Kimberley Asselin sits in a rocking chair in front of her 22 kindergartners, a glistening smile across her face as she greets them for the morning. Even at 9 a.m., she is effervescent and charismatic.
Yet behind Asselin’s bright expression, her enthusiasm is fading. Asselin, 24, is days away from finishing her first year as a teacher, the career of her dreams since she was a little girl giving arithmetic lessons on a dry-erase board to her stuffed bears and dolls.
While she began the school year in Virginia’s Fairfax County full of optimism, Asselin now finds herself, as many young teachers do, questioning her future as an educator. What changed in the monthes between August and June? She says that an onslaught of tests that she’s required to give to her five-and six-year-old students has brought her down to reality.
“It’s more than a first-year teacher ever imagines,” Asselin said. “You definitely have a lot of highs and lows, and it keeps going up and down and up and down.”
New federal data that the Education Department released in April shows that about 10 percent of new teachers leave the profession within the first year on the job, and 17 percent leave within five years of starting. Though far lower than earlier estimates, it still means that many young educators bail from the classroom before they gain much of a foothold. For Asselin, testing has been the biggest stressor.
The proliferation of testing in schools has become one of the most contentious topics in U.S. education. The exams can alter the course of a student’s schooling and can determine whether a teacher is promoted or fired. In Virginia, schools earn grades on state-issued report cards based on the scores students earn on mandatory end-of-year exams.
Fairfax County school system, one of the nation’s largest, boasts that its kindergarten students take part in coursework that exceeds the state’s standards. Unlike most states, Virginia has never adopted the Common Core State Standards, but Virginia officials say that the state’s academic standards are just as—or more—rigorous.
Asselin said that means that even the youngest students in public school are under an academic microscope, making kindergarten about far more than socialization and play time.
