On Thursday and Friday I attended the NCSS Great Lakes Region Conference. It was a great experience and I learned so much; I will be sharing more of what I learned as I go through all the information and sort it out.

I attended a breakout session on the state testing and standards in Indiana. At this session, I learned that next year, 7th grade social studies will be tested on ISTEP. Now, I knew this was coming, but had been told by my principal that it was years away because of a lack of funds to create a test. My feelings about this are mixed.

On one hand I am glad that social studies will finally be tested along with the other core subjects. In the past years social studies has become, in many schools, unimportant because of the huge focus on math and reading. In my own school, the students know that they only have to pass math and language arts to advance to the next grade level. That makes it extremely hard to motivate students who are already unmotivated for other reasons. I believe social studies is important for many reasons, it its important to learn about other cultures and the world, you must know where to came from to decide where you are gong, history repeats itself, citizenship and civic engagement are important, etc. Why would schools communicate to students that this subject is not important? A bigger question…why would an entire nation underestimate the importance of this subject? Although social studies will be on ISTEP, it will not count towards a school’s AYP, meaning that even though it is tested, it still doesn’t really matter.

As I sat in the session and thought about all these things, another thought hit me. I will now be held very accountable for my performance in the classroom. If my students do poorly, it will be posted for the world to see. I suddenly was stressed and able to relate to the math and language arts teachers across the county. Will my job be in jeopardy if my students do not perform well on the test? How can I cover all the information required before the test takes place in March? (Why do we have a year-end exam in March?…our school year lasts until June.) By no means do I think I have been slacking in the classroom, but knowing that my subject would not be tested, I have been able to take time for other important topics not mentioned in the standards such as current events and black history. Now my lessons everyday will be commanded by the standards.

Then a discussion began among the teachers in the session about the lack of text books that correlate with the standards…Currently only 3 units in my book relate to my 7th grade standards. Teachers were asking if the state and textbook companies worked together to create textbooks and standardized tests. As the discussion rolled on I began to make some comparrisons between our education system and that in many countries around the world, and not the type of countries the United States aspires to immitate. For example, one of the keynote speakers spoke about growing up in Iraq. By the time she moved to the US at 14, she was “prepared” for college, judging by what courses she had taken. But the government had mandated what the students should learn, which books should be used, and students were not taught to think but to memorize and regurgitate information…hmmm. Will there come a day when the only books available to students are those approved by the government to meet the standards the government creates? Where will the US be when this generation of non-thinkers are the ones running the country?…Since when are politicians experts on education?

We are doing our students and our nation’s future a huge disservice by relying solely on standardized tests. There are more problems with this system than I could ever articulate. Knowing that changes cannot be made overnight, I suppose we can only hope that “this too shall pass.”