“As the Test Collapses In”: Teaching and Learning Amid High-Stakes Testing in Two Urban Elementary Classrooms

District as magistrate

Prior to the State HST, the primary assessments used by the District for roll call were district-designed benchmark tests (BTs) administered three times across the year. Although BTs were prepared for each content area (science, social studies, writing, math, and reading), those areas tested by the state were emphasized. In some cases, BTs in nontested areas were never administered. The BTs were prioritized by school administration, teachers, and students. This prioritization was evidenced by school administrators rearranging the lunch, recess, and special area class schedules of other grade levels to allow tested classrooms to mimic the uninterrupted 4-hr State test administration. Although the teachers differentiated between the BTs and what they deemed “the real test,” we observed that they often increased the amount of instruction dedicated to test preparation in the days and weeks before BT administration. We noted in fieldnotes and videos that students also remarked to their teachers and to one another about being nervous about upcoming BTs.

On BT days, we documented an increase in surveillance as physical environments were rearranged to mirror the State test administration as much as possible. Desks, typically organized in clusters, were separated so each student sat alone, with folders propped up as dividers. The resulting BT scores, submitted to campus and district administrations, were used to determine health and treatment protocols. The school designed interventions for “treating” students who might not meet the State standard, including pullout instruction and after-school tutoring. The District oversaw the intervention plan and sent representatives to observe to the fidelity of the prescribed treatment.

School administration as intendants

As noted, the school administration reported to District administration and served as intendants in the disciplinary system. At the school level, district BTs were used to inform decision-making including allocation of resources for the “treatment” of students who were “sick” or at risk of poor State test performance. For example, students’ performance on these BTs determined whether they received after-school tutoring or pullout instruction by specialists during the school day. In addition, the results were used to determine what larger changes to curriculum and instruction were required before the State test. For example, following the December BTs in fourth grade, campus administration announced major instructional changes, particularly in the area of writing where scores were lowest. Campus administrators, in consultation with the District, created new daily schedules for the fourth grade. Although in our experience these classrooms were typically self-contained, this schedule required the teachers to rotate between classrooms during the first instructional block of the day, with each teacher teaching one particular competency from the writing test.

During a second instructional period, all fourth-grade classrooms administered a district-designed curriculum intended to improve writing test scores on the grammar-focused multiple-choice sections of the test. During this instructional period, we observed members of both the campus and district administrations teaching small groups in classrooms; such a presence also allowed them to determine whether the test preparation activities—their prescribed treatment—were being implemented faithfully. In addition, this mandated schedule included a reading instructional block where teachers met with small groups of students for test preparation. These were homogeneous small groups assigned by campus administration according to students’ performance on the reading BT. Each of these changes resulted in a decrease in teacher autonomy; instead, instructional decisions were made by the campus and district administrations. As syndics, the teacher’s knowledge of and experiences with their students were not drawn upon, and administrator-determined interventions were imposed.

Teachers as syndic

Perhaps in an attempt to head off the district’s eventual intervention into their daily schedules and instruction, we observed Ms. Douglas and Mr. Peterson use a variety of methods to assess the “health” of their students or the likelihood they would successfully pass the HST. These teachers tracked students’ progress across time, which was used alongside school- and district-level assessments to determine the academic interventions deemed necessary, such as small-group reading instruction (i.e., guided reading).

Although Foucault’s plague-stricken town was an apt analogy for the ways our focal teachers showed up for roll call, documented the academic “health” of their students, and reported to those above them, we also note that this analogy fell short of capturing the ways these teachers retained some degree of autonomy over their teaching practice, even in the midst of intense HST preparation (Au, 2011).

Outright resistance: “I’m going rogue.”

In a few cases, we documented each teacher responding to curricular control with explicit resistance. In these instances, they refused to enact the test preparation activities required by campus and district administration. One such instance occurred in Ms. Douglas’s classroom 1 week prior to the administration of the state standardized test in reading (Fieldnotes, May 3, 2016). To prepare for that test, campus administration mandated the fourth-grade team replace their typical reading instruction with test-focused activities. Ms. Douglas explained in an interview,

We’ve been told, you need to do reading reteach from 8 to 8:15, and it needs to be reteach only, it needs to be . . . a skill they’ve already learned and it needs to be [test] aligned.

