The implementation of SLOs at Clarke Central High School has become a horrifying affair. What will happen when they count as 20 percent of a student’s grade next year? Cartoon by Flynne Collins.
To the Georgia Department of Education, the newly implemented Student Learning Objective tests are a way to measure teacher and student performance. To administrators, they are just another thing that “must” be done. To teachers, they’re a pain. To students, they’re unsettling.
According to the GDOE, “The primary purpose of SLOs is to improve student learning at the classroom level. An equally important purpose of SLOs is to provide evidence of each teacher’s instructional impact on student learning.”
Starting in the 2014-15 school year, the students and staff of Clarke Central High School have been burdened with the implementation of the SLOs. They are content-specific, grade level learning objectives that are focused on growth in student learning and aligned to curriculum standards.
While Principal Dr. Robbie P. Hooker sees the benefits of administering this test, he also recognizes the drawbacks.
“For teachers it’s time consuming as far as grading. But it is something that is being mandated by the state, and we have to do it,” Hooker said.
Through a painful first round of SLO testing that began this school year, it is clear that these tests do not provide any of the services they claim. The SLOs we see next year are said to be improved, but they are seemingly unsalvageable.
These tests do not in any way improve student learning. It merely stifles it. The SLOs are stressful, misleading and harmful for students and teachers and waste a significant amount of learning time.
“They are inherently and necessarily destructive of all of us. Of students, of teachers, especially those students who do well on them because those students will be prone to believe that they have learned something or rather that they have achieved something that is important, and it is hard to take that away when it has, in fact, infested,” English department chair Ian Altman said.
The SLOs also cost a pretty penny. Just to administer the first round of tests, it cost the Clarke County School District $10,000. There are a multitude of things that money could be spent on to better improve student learning, like extending the grade levels that get personal learning devices, more library books or fixing up the embarrassingly under maintained bathrooms at CCHS.
Even without SLOs students are over tested. Aren’t final exams, End of Course Tests and end of unit tests enough? Now there’s another test students have to sit through rather than learning more.
How is it that SLOs will benefit student learning when they aren’t explained to students and thus not taken seriously? Who can blame students though? How does one take something seriously when it isn’t well written and obviously above ones ability?
One of the serious concerns is that the content of the tests is suspicious. SLOs are riddled with inaccuracies. In the French language SLO there were multiple wrong answers, the chemistry SLO had impossibly high standards for high schoolers and the weight lifting SLO contained unsafe tasks for beginning weight lifters.
“The questions were not relevant at all. Body sculpting-wise it wasn’t even safe. A lot of us in Body Sculpting are beginning with weight training, and the things required for girls, like squatting 90 percent of your weight, isn’t safe for people who haven’t lifted weights before,” sophomore Destiny Freeman said.
Beginning in the 2015-16 school year, SLOs will account for 20 percent of a student’s grade in classes that do not have an End of Course Exam – what a terrifying prospect. The thought that this trainwreck of a test will be a significant factor in whether or not students pass a class, qualify for the HOPE scholarship or even get to attend college is appalling.
