Obama’s education administration acknowledged their part in making our public schools testing factories.  Only 2% of a year should be high stakes testing, apparently.  Okay, so in my state our students take the MCAS or the PARCC.  My students still take the MCAS.  Right now, in tenth grade it takes up five days between English and Math.  Seven days if you include the two days of Science the year previous.  Five days is one week, or approximate 2.78% of an 180 day school year.  However, I only see my students half the year.  So really, it’s 5.56% of my academic time.

That doesn’t include two district determined measures – that the state insists on currently. (2 days)

The six unit exams that I’m supposed to give – that the district insists on currently (6 days)

So in total, for my tenth graders, that’s 5 + 8 = 13 days of testing that I didn’t create to show mastery of the materials.

Today, some of my students began a 5 day (45 minutes/day) abridged mock-MCAS.  That’s another 5 days of educational time that I’ve lost.

Remind me again what the point of teaching is?