The tests must be given during a given window of time, so the state is stretching it, not the district.
Distracting materials must be removed or covered in testing rooms, dictionaries and a thesaurus, calculators, pencils, erasers, tape, special logged restroom passes, handwritten seating charts for each testing session, nobody but proctors in the halls, and a whole lot more are all covered by TEA.
In our school, the second floor is used for testing so that traffic can move more normally on the ground floor, but there are not enough lunch periods and conference periods for test-displaced teachers to have a room every period, so dozens of classes go to the auditorium for movies under supervision by a handful of certified substitutes, since most of the teachers are testing.
Under the new regime of 15 standardized tests, up from 4, there will be 45 days of testing in a 180 day school year. If you do a one day review for each testing day, that means 90 days out of 180 will be given over to testing and test-related activity. This is why teachers converged on Austin to get the number of tests reduced to 5, still more than just last year, and the press covered it as a cut in rigor. Wrong. If school is going to be more than testing, there can only be so many tests.
All districts are covered, so all schools have the same experience you're having. At our large urban high school, high absenteeism also guarantees extra days of makeups, since a minimum of 95% of all students MUST be tested, or you become unacceptable or "F" by default.
It's a mess, and very profitable for Pearson, the testing people.
It's hypocrisy by the state, but the districts are just using the resources available, which are fewer than 2 years ago, after the state cut state aid to schools by $5.4 BILLION.
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