Dear Colleagues,
How much time is lost from instruction due to mandated district or state testing? How much planning time is lost to grading, analyzing, creating, or clerical work related to these tests? In the past 2 to 3 years the demands being placed on us as teachers have changed drastically. Tests that do not inform our instruction have taken priority over what we do every day.
Some teachers sent me a log of this lost time for quarter 1. It is hard to make generalizations from a small sample, but the average lost instructional and planning time was around 28 hours per teacher. Loss of instructional time on average was as follows:
-6.5 hours for training that took the teachers away from class
-6.5 hours for district or state mandated testing where the data is not useful for instruction
-almost 3 hours in testing individual students while the rest of the class was still in session (showing why averages are not always helpful – elementary alone would have a much larger number here)
-almost 3 hours of other lost instructional time.
In this small sample teachers reported a loss of around 10 hours of planning time in this 9 week period.
The first thing we can glean from this data is that we need more of it and it should be disaggregated by grade and subject. In this small sample the total hours lost by one teacher was around 7 hours while there were others that had lost over 50. When we talk about this excessive testing culture that has been created it would be helpful to be able to speak in more concrete terms. If you are able, please consider tracking your lost time on the attached sheet. If you are already doing this please continue. I will collect it again in late January or February. If you collected for the first nine weeks, but did not send it, please send it.
Change will eventually reach us as the world becomes saner, but this may require that we let our advocates know what is happening. Last Friday Susie Kaeser, our longtime friend of public education, and I met with incoming state representative for our area Janine Boyd. She was very interested in getting hold of this data on lost time. Janine seemed to have a pretty good understanding of what is happening in education, but believes that to convince some people we need stories and for others we need data. I hope you agree and will help us compile the data as well as tell your story.
Fraternally,
Ari Klein
CHTU President
Download the spreadsheet (click here)