No Counting of the Common Core Tests in the District for One Year

Today's Washington Post made it official - teachers and principals won't be held accountable for the test scores on the more difficult Common Core Tests for one year.  This makes me wonder what the tests are like?  Are they like the old SRA's that I used to give to sixth-grade students in Fairfax County, Virginia? Do they break out the demographics of the scores?

In the SRA, the reading test domains were all non-fiction and indicated whether students had mastered the skills of separating fact from opinion, making predictions, drawing conclusions and the like.  In the ten years I spent teaching sixth grade, students had the most problems drawing conclusions. After I noticed this trend, I tried all sorts of strategic interventions, but the scores stayed relatively flat. Since I am a believer in Piaget's theories that children don't do well with abstract thinking until they are developmentally ready, I felt that perhaps this skill was just a little beyond their developmental level.

I already indicated that I will see what I can find out about the tests and will spend some time next week looking for a web site that I used to share with my grad students.  It gives you a writing prompt and then scores it for you on a scale of 1 to 4.  The site also provides feedback - explaining why you got your score.
I have explained that the Common Core anchor papers are formulaic. Think of this as a syllogism - this web site will be useful to you because if you use the Writing Rubric I designed based on the Virginia Standards of Learning and the ACT test - your students should be able to rack up 4's on this site. The only thing you need to teach them about is T-scores.  This is an old measure and has to do with the length of the sentences and the number of syllables used in a variety of words.  The idea is that the writer demonstrates control if he or she can write a few complex sentences with multiple uses of poly-syllabic words.  

I don't remember how the score is derived - but I tossed out a number of between 5 or 6 long sentences in a five paragraph essay and that seemed to work.  If anyone out there remembers how the T-score is obtained or thinks that students need more than 5 or 6 "long" sentences - please chime in - I hate this kind of stuff, but it is what we must do for our students to get scholarships and have a pattern in place for the day-to-day grind of survivalist writing. Cheers - I'll be sharing some more ideas about how students can write for publication.