I am currently reading a book titled More Than a Score. It is a series of essays discussing the issue of high-stakes standardized testing in K-12 education. I have been sort of aware for a while about the emphasis that testing has developed in schools since the implementation of No Child Left Behind, but I had no idea how pervasive it had actually become. Frankly, it shocks me, and it makes me more than a little angry. It seems to me that the overemphasis on tests like this do nothing but dehumanize children, turn teachers into little more than autobots, and they do absolutely nothing to prepare kids for the world beyond the school walls. It really feels like we are attempting to, to paraphrase a song which was popular a while back, fit kids into little boxes where they all look just the same. My degree happens to be in special education, though I earned it over 25 years ago and I never taught. While I obviously don’t know this, I’d strongly suspect that at least some of my professors at Gonzaga would be horrified at what has happened in K-12 over the last 15 or so years. Multiple guess tests strike me as possibly the worst indicator of knowledge. I, for one, have always been a fairly low scorer in these types of test, even though I have a fairly high intellect, or so I’ve been told. Conversely, one can learn strategies to score higher than what they actually would in a real classroom scenario. This is somewhat personal for me, I admit. I have an 11-year-old daughter, currently making her way through the sixth grade. Since she lives with her mom in Washington State and I’m in Indiana, I don’t have any data on how these standardized tests are affecting her. What I do know is that she’s as smart as a whip, reads voraciously, and she could probably give kids two or three grades ahead of her a pretty good run for their intellectual money. I don’t want her to have to sacrifice one minute of precious actual learning time to prep for a test that, in the long run, will do her absolutely no good at all. She needs to concentrate on those things that will propel her forward, make her a better student, and when the time comes make her prepared for the next step. I’d say the same thing for any child in K-12 today. I’m heartened to see that some teachers are standing up to the testing juggernaut, and the protests are actually bearing some fruit. We need to get back to treating our children, the most precious commodity I can think of, as the incredible, diverse, individual human beings they are, and not just numbers on a corporate spreadsheet.
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I can’t begin to think how my teaching would be different if I was doing so much testing. My entire course is built around the philosophy that I am getting people ready for advanced Hebrew study and lifelong use of what they are learning in class. If I was having to teach so that they could perform on tests, my entire strategy would have to be different, and I think that things would end up being much more stressful for them. I guess that is what grad school is for; but it saddens me deeply that we can’t give young children joyful experiences like this.