Imma gonna busta yo NECAPs

My students have been testing for a solid week. The New England Common Assessment Program. Actually it's only 1.5 hours each day, and most of the kids are done in 45 minutes. But with all of the hype, you would think they were taking their qualifying exams for their PhDs. We have spent a solid month telling them how important the tests are, preparing them for all the questions they will see, begging and bribing them to "do their best." This week we gave them bottles of water, granola bars, and sticks of gum in addition to the pencils, scrap paper, rulers, protractors, calculators, reference sheets, testing booklets and bubble sheets. Not to mention extra recess, walks around the block and the promise of a "party" when it's all over. The adults in the building hobble through the hallways shooting one another wearied looks and sarcastic "Having fun yet?" comments over their shoulders. We are exhausted. We are ready to have this whole circus over with and get back to teaching. The kids, quite frankly, seem perfectly fine.

Are they "doing their best"? Will we be able to drag ourselves out of the SINI (school in need of improvement) category this year? Every time I collect a test I flip through the pages to make sure no one has skipped a problem, and I can't help but glance at some of their responses and cringe. So often I see a careless error, a place where they misinterpreted a poorly phrased question, an area that we have not yet covered this year but will next week. I see where perfectly bright, capable students just barely (or, okay, blatantly) missed the mark. I know how they will score, and it's not pretty. But I bite my lip, I dig my fingernails into my palms and keep myself from saying, "Remember what we did last week?" Or " By "expression" they mean a "open number sentence" or anything at all. And we'll all have to wait until June to see how they did in a series of charts and one little word: "proficient."