In the school last year, Title 1 teachers pulled kids out for small groups for reading interventions every day. In the last month before the testing, the teachers were told to stop pulling kids and instead go into the classrooms and help the kids with the practice tests. I found this so outrageous. Money that was meant for small group interventions was not used for small group interventions. Instead those teachers were being used to go into the classroom and help teach to the test. Instead of having me pull out the younger kids (first and second graders) who did not have to test, they appointed me to be a "test monitor" and walk kids to the bathroom. Gotta follow those rules! So the younger kids lost about a week of one-on-one tutoring because they needed adults who could walk kids to the bathroom.
DD brought home one of the reading practice tests and one for math. On the reading test this was one of the questions: "Which fact about the moon is most important in the story?" Answer. "The moon changes its shape all the time." Last time I looked at a science book, the moon is consistently a roundish sphere. No wonder kids don't pass these tests, they're written by idiots. In another question, they asked why a certain quote was written in italics, but in the passage, that line was NOT in italics. There were no italics anywhere in the passage.
