The Internet Monk
"the power of opinion, the phenomenon of speech, the impact of truth"
A Webjournal and News Review by Michael Spencer
Why Do Conservatives Love Standardized Tests?
by Michael Spencer
When
I think back on my junior high and high school career, it seems at least
half of my time was spent in the cafeteria with some sort of
standardized test. No one ever explained to me why we were doing these
tests, and I never saw a score. I did decide that I was one of the
sloppiest people on earth when it came to filling in a little circle
with a pencil mark. I never knew my California score or my Iowa score or
my ACT score and I didn't care then or now. I went to college and
graduated cum laude. So there.
When I left college and headed for graduate school. I had to take the GRE, better known as the ACT from hell. They charged me $50 for this privilege. I didn't recognize the majority of the questions and guessed at most of the answers. I never saw the score. They let me into graduate school and I graduated in the top third. When I went back for post-graduate study, I had to take the GRE again, this time at about $75. I began to smell a money game here. I don't know if I passed or not. They let me in and I did my thing.
My daughter- a sophomore- just took the ACT for the first time. She knows that colleges want a certain number and that's enough motivation to get her through a pre-test book the night before the exam. She's already taken the PSAT and I suppose she will take a second ACT and the SAT before graduation. If she asks me what these tests have to do with education, I can tell her that they are a standard statistical measurement of what she has learned and how she compares to other students. This is baloney, of course, but I'll probably say it anyway.
Our little school gives the Iowa test at the beginning and end of our school year, supposedly to see if our kids are learning. Sorry to the hardworking people at the Iowa test, but I can tell you more about a student from a ten minute conversation than from 16 hours of the Iowa test. And then I could design a plan to help that student learn. But, the kids are learning to color in those circles. You can't underestimate the importance of that skill.
You see folks, I hate standardized tests. I really think our planet would be a much better place if they were all gathered in one place and burned to solve the California energy crisis. Now I know this puts me into the zone of conservative heretics, and I do not go there easily, so stay with me while I offer an explanation. I do not usually depart from loyalty to our President, and Dubya is an outspoken advocate of standardized testing through the lower grades as a way of making schools accountable for federal dollars spent. If I thought it worked, I would be for it. I don't think its morally wrong to test. I just thinks its ridiculous, and as a conservative I have major problems with testing that I will confess freely.
Please don't think I have joined the multi-cultural establishment who say that such tests should be abolished because they are racist and sexist. Frankly, I haven't given it that much thought. It looked to me like the tests were biased against people who didn't have the test in advance, but other than that they looked pretty generic. If you want to write some Ebonic or radical feminist ACT questions, head for the message board. If some liberal colleges want to dispose of the SAT as an admissions standard, then do so with my applause, but don't count me in on the wacko reasons why.
You see, as a conservative, I do not like centralization. I don't care for the schemes or products of the expert class. I actually like diversity as an expression of individual freedom and choice. I don't like the liberal version of diversity, which is tyranny at gunpoint. I like the Jeffersonian version of diversity. I do not believe the Founders would have established a public education establishment in America. And I do not think we ought to have one now. I am one of those conservatives who actually believes the Federal Department of Education should be shut down. (Sorry Rod.) I'm one of those conservative who think that education was so much better in those one-room school houses that both my kids attended one.
Standardized tests are a tool of the educational establishment that has screwed up American education worse than Jesse Jackson's marriage. They are written, marketed and sold by the educational establishment, thereby explaining why they seem to come from God. Do they measure basic skills? To an extent. Do they measure or promote actual education? No. Do they promote accountability? For administrators, there is no question they focus attention like a laser beam. Do they give the media something to write about? Sure. Do they tell us that our children are drifting further and further from what it means to be an educated person? Do they make our children love learning? Do they show us what is wrong with us as adults? Give me a break.
Part of my attitude towards testing comes from being a classroom teacher. I don't need a test to tell me Sally can't write. I can see it for myself. Teachers know the abilities, strengths and weaknesses of their students. And every teacher knows that education, the love of learning, the process of becoming literate, expressive and understanding, is different for every child. It is immoral to ram every kid through a standardized test as a measurement of education. It distorts reality, and education has to be based on reality- real students.
I want to make it clear that I do not have any problems with the testing of basic competencies. Our kids need the fundamental tools of learning and some testing may have the ability to focus of making sure kids don't make it to the fourth grade unable to read, write or multiply. But this is the kind of testing that teachers do in their classrooms day after day. It can't be an assembly-line operation enforced from the central office on every classroom at the same time. It needs to be tests designed by teachers, not designed by some educational expert in the Cal-Poly basement.
I believe the entire standardized testing discussion is really about whether teachers and administrators are competent in their jobs, not whether kids are learning. Hanging around schools has convinced me that if teachers took teaching seriously as a mission and a passion, we wouldn't be falling for the idea that schools must become standardized test preparation boot camps. Paying off schools with higher test scores, as we do in Kentucky, is a diversion from the issues that anyone can see in our culture: we are becoming uneducated, dangerously irrational, ignorant of what is great and good and addicted to entertainment and junk information. No test will fix this mess.
And colleges? Well, if you need a number, take a test. But if you want to educate students, then get to know them and design a curriculum that gives them the structure and the freedom to learn. It is great to brag about those entering ACT and SAT scores as a predictor of the "quality" of students, but everyone knows that is a fixed game. The great story is not what a 32 does at your school, but what a 17 does. Or, even better, how your school created a scholar out of a dismal failure. Given what we are facing in America right now, we need schools to throw out the educational establishments numbers and invite students to come as they are and grow from there.
I have a program for improving education. Part one: parental choice. Let parents send their kids to the school that produces the results they want by giving the tax dollars to parents. Part two: encourage diverse private and public schools, making the marketplace the test of the quality of education. Standardized testing is contrary to both these ideas. It makes experts, not parents the judge of educational quality. It encourages schools to become more and more similar to those schools that do well on tests. Delightful.
In fact, I would like to see decentralization take place on such a level that no school board, state agency or federal department would have anything to do with telling us what schools are good. I strongly suspect that the ideal school, from the standpoint of any government expert, would be vastly different from the kind of school conservatives would be most impressed by. Standardized testing will always be interpreted as needed more centralized answers on every level.
If we went back to the school system we had a hundred years ago, we would have a better society, more educated and moral graduates and no standardized tests. These tests are a creature of the education system that conservatives generally see as a disaster. What's up?
Conservatives have a strange attraction to testing. Probably because they want to operate on the basis of the truth. The truth of standardized testing is the truth of the educational establishment and not the truth of individual students in real schools. As conservatives, we need to admit that standardized testing is not the answer. The answer is an army of impassioned teachers committed to teaching students, not producing test scores.