing a poor job. This seems unreasonable. Does it matter that the curriculum becomes progressively more difficult as the student proceeds through the grade levels? Does it matter if a grade level departmentalizes and groups students for various subjects among three or four other teachers? Does it matter that a student's previous scores could have been the result of overzealous preparation on a former teacher or tutor's part? Does any of this contribute to the overall well being of the child?

I welcome the notion of meaningful evaluation for teachers and other educators. Reform certainly is in order, but this notion is flawed--it gives too much weight to test scores with little regard to other factors. Analyzing this data grade level by grade level and school wide is beneficial, especially in terms of maintaining grading uniformity within a grade level or cohesiveness from one to another. It would promote collaboration among colleagues. But rating individual teachers in this manner seems petty and of little consequence. Teachers work hard to improve instruction with very little funding for professional development provided by our district. This article serves only to discourage teachers who are already facing larger class sizes and diminishing professional growth opportunities. It will, however encourage the frustrated among us to begin teaching to the test, pit teachers against one another, and cause parents to judge teachers based only on their test scores. Is this what we want for our students?