She also used the word “directives” to describe these administrative mandates, which suggests she perceived such test preparation as mandatory. Ms. Douglas to some extent already resisted this mandated test preparation by allowing her student teacher, Ms. Stein, to meet with small groups of students on a Holocaust inquiry project, labeling the activity as “non-fiction reading intervention” in plans submitted to administration. During this same instructional time, however, Ms. Douglas typically enacted the mandated test preparation, reviewing practice tests with students in small groups.

In one of these small groups, several students were eager to continue the conversation they had begun with Ms. Stein. Rather than redirect attention toward the practice test, as we observed Ms. Douglas do in other instances, here she engaged these students in conversation about the causes of the Holocaust and related genocides. After 10 min, she looked at the practice test in front of them and said, “we’ll just finish this tomorrow.” Ms. Douglas then asked the entire class to join her on the carpet, reporting to Laura (the researcher) as she walked by: “I’m going rogue. I’m not doing test prep today.” She proceeded to lead the class in a reading and discussion of Star of Fear, Star of Hope (Hoestlandt, 1993), the story of one young girl’s experience in German-occupied France during World War II.

During the discussion, we documented students inferring about character actions by drawing on their knowledge of the Holocaust. They also raised questions about the text and its historical context. In other words, this self-described “rogue” activity was not one that ignored students’ literacy development but instead built their comprehension of complex texts—an objective ostensibly at the core of the administration’s mandated test preparation. By engaging students in facilitated discussion around authentic text, she engaged in an instructional approach well supported by the research literature (cf. Murphy et al., 2009) while simultaneously defying administrative test preparation mandates. Ms. Douglas’s risk of being “caught” was real, as we recorded campus administrators frequently walking through classrooms for unannounced observations during this period. Although she did not explicitly state assumed consequences for such “rogue” behavior, in interviews she made clear that such deviations were not acceptable in the eyes of administration: “Everything’s pretty spelled out. We were assigned schedules with the amount of time for each subject and what’s happening when.” In this instance, however, she prioritized her professional judgment of what would best support her students’ intellectual and literate development over the administration’s mandate.

Likewise, on several occasions Mr. Peterson stated to the researcher (Michiko), “I’m not technically supposed to do this,” before diverging from the test-centric curriculum to follow his students’ interests. At one point, he diverged from the mandated curriculum in favor of a 2-week unit on World War II after students expressed interest. This resistance was also made visible as Mr. Peterson introduced a district-mandated reading assessment, through which he made explicit his deliberate resistance to district mandates that had previously been tacit:

Actually, we were supposed to do it a long time ago, but we’ve been doing other normal reading things, and so it’s just gotten to the point that there’s three of these that we were supposed to have taken . . . it’s the third one for us. Like I said, we skipped some. I’ve got one more there (points toward a pile of papers near the door) that I didn’t give you.

Here, Mr. Peterson explicitly contrasted “normal reading things” they had been doing in place of assigned district reading assessments. He says that they had “actually,” or in truth, not taken the assessment at the time the District assigned. Furthermore, there had been several such assessments that he had skipped to privilege “normal” reading activities. He went on to say that the principal’s “bosses don’t know about [teacher developed assessments] and our work,” work that he described as “reading and talking.” He rationalized that in order for the bosses “to do their job” (which was to look “at these kinds of tests”), he had to have the students take a reading assessment. While in this moment Mr. Peterson acquiesced and gave the students the mandated assessment, what he made obvious was that he had previously resisted giving several others. Like in Ms. Douglas’s case, Mr. Peterson had replaced test preparation with activities, such as student-led inquiry, that he viewed as more authentic ways to support their academic development.

Although these instances of outright resistance explored in this section were rare within our observational data (only eight events total), we include them because they represent one response to HST-mediated administrative surveillance and control. They help to make observable the relationship between determinism and volunteerism (Erickson, 2004) and the dynamic ways both teachers exhibited agency in resisting HST. Yet, as evidenced in Mr. Peterson’s reference to the “bosses,” teachers also felt significant pressure to comply to some degree with HST mandates that contradicted their own pedagogical philosophies and approaches. In the following sections, we explore how these contradictions produced tensions in teacher practice around two themes: (a) how best to prepare students for HST and (b) the teacher’s role in that preparation.

