Most public school students, including those in Choctaw and the Mid-Del districts, began taking those tests two weeks ago. Students in some grade levels will continue testing through the end of the current school year, he said.

McCharen is an advocate of student and teacher accountability, but the state’s current evaluation method is filled with weaknesses and ignores uncontrollable outside influences, he said.

“(Accountability) needs to be fair. Some of the (evaluation) programs do not tell the whole story of an individual educator or school. Too many decisions are being made for public education by people who are not professional educators. We know what’s going on. Just ask us,” McCharen said.

Part of the problem, he said, is that lawmakers and officials with the Oklahoma Department of Education continue placing a high level of emphasis on the end-of-year tests, which creates pressure to perform for students, teachers and schools.

“Unfortunately, test scores only give us a sample piece of data to determine if a student is going to be successful. There are a lot of things about standardized tests that don’t measure other qualities good teachers instill in kids,” the superintendent said.

Teaching to the test to ensure high scores eliminates a lot of teacher creativity in the classroom.

“It takes away lesson plans that teach about teamwork and the need to develop critical thinking, social and communication skills. There are other critical attributes students need to develop rather than memorizing curriculum information,” McCharen said. “There’s more to learning than regurgitating data on a test. Teachers teach because most of them are creative people. High-stakes testing takes away some of that creativity. There are other ways to assess a student besides paper-and-pencil, high-stakes testing.”

CURRENT EVENTS

Under the current education system in Oklahoma, students are labeled as failures if they are not proficient on state-mandated tests, McCharen said. All Oklahoma public schools will now receive a grade of A through F depending on the test scores, according to a new state law passed during the current legislative session. In addition, teachers face the possibility of being removed from their current position and reassigned if their students do not score high enough on the state tests.

“We’ve learned in years past, like in our alternative education school, some students have had a hard time passing the (end-of-instruction) tests, but they perform well on other types of tests and are very creative. When you see them perform other tasks, they do quite well,” he said.

Oftentimes, outside influences such as family situations, socioeconomic conditions or health issues impact how a student performs on any given test, McCharen said.

“There’s too many variables that can cause a student to do poorly on that one test,” McCharen said. “Maybe dad beats mom the night before. Don’t you think that’s going to affect how a kid performs on the test the next day?” Katherine Hughes, assistant superintendent of curriculum at the Mid-Del school district, said adoption of a student growth model would be a better assessment method than the current mandated end-of-instruction tests.

“It would allow us to look at how, for example, a group of third graders did last year compared to how they did this year. Are they making progress? We do that at Mid- Del with our benchmark testing. Benchmarking follows student successes and helps us determine the areas we can help,” she said.

The current evaluation approach allows teachers to know at each grade level the information students must master to be successful the following school year.

“However, it tends to restrict some of the lessons teachers used to do and some of the freedoms that are not built into that grade level,” Hughes said.

McCharen argues that the amount of testing time precludes teachers from doing their job. Because of that, he’s an advocate of a longer school year and more instruction time.

“Right now, we take almost a quarter of the school year for testing,” he said. “It’s almost hypocritical to suggest a longer school year and then inundate schools with six to eight weeks of testing. It has a huge domino effect on everyone in the district. When schools are testing, it’s all hands on deck, including the staff.”

Computer labs are used for testing only and cannot be used for instructional purposes. At the same time, computer technicians are on call for troubleshooting and are taken out of their normal jobs, he said.