This is the time of year that many area educators dread; parents are checking the newspapers and online to see how schools performed on End of Grade tests.

Teachers and administrators have been biting their nails to the nub for months now and have calculated their results in ways even baseball statisticians couldn’t imagine.

Personally, I think the entire process is a bit out of control. All of the proverbial “blood, sweat, and tears” required to teach a group of students for a semester or a year comes down to a double digit percentage in a single column.

People see scores in the newspaper and make assumptions about a school, its teachers, etc. They have no concept of the amount of planning, tutoring, training, and caring that goes into helping students each day.

I find it ironic that the state wants us to create 21st century learners while expecting a multiple choice test to show all our students have learned. These two concepts are contradictory in nature.

It does not and will never make sense to me that teachers are expected to use a variety of assessment models in the classroom, but the state determines a school’s overall success based on a select handful of tests that are all the same format.

I have taught school in North Carolina for eight years and have never had a state legislator or school board member visit my school or the classrooms of any of my colleagues. How do they know what it is like in our varied and diverse classrooms?

The only detail this group of “educational leaders” worries about is a single percentage. As a teacher, I know that merely teaching with a specific test in mind is limiting and prohibits a teacher from exploring avenues of curiosity generated by the students.

Erin Gruwell, the teacher portrayed by Hillary Swank in the movie The Freedom Writer’s Diary, discovered that her high school English students, who were at odds with each other as a result of racial and gang tension, did not even know what the Holocaust was.

Therefore, she spent an entire year exposing them to the literature, history, and individuals of the Holocaust. Because there was no specific test forcing her to speedily cover a litany of possible test questions, she was able to focus on an issue that related to her students’ tumultuous lives and use the concept of extreme prejudice to encourage a departure from their environment of hate. She accomplished her goal while having them read and analyze literature as well as write and publish their journals.

Such success is an example of the learning and growing that is possible in our classrooms when the details of how a teacher must meet curriculum goals is determined not by people sitting at a conference table across town but by the students sitting in the classroom and the teacher who is guiding them.

Why can’t the state trust the teachers, to whom they have granted a license, to determine if students have mastered a subject and also have faith that the school administrators will be fully aware if a teacher is not meeting high performance levels?

Given the amount of time and extra money it took our state legislators to pass the budget, I guess it is a good thing we don’t make them take an “end of session” test and publish their individual scores in the newspaper!