When I was in fifth grade, I made the choice to attend the local public school. Before and after that year, I went to The Antioch School, a remarkable institution with an alternative-education model for learning.
I don’t remember why I wanted to go to Mills Lawn, the public school, but I really liked it. I think I wanted more girl friends my own age, and I definitely got that.
I was also introduced to testing, something that didn’t really exist at the Antioch School. I met one of my very oldest friends when we, the new kids, were sent on the first day of school into another room to take what I now know must have been some form of placement tests.
It being public school, we had regular tests in all our subjects. And I remember taking a different kind of test too – you had to enter the letters of your name in squares, and fill in little circles for the answers, and there was some discussion about how to do that correctly. And then we took the tests. You paid attention and tried hard to get the right answers because it was a test and that’s what you do on tests. And beyond that I don’t remember much about it, because it wasn’t made much of.
It’s hard to fathom what was so very wrong with that model.
Yet somewhere along the way things became very different. Under George W. Bush, No Child Left Behind (NCLB) became law, and Virginia was a front-runner in the race to implement standardized testing, putting forth their Standards of Learning early in the game.
Some well-intentioned, dedicated, and well-educated folks put a tremendous amount of effort into creating those SOLs. You can look them up, as I did. A 3rd-grader is expected to, for instance, recall multiplication facts through the twelves table, and the corresponding division facts, and to “recognize and use the inverse relationships between addition/subtraction and multiplication/division to complete basic fact sentences,” and to use these relationships to solve problems.
Oh, they’re cumbersomely worded, born of bureaucratic minds to be sure, but I’m willing for the sake of argument to say they aren’t per se particularly unreasonable.
However, problems abound. This is a blog and not a book, so I won’t touch on them all, but let’s visit a few.
We can start by agreeing, I think, that our schools do indeed need to teach students foundational facts. Yes, it would be swell if we could have some measure of how well they are doing at that task. But I’m going to suggest that for that to be the primary way we talk about a school’s success or failure is a really bad idea. In fact, it’s bonafide crazy.
Because a student body capable of NCLB’s goal of “100% success” at parroting facts and recognizing proper formulaic responses is the stuff of an Aldous Huxley novel, and little more. We need our schools focused on helping students develop the true skills of success: curiosity, critical thinking, resilience. Persistence, empathy, courage, self-discipline. You know, all that soft stuff. Standardized tests can’t tell us crap about those sorts of things, and teachers can’t work on bolstering them if the only measure of teacher performance that matters is having the right bubbles filled in.
(Remember how Steve Levitt in Freakonomics showed that teachers given a monetary incentive for better test scores cheated and changed students’ test answers themselves? I loved that.)
Okay, so that’s the first part of my rant, which is to say that the tests don’t measure what should be measured, and in fact they do a pathetic job of measuring what they purport to measure.
And I really wouldn’t care very much about either of those points, and wouldn’t be all hopped up about the stupidity of the regime if the tests were administered as they were back in my time: You came in one day, you sharpened your #2 pencil, you took the test, you thought no more of it.
Instead, students spend the last quarter of the year largely in review mode, going over material they’ve already learned. (Since Megan is in the gifted program, I don’t know exactly how it goes down in standard third grade, but I hear it’s worse. She actually came home with new work, and did projects and such, through the end of April or so.)
Teachers pretty much universally hate the SOLs. Shouldn’t that tell us something? I feel for them, stuck in the role of fulfilling a mandate they don’t believe in.
Bad enough that new information is back-burnered, but in May things truly ramp up, and the teachers are forced to spend significant chunks of time administering simulation tests. I’m not there in the classroom, nor is Megs one for sharing every detail of her day, but I do know that homework consists of plowing through a book of SOL review worksheets.
I think her teachers try to keep some actual educational process going, bless them. They must feel sorry torturing these bright kids. But despite their efforts, hours upon hours of time are being spent – wasted – in test-prep.
And if all that weren’t enough to create an environment of THIS MATTERS A LOT, DON’T FUCK IT UP for the kids, there is “SOL Spirit Week” the days prior, where each day has a theme. “Get Lots of Rest Before Your Test — wear your pajamas to school!” “You’re Going to Shine on the SOLs – wear bright colors!” and assorted other horse-hooey.
And what, again, is the consequence of these tests for the student? Oh, right: none. Through middle school, there’s absolutely no connection between their performance and their lives going forward. Which is the utter crying shame of it: the stakes are for the principals and the higher-ups, and yet the kids are the ones who suffer. We’re talking life energy by the megawatt, sucked from the innocent pawns in this administrators’ game.
And oh, they also lose the library for the month of May while it’s used for test-taking, and their guidance counselor too; she’s busy helping kids who aren’t doing well with the SOLs. Some schools lose their gymnasium.
The MPM and I have sat down with Megan and explained that these tests are of zero importance in her life. We’ve gone over who they are important to, and why. We’ve stated categorically that she should not, under any circumstance, feel stressed about them. And we’ve told her that how she scores on them is not something we care about.
It’s like whistling Mozart over the screech of a hurricane. She nods, and says Okay, I know, and then later asks, “If you had to pick a score for me to get, what would it be? Would you want me to get a 600 [which must be perfect; she keeps mentioning it]?”
This Tuesday was her first testing day. She couldn’t eat much breakfast because her tummy “felt funny.” I whistled some more, and sent her off to the bus. And in the afternoon, as we were walking home, she asked me a question about animal habitat. And promptly burst into tears when I answered it, because apparently it was not the answer she had given.
That a nine-year-old – and one for whom learning comes easily – should be nervous on the morning of a test, and undone by missing a question on it, makes me insane. Because clearly the amount of emphasis placed on these tests is galactically out of whack, particularly in the case of schools that are in no danger of losing accreditation.
Administrators need to clue in to the fact that the current environment is causing real harm to students, and changes need to be made.
I’ll close by suggesting that if the taxpayer dollars being flushed down this stinking sewer of standardized testing were to be put toward paying teachers, we wouldn’t need to be engaged in trying to measure educational success. If salaries for educators looked like salaries for physicians – or even like salaries for medical-device reps, for god’s sake – the best and brightest minds would suffuse our education system from bottom to top, and its success would be self-evident.
Just a little dream, to end my rant.
