High Stakes, Low Expectations: How the Pressure to Prepare Proficient Test Takers Undermined One Elementary Teacher's Efforts Toward Justice and Equity

• In Event: 46.085 - Roundtable Session 15
  In Roundtable Session: 46.085-5 - Critical Issues in Testing Practices

Abstract

Drawing from a qualitative, classroom-based study, this paper portrays the complex ways a teacher, Norah, responds to curricular mandates and implicates high-stakes testing in that response. This analysis focuses on weekly teacher planning meetings because they were rich sites of instructional decisions and they represent the intersection of district, school, teachers, and students as teachers followed a school-provided template that prompted them to leverage “student data” to inform their teaching. Norah and her students were positioned in problematic ways by the school-sanctioned planning template, which functioned to reify deficit perspectives and create an illusion of data-driven planning.

Author

• Andrea Caroline Bien, Boston University