A Case of the CMT Crazies

My column on Westport.Patch on the irritating standardized testing here in town.

"For any parents whose children are in grades 3 and up, the letters C, M and T ceased to be benign a long time back. CMT stands for Connecticut Mastery Test, a bear of a standardized exam that is being administered this week and next in Westport. Students, teachers and parents dread it all school year.

The CMTs have been around since 1984. Mandated by state law, they're a component of the No Child Left Behind Act and are designed to "set high performance standards for all students" and provide "accountability for the Connecticut educational system."

It covers editing and proofreading, writing, math and science. Until 2004, the test was administered in grades 4, 6 and 8. Now, students take the test beginning in third grade and continuing through eighth.

It's not a quick and painful day, either. The testing lasts seven hours over a two-week period. Seven hours is a lot for an 8-year-old. I'm guessing seven hours to them is about the equivalent of 21 hours in big-people time. Just call the CMTs the Bar Exam of the primary school set.

By the time the big day rolls around in March, the kids have spent much of the year going over the material, doing practice tests, composing non-fiction pieces and fictional stories. They've heard their teachers warn, "You'll need to know this for the CMTs" more times than they care to remember. Our teacher sent a letter home urging us to get our kids to bed early, feed them a healthy breakfast and pack appropriate snacks. (In other words, no doughnuts, please.) I doubt I was this prepared for my college finals.

Befitting the seriousness of it all, the kids are appropriately reverential. Big signs are out in school entryways and on classroom doors announcing: "Quiet, Please. CMT Testing in Progress." The poor kindergarteners can be seen tiptoeing down the hallway, shushed by their teachers. When a friend of mine asked her child why his PE class was canceled on a testing day, he answered, "It's illegal to change the time of the test, Mom!" There are serious consequences if students so much as whisper to each other during an exam period. Yes, the kids are most definitely quaking in their snow boots.

While this amount of test-taking pressure might be appropriate for an eighth-grader, it can be detrimental to a younger child. If they aren't able to perform under the gun, it can affect how they view themselves and their abilities. For some of the youngest test-takers, they may have only been reading fluently for a year or two. And now they've got to compose a creative, grammatical, coherent piece of fiction under a time deadline. It's a lot to expect.

My third-grader came home on Day 2, deflated that he hadn't finished writing his fiction piece by the end of the test. He might be a quick thinker, but his pencil is slow, and it just can't keep up with the speed of his thoughts. "I'm a bad writer," he announced that afternoon, as he has many times this year. Until the CMT prep and timed test-taking began this year, he thought just the opposite.

Naturally, we parents are worked up, as well. Some schools have been less forthright than others at explaining what the process is for and why. "This thing is anxiety-ridden for moms," a friend of mine said, "especially for new Connecticut residents, because I don't know what the heck it's for. What's it testing and why?" Does the score stay in our child's record, parents want to know. If a child performs poorly, are there implications?

Adding fuel to the fire are the parents who take it much more seriously than most. The same friend, already uneasy about the process, overheard someone saying, "We're feeling okay about the CMTs. We've been prepping our child at home for three-and-a-half months."

Hold on. Were we supposed to be doing CMT drills at home since late 2009? I, along with my friend, must have missed that e-mail.

As much as the CMT is about the individual students, it's very much a report card for our teachers, schools, and for our district. Yes, standardized tests have a place in the world. Sometimes we need a quantitative way to measure our teachers' and schools' competency. But I wish these youngest kids didn't have to be thrust into the world of rankings and percentiles and good writer/bad writer quite yet.

The CMTs provide the data that establishes that Westport has a stellar school system. And our property values, of course, are very much determined by school district rankings. So it's not all that far-fetched to conclude that the value of what is for most people their single biggest asset rides on how the students did on their math tests today. But hey, kids, no pressure.

And then there's the whole teaching-the-test business. Non-CMT curriculum goes by the wayside when March looms. It's hard not to wonder if the kids might be doing more interesting, creative work if there wasn't so much focus on fill-in-the-bubble tests. Essentially, the CMT isn't so much a test about individual students as it is an assessment of how well the teachers have prepared them to take the test.

The whole matter makes me nostalgic for the days not that long ago when my son's class spent a week investigating pill bugs. Just because it was fun."