"We have turned into factories producing the same product"

The text "Rhode Island Teachers Respond to PARCC : A White Paper" from Johnson and Richer is a very easy to read and great analyzes on how teacher feel and react towards standardized test PARCC. With a very cleaver title "A White Paper", this article mentions how student race and socioeconomic status influences the student's success in the standardize test. 

From all the question and topics that the authors pointed out,  two of them really got my attention. The perspective teacher have on students understanding of test's questions and the excessive time spending

"90% disagreed or strongly disagreed with the statement that those students understood most of the questions on the test."

This part of the text literally surprised me. Why people even give a test where teachers, who spend year around interacting and teaching the students, do not even believe they understand the questions. What is the point? This statement made me think about Finn chapters on "Literacy with an attitude". Because this is counting 298 teachers from urban to rural district and from elementary to high school level, and 90% of them disagree or strongly disagree that students understands most of the questions. 

That brings another analyzes and I loved the fact Johnson and Richer mentioned this:

"Again, of the 167 teachers that work with ELLs, 95% of them disagreed or strongly disagreed with the statement that their ELLs understood most of the questions on the test."

After reading "Teaching Multilingual Children" by Virginia Collier, it opened this part of education that I did not existed. Recognizing that there are 84 additional languages being spoken in RI public schools, and the fact the standardized test is only available in English or Spanish can be very unethical and probably discriminatory towards the local population. After reading that teachers recognize this fact, makes me think about when people get older. The amount of kids who are born in a foreign family and lose their ability to be fluent in their families language which in the future friends will ask "why don't you speak Spanish (or other language)"- only because everything on their lives was set for them only speak English. The most amazing part of this is that later in life people spend so much money learning a second or third language. Putting in your resume that you are fluent in another language gives you so much respect towards the ability to communicate with more people. However, when these people are young, all these facts are not appreciated and recognized.

"On average, 90% of teachers disagreed or strongly disagreed with the statement that the time spent was worthwhile. "

This part of the text also surprised me. When you stop teaching what you think it will be beneficial for the students in the future and start teaching just to pass a test, its hard for me to believe how this test is even mandatory. I did not how soon these tests are performed. In Brazil we do not take standardized test until we are in high school. I was one of these students that always got As but just couldn't take standardized tests. Maybe my schools was not good enough or maybe I just could not do multiple choice questions. Since very young I overthink everything, and I just couldn't finish in time. Imagine if since middle school I started taking these tests, agreeing with the text, I would definitely be one of these kids crying while taking it. I absolutely would doubt my ability to learn or how intelligent I was. 

Teachers believing that tests like PARCC move them from teaching now towards teaching only for the technical and content aspect of the test is crazy. I can believe the level of frustrations educators go through especially when test time arrives. 

It makes not only making the teachers guessing their ability to teach but also guessing their philosophy to teach. If there is a personal teacher who spend time making the class more realistic to the kids experience, if results of the tests comes negative, the next time teacher will double guess if personal interaction is important for teaching. 

It is hard for me to see all this as a teacher, but I experience something very similar as a coach. Instead of standardized tests we have tournaments and games that winning and scores are equal scores in these tests. It doesn't matter the idea of developing players to look the best they can be at age 17-18, to make them coachable, creative, and smart to play anywhere. Instead, coaches around America are so caught out in the status, the immediate result, and the pressure to be in certain imaginary level, that they do not produce complete players anymore. They would train, teach and instruct on how to win games no matter what. 

Even reading these type of texts I still wonder how to give a more personable and complete education but still being able to apply a test or anything that will give teachers around the country a tool to evaluate their teaching skills. I had taken SAT and GRE which blows my mind that those are tests made for students to be approved in universities. The fact that GRE only has English and Math it gets in another level of ridiculous. I do not remember much about SAT but I feel it is similar to GRE. Wondering what happened to students who are not comfortable with those subjects? Is there other different test in the american education system?