Tensions in test preparation: Access versus critique

This first set of tensions arose, in part, from the teachers’ recognition of the material and affective consequences of the test for students. For instance, in interviews Ms. Douglas described how she entered teaching intending to ignore HST completely, but found herself unable to do so after realizing how much anxiety her students had about their performance on HSTs. Similarly, Mr. Peterson stated that when students did not perform well on HST they felt like they could not read. Thus, both teachers sought to prepare students to be successful on HSTs while simultaneously insisting that such tests did not accurately reflect students’ literacy development. We theorize these conflicting goals as a tension between providing students access to knowledge and strategies necessary to succeed on HSTs and raising critiques of the validity of the tests and their influences on instruction. Reflecting the intersection of local and global discourses always at play within interaction (Erickson, 2004), the global forces of testing and accountability constrained teachers’ pedagogical practice, but teachers also strategically engaged in test preparation in ways that built shared critiques of the testing system.

The focal teachers sought to provide access to HST by explicitly teaching an impressive number of test-taking strategies. Students learned “lots of systems” (Mr. Peterson) to use when taking the test. For the reading test, for instance, students were taught to write a few words next to each paragraph in the passage, meant to guide them toward the relevant sections when searching for answers. Another system required students to (a) cover the provided answer choices, (b) write their own answer beside the question, (c) find the answer choice most like theirs, and (d) find evidence from the text to support the answer. To remember the many systems, students learned mnemonic words and phrases. These were fluently incorporated into their test preparation activities, with sentences like “Yup, if it’s comma FANBOY, it has to be subject predicate, comma FANBOY, subject predicate” (Ms. Douglas) being easily understood by the classroom community.

In the teaching of these strategies, the focal teachers prepared students to demonstrate their literacy knowledge on the test. In doing so, they provided students access to structures and discourses of power. Although strategies served to support students’ navigation of the HST genre, it also required them to learn a large number of test-taking strategies and terminology in addition to their typical curriculum while framing grammar as a set of static rules producing correct typifications of “academic” language (cf. MacSwan, 2020). Thus, in preparing students to be successful on the tests, teachers simultaneously reproduced the oppressive ideologies of HST, including ideologies of language as transparent and standardized (Kroskrity, 2004; Lippi-Green, 2012). This seemed to diverge from their views of language as social practice as professed in interviews.

Yet, both teachers also found opportunities to guide students in analyzing and critiquing the HSTs they were compelled to take. This critique took slightly different forms in each classroom, but both involved making visible the people constructing the test. In Ms. Douglas’ class, there was an ongoing conversation about the people who designed HSTs. Often referring to them as the “testmakers,” both Ms. Douglas and her students named them repeatedly, in much the same way authors are invoked during literary discussions. Akin to analyzing an author’s purpose, students were encouraged to analyze the test from the perspective of the testmaker to understand why the test was written and structured in particular ways. This served as both a test-taking strategy and allowed students to engage in critical conversations about why, how, and for whom the tests were written.

In the excerpt below, Ms. Douglas met with three students to review answers on a practice reading test. Their conversation focused on analyzing each answer choice on a question these students had answered incorrectly to consider why the incorrect answers were included:

Although the writers of the test are not explicitly named here, they are repeatedly referenced through the pronoun “they.” A shared understanding of the test writers was built within the interaction, with two students adopting Ms. Douglas’ use of “they” to analyze the test construction. In doing so, the students acknowledged the existence of these writers and constructed an identity for them as the authors in the text. The test writers were positioned not as attempting to assess students’ knowledge but instead trying to “trick” them. In addition, the students inferred why the test writers included a particular answer choice and considered how the test writers constructed identities for them as the readers of the text (e.g., “they think you’ll stop right here”). They recognized that the testmakers expected some students not to read the entire answer choice, positioning those students as careless. Yet, students did not allow this positioning to remain uncontested. Instead, they actively repositioned themselves as more savvy than the testmakers expected in that they were able to recognize attempts to trick them. This repositioning was affirmed by Ms. Douglas who insisted that the students “have to be smarter than them.” In this exchange, Ms. Douglas established that students could outsmart the test writers, while providing students an opportunity to develop the test-taking strategies needed to successfully answer multiple-choice questions.

