Wait...is This MY Hand I'm Playing?

They say you play the hand you are dealt. This past Tuesday, I spent the day wondering whether the hand I'm currently playing makes me a sell-out.

Ridgeview Middle School feels like a pleasant place to be. It's a relatively new, clean building, and it's populated by Future Raiders -- the younger brothers and sisters of my students at Cedar Ridge High School, just a few hundred yards to the west. I'm here for a district-wide training of school administrators, and this latest one has to do with testing. . More specifically, they are giving us the information we need to successfully administer the state's standardized Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS) and State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness (STAAR) exams. I sit through the worst kind of so-called "professional development," in which they read to you in the darkness from a wordy PowerPoint slide show. The last time anyone read to me in the dark I was six years old, and the expectation was that I would eventually fall asleep.

Now, I pinch myself in the arm to avoid doing so. But I get through it, and now have yet another binder to add to my extensive collection.

I have signed my oath as a Test Administrator. I am now an officially-sanctioned Giver of Tests, working in what the Austin American Statesman reports will -- as of next year, be the largest high school in Central Texas, with over 3,000 students.

It's a far cry from those Time Out from Testing Consortium meetings I used to attend at the Julia Richman campus as a representative of Satellite Academy High School, Chambers Street (which became Midtown), where we worked with approximately 200 students at a time.

I continue to marvel at where I have landed. There are many great things about Cedar Ridge High, despite its size, and I really do think I bring a small-school mentality to my work. But all this money and all these resources being spent on standardized testing, and my complicity in it, does, I must admit, keep me up some nights, and I imagine Ted Sizer, my education guru, turning in his grave.