It's just a test

I may be an English teacher, but I have become pretty good at numeracy lately. Let's do some basic math right now.

I spent the half hour right after school today (when I could have been helping students) in a Test Training session. One of the tidbits of information that I gleaned from this training is how much is spent on each student copy of the New Mexico Standards Based Assessment (hereafter referred to as SBA) which is the direct result of No Child Left Behind (hereafter referred to as NCLB or That Insanity).

Each test costs just over $57 ($57.10 to be exact). That made me wonder. How many students take this test, and how much money is pent on this instead of on actual teaching materials. So when I got home, I Googled how many high school students are in New Mexico. Not that easy to find, but the census bureau had some data that I could extrapolate to get the info I wanted.

We have roughly 40,193 juniors in New Mexico (they take the test in high school as juniors). I then multiplied $57 by that number and reached the whopping sum of $2.3 MILLION a year for one test for one grade level. They also take the test in 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th,  7th and 8th grades. That comes out to $16.1 MILLION spent every year on a test. 


SIXTEEN MILLION DOLLARS

At the high school, we also lose six days of instruction to take this test. 6 days are spent checking to see if kids can take a standardized test. Add to that, all of our 9 weeks tests (3 days per 9 weeks, so another 12 days) are really designed to see how kids will do on the SBA.

That means we spend 16 million dollars and one tenth of the school year taking standardized tests.

If people think our education system is defective, that is why. What would you spend $16 million on to help our kids learn more? More computers? More books? More librarians? Smaller schools?