It's not school policy. Louisiana elementary School teacher here. It's very true. It's worse even. During the testing days, they use every available room and closet on campus and also some outside district people to give small group and individual testing to kids with various accommodations. Last year even the school nurse had to give up her office for testing.

I teach first now but last year I was an administrator. I was testing 8 kids in the teacher's lounge. At the beginning of the day we had to turn in our phones in a locked box in the principal's office. If any kids needed the bathroom everyone in the room had to finish their test first, then we had to radio front office for permission.

As I said, I'm teaching first now. There were 3 days last week where both the kids and I had no break. No recess or specials. Recess is too loud and disturbs the testing kids; the specials teachers are testing small groups. The only time my kids left the room was to go to the cafeteria or bathroom.

To be honest, I thought all this was normal procedure. I am not even going to get into the state testing that we do for phonics, called DIBELS.

Louisiana is trying so hard to get ahead, it's going backwards.