This “making visible” of the testmakers was also prominent in Mr. Peterson’s classroom, although his description was somewhat different. In preparing students for the test, he encouraged students to imagine the testmaker as an “old white lady, smoking a cigarette, with a cat.” Similar to Ms. Douglas, Mr. Peterson made visible the test’s human authors, allowing them to analyze test items relative to the author’s purpose. In evoking this image, his personification of the testmaker as old and white illuminated sociopolitical contrasts between the test creators and his young students of color. Although we recognize that to some this racialized image may feel offensive or uncomfortable, we also see this as a way Mr. Peterson implicitly raised questions about the racial dynamics of HST, drawing attention to the often silent circulation of power related to racism and whiteness within the testing regime (Au, 2016; Leonardo, 2009). This attention to the positionality of the testmakers served as a strategy to support students in understanding how the test was constructed and in effect how to successfully complete it. Within this, there are echoes of Delpit (2006) teaching marginalized students to understand and critique the culture and codes of power. We might also view this choice of image as aimed at developing a playful stance toward test preparation, like that described by Segal et al. (2017), which recognized the “game” at play in HST.

In addition, Mr. Peterson also explicitly critiqued the testmakers by drawing students’ attention to testmakers’ mistakes. In one example, he drew attention to a poorly formatted test:

Mr. Peterson positioned the testmakers as unknowing by stating that “they don’t know place value,” requiring students to counterintuitively fill in their test ID numbers. Several students affirmed the confusing nature of this task by repeatedly asking for confirmation. Mr. Peterson used that as an opportunity to say that adhering to conventional place-value positions would “make sense,” and that was not what students were being asked to do. This again positioned nonsensical testmakers opposite the sense-making students.

Later in the same interaction, Mr. Peterson asked students to open the test so that he could explain a confusing formatting detail:

And this is formatted weird, so open your test book and it’s confusing and so I’m going to tell you why it’s weird. So open your test book and turn to the picture with fish. Because every year somebody misses this and then their bubbles get off and it’s crazy. So turn to the picture of the fish, there’s no [page] numbers, so that’s not very helpful.

Mr. Peterson took time to explain formatting that was “weird,” “confusing,” and “not helpful,” which led previous students to answer incorrectly. Although students worked independently on the test, he stopped them again to explain that one of the questions asked the students to find a word in paragraph 5 of a story, but the word was actually in paragraph 7. Each time he drew students’ attention to mistakes, he reified the position of testmakers as acting carelessly and nonsensically.

Within the local context of the classroom, these teachers drew attention to the people who constructed the test, which functioned to “unmask” (Foucault, 1975/1977, p. 197) the humans responsible for creating the HST. This unmasking disrupted the typical positioning of test creators as unknown within “faceless bureaucracies” (Luke, 1995, p. 35), or as unaccountable global structures that were unable to be resisted. Through this work, the teachers provided students with locally developed tools to successfully demonstrate their knowledge on the test and to begin to understand and critique the more global structures of power underlying the testing regime.

Tensions in teacher role: Agent of the state versus student Ally

A second tension faced by both teachers was in their role with in the HST system. They were required to monitor test administration and report testing infractions, which positioned them as agents of the State. Although this institutional positioning presupposed an antagonistic relationship with students, Ms. Douglas and Mr. Peterson sought to position themselves as allies, expressing their solidarity and support as they prepared students to complete the test.

