testing tirade

I left school on Friday buzzing.

We tried to take it easy, squeezing in ONE more practice test, ONE last reminder to answer all the parts of the short answer question, to re-phrase the question in your mind, to look back at the text and rely on your eyeballs to find the answers and not your memory. But I didn’t expect anything I did that day to make or break their fate on the ELA. Mostly I wanted them to feel confident.

In the afternoon we looked back at all the Kaplan lessons we’d done and took note of all we’d learned; the types of questions that were trickiest and the strategies that have helped us the most. Then we made posters of advice and encouragement for the third and fourth graders who are also taking the ELA tomorrow. They were really cute. S---‘s was two crossed light sabers and said “Victory will be yours!” Sh— drew a (really good!) Jedi defending himself from Testing Vader. Others wrote strategies we’d learned or generalized words of encouragement. Then we snuck over to the third and fourth grade hallways to hang them up as a surprise.

During the last few minutes I took them out on the terrace -- this largely unused, empty patio that we have on the third floor -- to give them a pep talk. I reiterated how proud I am of them, how I was confident that everyone sitting in that circle was more than capable of getting a 3 or a 4, but that I would be proud of them even if they all got ones because of how hard they’d worked, how they had been supportive of each other and stayed positive and worked as a team.

Finally, on our way out for dismissal, we went down the stairs chanting the Test Prep Jedi cheer… “Test Prep Jedis Use the Force!” and “Oh Yes we Can, Yes, Yes we Can!” and “Testing Vader Goin’ Down!”

The rest is up to the kids and the powers that be in Albany, whatever twists and turns they may have decided to throw into this year’s test… But I do find it remarkable that my kids’ fifth grade careers are decided based on an hour and twenty minutes’ worth of performance.

I know kids need to be evaluated from time to time for logistical reasons. I know the government needs some sort of gauge to see how kids and schools are doing. But I think that multiple choice tests are too narrow to capture an accurate picture of what kids have truly learned, that they do not assess what we think they are assessing. I think that the stakes of “high-stakes” testing are inappropriate, and that the emphasis on these scores is detrimental to real learning.

Of course, it’s obvious why we do it this way. Multiple choice tests are the easier and less inexpensive way out. We do it because the outcome is clear-cut, because the end product is a number that can be compared to other kids’ numbers and compiled and graphed and averaged and compared other schools’ graphs and averages…

If the end product were, say, a portfolio, or a project or the completion of a task that more closely resembled tasks that could be encountered in the real world… well, imagine! Who would pay to grade all that!? Who would decide what is good enough? How could we create and cut funding based on that!? Whom would we penalize? How could we manage if not every kid did the SAME thing?!

We like to put kids in boxes because we know what to do with the boxes. They are easier to line up and stack up and count. Reducing each child to a single digit is convenient for us. A 1, 2, 3 or 4 is a lot easier to digest than a project, a painting, a poem, an essay.

Just imagine! If we looked at the actual shape of kids minds, rather than the leftover space in the boxes we build for them. What would happen if we looked for what is there, rather than what is not?

With standardized tests, we ask a yes or no question… “Did they learn enough?” without asking the logical follow-up, “enough for what?” To look at kids’ minds through this pass/fail, black/white, yes/no model limits our collective definition of human understanding and intelligence, and it seems to me that it may actually be limiting the breadth and depth of our understanding and intelligence and progress as an entire species…

I don’t think it’s an accident that no two individual minds are created alike, and I think it shows the short-sightedness of Education to expect that we will all use our minds the same way to achieve the same result in the same amount of time. That sameness is considered desirable is at odds with a fundamental reality of being a human: To be human is to be an individual – irreplaceable, inimitable, and unique. There are more than four categories of human.