Two 1sts for Kindergarteners: Standardized Test & the 1st Day of School

Tuesday, August 11, 2015

Rebecca Randall, GoLocalPDX Contributor

Kindergarten is not what it used to be. For the last two years, Oregon’s kindergarteners have been taking a kindergarten assessment during the first week—sometimes the first day—of school. Education advocates from Oregon Save Our Schools (SOS) say kindergarteners shouldn’t even be taking the test.

“The test itself is not reliable and valid, and it’s an inappropriate test to be giving to kindergarteners,” said Dana Brenner-Kelley, a member of Oregon SOS and a North Portland resident.

Brenner-Kelley is organizing three events this month—Aug. 20, 21 and 23—to make parents aware of the tests and tell them how to opt out. All of the events will have kindergarten teachers available to add perspective. Two of the events will also screen “Education, Inc.”

Two Tests

The Oregon Kindergarten Assessment is different from the Smarter Balanced tests that have received heated debate and perhaps more attention.

For starters, the kindergarten assessment is given at the beginning of the year instead of at the end of the year. And it’s not tied to teacher evaluation, which the Smarter Balanced tests are. “They’re really quite different, which is why it hasn’t been one of the policies we’ve worked on,” said Stand for Children spokesman Kelsey Cardwell.

Stand for Children has been supportive of the Common Core standards and the correlating Smarter Balanced tests.

Ultimately, to Brenner-Kelley, the problem for both tests stems from an increased corporatization of education. The Oregon Education Investment Board, started by former Gov. John Kitzhaber, was “made up of business leaders with corporate interests in guiding education.” Though the board was disbanded by Gov. Kate Brown, the legacy lives on.

“It’s high stakes from a systemic point of view,” Brenner-Kelley said. For her the question is: “How is this data going to be used in a way that affects this child in inappropriate ways?”

While the test results are showing lower scores for low-income students, which could drive more funding toward low-income schools, Brenner-Kelley said that “drilling” academics into children at a younger age will “create much worse performance for these kids.”

The testing is “high stakes” in the sense that it places pressure on programs that are publicly funded to implement more rigorous academics at an earlier age in order to maintain funding.

A former Washington state Head Start Association director, she said what kids need at an early age is play-based learning. “They’re trying to push the Common Core and academics further down into early education,” she said.

Differences in Communities

While higher income schools have better performing students, the students in Lake Oswego have access to a lot more early education programming, said Brenner-Kelley. “If what (students) are getting is testing instead of play based learning, they’re not going to be getting the same thing as kids in Lake Oswego.”

She worries that the academic approach creates disinterest in school from a young age.

Additionally, the data from the tests is being wrongly interpreted, she said. For example, last year, the Oregonian ran an article on how kindergarteners were not prepared for school using the data from the Oregon Kindergarten Assessment.

This kind of information “manipulates communities,” said Brenner-Kelley. “The state is using inappropriate data points to drill academics… That is going to create much worse performance for these kids.”

The test does not measure kindergarten readiness, said Brenner-Kelley. It is actually a composite of other standardized tests meant to be given at the end of the year to measure whether a child understood a teacher’s instruction.

“It seems pretty ridiculous that the first thing that kids are experiencing is a test that has not been designed to measure what they would know entering kindergarten,” said Brenner-Kelley.

Additionally, the test has not been validated by studies to show whether it is actually measuring what it intends to measure, she said. But since it’s meant to measure teacher performance, it’s the wrong test given at the wrong time.

Brenner-Kelley also pointed out that kids have varying levels of anxiety and processing speed in kindergarten. “Some are conscious they’re being given an assessment, some are not,” she said.

Learning Rates

Using this test in kindergarten is particularly problematic because younger children have more variable learning rates. “It’s very normal for children to develop at different speeds,” she said. “Whether a child reads at four, six or seven doesn’t have any impact on outcomes later on.”

And the test may not actually capture what each student knows. The test is scripted, and teachers can’t add anything to what they’re saying. It is also timed. “Many kids will do very poorly that actually know the things that they’re being tested on,” said Brenner-Kelley.

There’s also a portion on behavior that is completed by the teacher using their observations, but, of course, that means it’s pretty subjective.

“The test was not designed to draw conclusions the way the state is trying to,” said Brenner-Kelley.

In that way it is “high stakes” just like the Smarter Balanced tests.