CSAP and Educational Accountability

According to Meaghan O’Brien, a fourth grade teacher at Cheltenham Elementary in Denver, students who are taught to the test will be lacking other skills they need to succeed in an educational setting, one being to think on their own. “As an educator it is my responsibility to give these children the tools they need to succeed, but the CSAP doesn’t give them all,” O’Brien says (Ryckman E5). The CSAP’s pressure on teachers forces them to spoon-feed students the critical information that will help them perform well on the exam, and this is not the way students should be learning. Granted, students will need to be chauffeured through some subject material, but for the most part, teachers need to be selling the fact that most learning that occurs in students should be for learning’s sake. That is, students should actively pursue subject matter because they are interested in it, or because they know it will give them the skills they need to be successful outside of the classroom.

Teaching to the test is hurting students who are subjected to it, but the blame should not be placed on the teacher. Again, pressures to have students perform well on the CSAP can be overwhelming at times, forcing a teacher to contract their curriculum to fit in more instruction time for the subjects the students will be tested over. However, teaching to the test has another effect because it takes away from a teacher’s creativity, a source that can be critical to students’ learning. In some cases, as Beth Celva, director of assessment and testing for DPS, suggests, “If you take away the creativity of a teacher, you take away the learning of a student” (Ryckman E5).

Students in Denver who qualify for the free or reduced lunch program is at 62% of the population, one of the clearest indicators of poverty (Mitchell, “Gaps in Achievement” B3). Hispanic students make up 53% of district’s enrollment while Anglos make up 22%. In fourth grade reading results on the CSAP in Denver, 75% of students in low-poverty schools are reading at grade level, while in high-poverty schools, where more than three-fourths of students qualify for lunch aid, just 27% of students are proficient readers, or reading at grade level. These type of demographics are clear indicators the CSAP is not a fair assessment of students and their abilities in school, especially when students from one school district or area do not have the same resources as those from another district.

rm being a touchy subject, the local media need to present the facts straight, and then let the public form their perceptions, instead of throwing around lies, which lead to an uninformed public.

This may sound like a solid, fundamental plan to teach students; students are given the information they need to succeed, while achieving well on standards-based exams. However, it can be damaging in the long run. Teachers who teach to the test focus primarily on the content of the exam their students are taking, thus leaving out important information in certain areas of academia. In the case of some teachers in Colorado who are preparing students for the CSAP, the focus is on reading, writing, math and science. There are two things wrong with this. For one, a number of teachers are somewhat or completely ignoring social studies, an integral portion of an American public school education. The pressure to score well in math, science, reading and writing leads to the focus of instruction in those areas, which in turn leads to a contraction of the curriculum, and subjects like social studies and student electives are suffering because of it, according to Carla Santorno, a !

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