Mr. Peterson made this tension explicit one morning as the class prepared to take a district BT. While explaining the testing procedure, Mr. Peterson shared how he perceived his role during the administration of the State HST. A student asked whether Mr. Peterson was going to collect their answer sheets after 4 hr, like on the day of the State exam:

Here, Mr. Peterson elaborated on his institutionally assigned role on the day of the State test by responding to SJ’s incredulity at his statement that he would “have to take that bubble sheet away” at the end of the 4-hr testing window. Mr. Peterson appeared to feel compelled to justify this hypothetical act, providing the class with an extended description of his test administrator duties. In that role, he had to read instructions “exactly how they have it” and would be walking around “filling out little papers” to document his surveillance. He also emphasized the seriousness of the day and perhaps attempted to defend his surveillance by repeatedly stating that his “job depends on that.”

Although his explanation of the test’s time limit was designed to prepare students for the test administration, Mr. Peterson’s further elaboration arguably suggests that he felt it necessary to share these details in response to the tensions this act created with his more common supportive role. SJ’s remark made plain that such an authoritarian act of removing students’ incomplete work was incongruous with Mr. Peterson’s typical way of interacting with students. Mr. Peterson’s elaboration acknowledged that incongruity and justified it, explaining to students the material consequences of not fulfilling these duties. Moving back toward his supportive role, Mr. Peterson told the students that for this BT he would not take their bubble sheets after 4 hr but would let them finish so he could see how they performed and what they needed to cover before the State test.

A second example of this tension can be observed as Ms. Douglas’s class prepared for a writing BT by reviewing answers to a practice test. Ms. Douglas began by restating some of the mnemonic devices that served as test-taking strategies for the class. As she spoke, she was interrupted by a student’s question:

When the student raised concerns about “remembering” for the test—presumably referencing either test-taking strategies or tested content—Ms. Douglas did not directly respond to the question. Instead, she shared how she was feeling (“I’m really struggling”). Initially, she referred to students “talking at me at the same time,” but then she named a second issue: “people are getting really negative and really starting to complain about tomorrow.” Although her initial comment appeared to reference classroom management, the second was more related to the test. She recognized, named, and then questioned a seemingly growing sense of concern among students.

It was here that she began to position herself as an ally to her students. She used the collective pronoun “we” when referring to the group taking the test, positioning it as a shared activity that included her. In stating she was “not quite sure why” students responded negatively to the test, she implied that students had no reason to “complain about” it. The rationale behind this uncertainty did not become clear until her second turn. Referencing a previous conversation, she emphasized that all students’ test scores had improved. Thus, students did not need to respond negatively, because in her eyes, they should expect to do well. Again acknowledging their concern, she said, “I know that you can, and you know that you can.” Unlike her prior use of “we,” here she made a distinction between herself and the students; she stated her belief in their ability to perform well, then she stated that the students themselves share this belief. This distinction signals their differing roles, test-taker versus teacher, while asserting that both groups shared certainty regarding the students’ test-taking ability. In this exchange, Ms. Douglas positioned herself as an ally to her students as they prepared for the test. While acknowledging their concerns, she did not affirm them but instead drew on her local knowledge to assert their ability to perform well.

However, her response to Adrian points to the tension in her role. Mishearing Adrian’s statement (“It’s just a test”) as “forget the test,” Ms. Douglas rejected this suggestion outright (“No, I did not say forget the test.”). Such a direct and negative evaluation of a student’s response was uncommon in our observations. It appeared that she deemed such a response necessary to reject Adrian’s assertion that the test was not important, an assertion he seemingly attributed to her. Ms. Douglas stated clearly in interviews that she did not value HST or its results. She had shared versions of “forget the test” in both formal interviews and informal conversations with colleagues. However, in this moment, she was unwilling to make such a statement, perhaps in part due to concerns about the consequences for students who did not perform well. It was also likely related to her duties as a test preparer and administrator. Ms. Douglas understood that both campus and district administration believed part of her role as classroom teacher was to produce good test scores. To fulfill this role, she could not reject the test outright. Instead, she implicitly affirmed the test’s importance when rejecting Adrian’s response.

Tensions in focal teachers’ roles seemed to increase as testing dates drew nearer. Perhaps in response to the tension between their desired positions as allies and their imposed positions as test administrators, both teachers addressed the mandated nature of their roles as agents of the State in their discussions with students. Rather than these tensions being felt equally across the year, they seemed to increase as the season of HST arrived and their roles as State agents were imminent.