A tutor helps students at Benjamin O. Davis Middle School in Compton last week.
Credit: AP Photo/Eric Thayer
On paper, the Compton Unified School District has soared in its academic performance in the last decade.
District Superintendent Darin Brawley has, in part, attributed the upswing to regular assessments and the use of standardized test scores to help determine academic strategies at individual school sites.
But some teachers question whether the improved scores should be celebrated — and have claimed that the scores are higher because the district puts all of its emphasis on preparing students for tests, rather than educating them completely, a tactic they claim impedes rather than helps students.
“We’re testing in September, October, November, December, January, February, March — like we’re testing every month, so that the district has the numbers,” said Kristen Luevanos, the president of the Compton Education Association, the district’s teacher’s union.
“But as a classroom teacher, you know how to assess your kids as you go. We don’t need these huge standardized tests once a month. And so we’re wasting precious instructional time.”
According to the Nation’s Recovery Scorecard, the district’s performance in math has risen in the past decade from 2.54 grades below the national average to only -0.86 behind — a difference of 1.68. And in reading, Compton increased scrores by 1.37 to 1.04 grades below the national average.
Brawley maintains that assessing students’ progress is critical to the district’s progress.
“Our testing is aligned to state standards that determine whether or not kids have mastered the information. And for a teacher or anyone, an administrator, a politician, to say that you are prepping kids for a test, I think it’s laughable,” Brawley said in an interview with EdSource.
“Because those same people: What did they do for the SAT? What did they do for the GRE? What did they do for the LSAT? What did they do for their driver’s test?”
The role of test prep
In a given semester, teachers in Compton Unified are expected to administer dozens of exams.
Credit: Kristen Luevanos“You’re going to look at these lists and go, ‘When does education happen?’ And that’s the exact question that teachers are having,” Luevanos, who said she recognizes the importance of some test preparation.
“[The district will] say, we’re using it to teach,” she said. “Anyone who’s ever been in education and has taken courses knows that’s not how it works. You don’t use the end goal to help. You start with scaffolding. You start where the kids are at. You start with the basics. You start with the vocabulary. You work your way up.”
Going Deeper
On top of indicating students’ progress, assessments can be a critical tool for teachers to reflect on their own quality of instruction, according to Julie Slayton, a professor of clinical education at the University of Southern California.
“If a student didn’t perform on an assessment, or depending on how a student performed on an assessment, or a class performed on an assessment, we can use that information to ask ourselves: What did I do that set the kids up for the outcome that they experienced?” Slayton said. “That would be good. That would be what we would want.”
She added that assessment should also be used by students to help gauge their own progress, which would improve student learning — and by extension, student outcomes.
Drilling students on what an exam will assess, on the other hand, “is not meaningful in terms of actually acquiring the knowledge and skills,” she said.
Slayton said “having a test prep orientation is more the norm than it is exception” — and that it comes as a result of the federal No Child Left Behind Act, where more schools have incorporated more test preparation to boost performance and minimize punishments for failing to do so.
“If we start with what do we want a kid to learn within five months or two weeks, or whatever the time period is, and how does that align with what the teacher is doing, we have a nice relationship,” she said. “And testing would just be an extension of a regular, appropriate assessment process that was embedded in a learning process.”
Despite the hard work of staff and students alike, Luevanos said the standardized test results aren’t revealing students’ academic struggles — from fourth graders who are struggling to read to eighth graders who haven’t yet mastered their multiplication tables.
But Brawley believes that preparations for standardized tests are supposed to help students better understand the language they might encounter on the exams — and that there are also equity concerns involved.
“Every kid whose parents has the means, they participate in that, they have tutors, they have specialized courses that they take that preps them for the assessments to get into college and everything else,” Brawley said. “So, why is it bad for Black kids, Latino kids, English language learners, to learn the academic vocabulary that’s necessary for them to do well?”
Kendra Hatchett, a literacy specialist at McKinley Elementary School in Compton, agreed that getting students used to the language that appears on exams is critical.
“I have been in the classroom and have refused to do test prep years ago as a brand-new first year teacher because I thought, ‘Oh, it’s against my philosophy. We shouldn’t do test prep.’ But then, the kids didn’t pass a test, and it wasn’t because they didn’t have the information,’” Hatchett said.
“I may have taught them that five plus 10 equals 15,” she said. “That’s straightforward. We’ve got it. We’ve nailed it. But I didn’t teach them: 15 minus happy face equals five. So, that threw them off. I had to rethink my strategy, and that’s when I decided I’ve got to find a way to weave in test prep while still doing hands-on activities.”
Broader impacts
Luevanos said pressures to do well on exams have led some teachers to stop teaching novels and prioritize excerpts and short stories, which are more likely to appear on tests instead. Novels also aren’t listed on pacing guides reviewed by EdSource for eighth or eleventh grade.
The district said in an email to EdSource that it has not issued any directives to limit the teaching of novels.
Teaching students novels “takes you on a journey,” Luevanos emphasized, noting that certain standards — whether indirect characterization or motivation — cannot be taught just through excerpts.
“The kids are amazing,” she said. “They deserve to be able to read novels. They deserve to be able to play math games. They deserve to be able to just struggle with the work and create.”
Luevanos said that because students are spending more time on test prep and less on regular materials, they are not as interested in what they’re learning — and she has noticed more challenges with student discipline over time.
“They’re not learning how to think critically, how to be rational, how to be lifelong learners,” Luevanos said. “They’re learning how to read and answer questions.”
She also said she has heard about instances of alleged cheating.
Helida Corona, a district parent, said she had approached one of her children’s schools every year to express concerns about them being behind, beginning in second grade.
She was surprised, years later, when her child received an award for her performance in mathematics in the sixth grade. Corona said she “found it kind of odd,” especially as her child still struggles with regular addition.
The next year, Corona’s child got the award again, yet the child still struggled with everyday math, such as accurately adding up the value of money using simple single digits.
Suspecting that her child might have been involved in some cheating, Corona said she learned more when she spoke with her child about the multiple-choice test.
“‘Our teacher sometimes helps us,’” Corona’s child told her, explaining that students would first guess — and if wrong, be instructed to try again, until they landed on the right answer.
“It’s terrible because it does not help you. They use those tests [to] place you in a class that’s appropriate for you,” Corona said. “If you continue this way, you’re going to end up going to high school, and they’re going to put you in a higher level math class, and you’re going to go in there blindsided.”
The district, however, said they do not have knowledge of instances where students have received assistance on standardized tests.
Although Hatchett now believes in the importance of preparing students for tests, she also believes in having a balance — and says that the district could be more balanced in its approach as a whole.
“I know everybody’s struggle is different, and their perspective of what that should look like is different,” Hatchett said. “Each person should try their best to try to mix it up. You can’t just be all or nothing, all one direction or the other direction.”
