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It’s three weeks Even Mississippi Standardized testing season It starts, and Candace Hamberlin is feeling the pressure.
Clues of what’s at stake are all around Jefferson County Middle School, where Hamberlin teaches her first year of eighth-grade English. Inside the classroom, a large piece of black polyester with clear bags labeled “Data Wall” shows each student’s current reading level. The school hallways are filled with posters listing school-wide scores on a previous practice test. One prominently displays the grade Mississippi State would assign to their school if this practice test were the real thing: 175 out of 700 points, an F grade.
Jefferson County is one of the smallest counties in Mississippi. 6,800 people spread over 527 square miles along the Mississippi River. It is also one of the poorest countries, with 32 percent of the population living below the poverty line. Fayette, home to the only public elementary, middle and high schools, is the only city in the county, home to about a dozen churches but not a single stop sign. The county’s population is 13% white, but most of those families send their children to private or parochial schools; 98 percent of the school district’s students are black.
Inside the Humberlin classroom, it’s time for test prep exercises. This period has 20 students enrolled in 8th grade, but there are only 10; Six of them have been withdrawn for remedial work with a counselor hired by the district to boost test scores, and the remaining four are absent for unclear reasons. The students in the room each hold an A Chromebook And log in at speeds ranging from idle to active resistance. They open StudySync, which presents each of them with a series of questions tailored to their weaknesses. Their faces look like they are walking to the guillotine.
Much of Jefferson County Middle School’s literacy instruction now begins and ends with screens. In fact, Hamberlin does not lecture at all on Wednesdays and Thursdays; Students spend those class periods with StudySync and i-Ready, another adaptable program, so each can focus where they need the most help.
Their teacher couldn’t blame them for getting tired of these exercises. The students’ lives and lives are dominated by the Mississippi Academic Assessment Program (MAAP), a set of annual standardized tests that measure their progress in language arts as well as science and mathematics. Test preparation is a year-round activity. Her students must learn how to decode the meaning of unfamiliar words, make inferences, determine the central idea of a passage, and analyze tone and point of view. Every Friday comes a practice test.
Before moving to eighth grade, Hamberlin logged 25 years as an elementary school teacher. Eighth grade appealed to her because that’s what it’s all about analysis Texts, not just their consumption. This is her idea of a good time. She remembers reading the first chapter of the first Harry Potter book four times just to make sure she didn’t miss any details. When she talks a group of students through a Sojourner Truth reading passage, her passion is clear — for the material, but even more so for the puzzle-solving that reading comprehension requires.
“A lot of them think they’re studying the story,” she says then. “You’re not studying the story, it’s just sprinkles on top. This is what she was thinking, why did she say that, and how did she get her message across?”
