Back to School: It's the tests.

It's August, and for millions of U.S. students that means the first day of a new school year. Here in Los Angeles, LAUSD classes started on Monday, and so the last week or so there have been loads of stories in the paper and on local news about Covid precautions, the new superintendent, and of course why in the world we start school in August.

Didn't it used to be different? Didn't those idyllic endless summer vacation days used to dissolve to the sound of that first bell just after Labor Day? Turns out the answer is yes and no, and yes.

As we were sipping our coffee the other morning and watching one of those stories on local morning news, the smartest person I know turned to me and said something to the effect of "Why does school start so early?" To which I replied, "Testing." "What?" "Yeah. It's so kids have more time to prepare for the big tests in the spring."

She couldn't believe it. "I had no idea." Then I couldn't believe it. I had no idea everyone didn't already know that. But it's true. And I'll bet there are lots of people who don't know.

For anyone who's spent a significant amount of time working in schools, the addiction to testing and the "data" it generates is common knowledge. In fact, it's hard to explain to outsiders how thoroughly the testing imperative dominates all other dimensions of schooling. It often feels as if the testing schedule determines and controls every hour of the school year, and in important ways that's true. 

In this wag-the-dog world, your pacing, the standards you are directed to teach, the way you structure your lessons and craft your assessments, even the language you are instructed to use with your students, are all dominated by the impending big test in the spring. Even Advisory activities and school assemblies seem to exist in service to the testing. The start of the school year, too.

I've included here once again the testing schedule for LAUSD: 

And here's the current table:

I've highlighted the exams with what I would call the highest stakes for administrators and their schools and their districts, and you can see that even though the second semester of school is particularly impacted by this madness, the most intense window of high stakes testing begins in February.

It starts with the ELPAC for English language proficiency reclassification, on which the district and state base their estimation of how well you are serving your English Learners. Then, in March, you begin the big math and ELA Smarter Balanced Assessments on which the bosses base everything else. And don't be fooled by the long window or the June completion date. Schools are forced to begin as early as possible in order to ensure as many students as possible complete the assessments. So the principal doesn't get yelled at.

Throw in the AP exams in May and you've got a busy spring spent under a lot of pressure.

It wasn't always this way. I don't think. In an effort to avoid being the "when I was a kid" guy, I did some digging around but the data is... elusive. In fact, when trying to answer the simple question "Are students going back to school earlier than they used to?" even Pew Research Center, in an article titled "‘Back to school’ means anytime from late July to after Labor Day, depending on where in the U.S. you live," admitted that   "[f]inding school calendars from years and decades past for our sample districts proved to be beyond the reach of this analysis." This one, too.

Reporting from CNN is a little more helpful, relating that while districts around the country vary depending on who's running the show in which state, generally up until the mid 1980's Labor Day was still a common boundary between summer freedom and back to school. By the mid 90's things were changing and the change continues today.

Los Angeles and LAUSD is an interesting case, as we were evolving our present calendar while also emerging from the mayhem of year-round schooling, the workaround initiated in 1981 for overcrowded schools. By the 2000s, as enrollment eased and schools moved from multiple tracks back to a "traditional" calendar, the trajectory was clear. However, the question remained as to when that calendar would start. 

In 2008-2009, the first day for schools on the "traditional" track was September 3. But by 2012 LAUSD had moved its single-track start date to August 14, and in 2017, when Bell Senior High School became the last year-round LAUSD school to return to a single-track schedule, that schedule started in August.

Of course, the world is full of Big Test promoters who are happy to tell you that the first day of school is different from district to district decade to decade, and that's true-ish. But anybody with a brain and a calendar can see it's different. 

The same bunch will also offer that it makes it easier on teachers and students to finish the first semester before winter break, or that shorter summer vacations produce less summer learning loss, or even that more breaks during the year make the early start necessary (instead of, perhaps more plausibly, the early start requiring more in-semester breaks in order to avoid finishing the 180 day year in April).

But here's the truth: All of those things would have been true for about a hundred years. What's different today, is testing. Beginning with Bush's "No Child Left Behind" (more about Bush 1 and Clinton some other time) and continuing through Obama's "Race to the Top," free market education became the neoliberal wet dream. And the market means competition, and competition requires metrics, and our present testing derangement was born. 

But we aren't encouraged to talk about that. Even in this CNN piece, although we are given lots of reasons for the change, number one is more instructional time before the testing begins, and yet nobody goes on the record. Only "several experts" who "agreed" that this was the big one. Reminds me of when I was still teaching and we brought in a bunch of consultants to help us with text prep, only we had to call it formative practice or some bullshit. Testing is the Voldemort of the education biz.

I guess maybe they're worried that if parents actually understood how much of their kids' school lives are devoured by test prepping and test taking and test talking, they might not think that the numbers which don't mean a thing to their kids -- You mean they don't need it to graduate? It's not for a grade? Will it at least help them get into college? -- are a good tradeoff for drama class or driver's ed.

Parents also might wonder why the family trip to Yellowstone or Las Vegas that they used to take with their parents every year as the end of summer/beginning of school is now unavailable to them and their children. Every year I taught, I had students miss the first week of school or the last week of school for family vacations. 

Sadly, come to think of it, I spent a significant portion of those years being mad at kids, which was stupid, because one of the most important lessons I learned later than I should have was how little control students have over their own lives. Lots of parents have very little flexibility with respect to trips and time off. Their kids have none.

In any event, the news stories ran back to back  one morning this week, and one was on starting school in 90 degree weather--117 in Palm Springs! (there's no air conditioning on the basketball courts or in the cafeteria) and one was on so many absent kids. I wonder if there's a chance the early start and the absent kids are connected. I don't wonder, really.

With the August 15 return to school, students have approximately three more weeks to prepare before the SBA and AP exams roll around, and three fewer weeks to just fool around learning afterward. What a waste.

Summer is not over. Testing is not that important. Or it shouldn't be. If you don't know, now you know.