April 16, 2019 reposted March 9, 2021.
By: Julie Neitz Wielga, Founder and Director of Partners in Literacy
CMAS (Colorado Measure of Academic Success) Does Not Tell Educators the Most Important Things about Students’ Reading
CMAS does not tell you if the child laughs out loud when she reads. It does not tell you if she can hear the inflections of the characters’ voices. It does not tell you if she has ever cried reading a book. It does not tell you how fast she turned the pages or if she peeked at the end because she could not wait to find out what happened. It does not tell you that she kept reading when her father told her to turn off the lights and get to sleep. It does not tell you why she chose this book or if she would recommend it. It does not tell you the names of other books that are on her desk at home. It does not tell you that she goes to the public library after school on Wednesdays. It does not tell you what she remembered of the story after she closed the covers of the book for the last time.
Ask her school librarian. She can tell you many wonderful things about her readers.
What the CMAS does teach her:
The test teaches her that other people get to ask the important questions.
The test teaches there is only one right answer and an unknown authority gets to decide what it is.
The test teaches her that texts about her local world, the one that she notices every day: her family, her home, her neighborhood do not merit examination.
In fact, the test teaches her that posing her own questions about what she reads is not valued.
The test teaches her that there need be no supportive evidence for that one right answer and there will be no discussion.
The test teaches her that conferring with a friend or checking google are not viable strategies to answering test questions.
The test teaches her that having everyone in her class achieve high percentiles is the important thing- more important than art, gym, foreign languages, music, orchestra or a library time.
The test makes her very nervous because the adults are very worried about the outcome of it. She feels that she must do well, although she will barely understand the results when her school makes them available. She does not understand that if her school has any worth at all, her teachers and administrators already know nearly everything that the test will tell them. In fact, rarely is anyone surprised about the results for a particular school because the test results correlate so strongly with amount of school-wide test preparation, income levels and demographics.
