El Chupacabra and Standardized Assessments

Having read every word of Georgia’s CRTC (high-Stakes end of the year assessment) to third and fourth grade SLD students, I consider myself somewhat of an authority on the subject of manure. It was the most irrelevant piece of tripe imaginable, even more pointless than Florida’s FCAT (same type of high-stakes end of the year assessment). If not for needed and appropriate IEP modifications such as extra time, small groups, and tests read aloud, these scores would have tanked even further.


What did I learn? I learned that students are great at “Christmas treeing” in answers. I learned new and improved ways to increase adolescent daydreaming, and most importantly, I learned that state officials are clueless. However, as long as they smell roses instead of reality, nothing is going to change.


Take these same students and listen to them tell stories of visits to grandparents in Mexico and you will see what they really know. They can provide detailed instructions on how to build a piñata. How to make tortillas on an outdoor grill, and tell you about how scary El Chupacabra, the goat blood-sucking creature from hell is. Their detailed stories are packed with wisdom, knowledge and superstition learned from their grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles, and elders. Now I don’t believe for a second that knowledge about El Chupacabra is going to get you too far in twenty-first century America. I do believe that these kids are not going to thrive in twenty-first century America if the sum of their knowledge and wisdom is determined by abstract CRCT questions normed on some kid in Beulah, Montana. We are setting these kids up for failure.