I doubt many teachers were surprised. A major study performed by researchers at Arizona State University found that not only did standardized testing fail to improve academic performance in the twenty eight states where it takes place, but it may have actually worsened it, and led to higher dropout rates.

The tests have been a cause celebré among right wingers, advocates of funding for private schools, politicians, and Putsch. Putsch, of course, wants to tie school funding to the tests. If a school finishes below the acceptable levels two years running, funding is cut off. That’ll show those kids a thing or two about not passing tests, right?

Sixty six percent of states that adopted the standardized tests saw poorer average scores on existing tests, such as the ACT and the SAT.

The tests were a smarmy and empty-headed feel-good solution crafted to either test the schools to make sure they were doing their job, or as a rationale to get rid of public schools altogether, as some on the right would like to do.

The argument against the tests, offered from the earliest points of the movement to foist them on schools, was that it would put the kids under pressure (pass or be held back, no matter how well you did during the rest of the year), it put the teachers under pressure (emphasize the specific knowledge needed to pass those tests at the expense of everything else) and the schools (encourage lower achieving kids to transfer or drop out). One right wing outfit did a poll of teachers, asking them if they "taught to the test," IE, favored test related materials over the general syllabus, and triumphantly reported that only one in four teachers said they did this.

I was amazed that one in four teachers would admit to it. After all, it’s shortchanging the kids and basically goes against everything the teacher stands for. If one in four are openly saying they’re doing such a thing, then it’s probable that a large majority of them are doing it and not copping to it.

For the kids, it’s a nightmare. High school seniors, in particular, have to pass these tests in order to graduate in some states, and there are cases of kids with good GPAs flunking the test and having to repeat, and in the process losing scholarships and a year of their lives.

How did you do in algebra? Me, I did ok; I’m lucky enough to have the right type of mind that I could grasp the concepts. On the other hand, I was hopeless at foreign languages. But for most people, algebra was their "nightmare subject." People who could memorize Shakespeare and recite it in front of thousands of people had to sweat blood to pull a passing grade in algebra. Similarly, there were kids taking advanced calculus in high school who couldn’t identify the predicate in a sentence to save their lives. Few kids are good at all subjects, and schools make allowance for that. The tests don’t.

It’s only your life, kid. But don’t feel pressured.

Because of the high degree of public interest, politicians always feel that they have to "do something" about public education. That, combined with pressure from factions that either want to "improve" the schools or replace them, is what led to the crowd-pleasing standardized tests. If you measure it, that means you’re doing something about it, or can do something about it.

That’s the rationale behind the tests. The tests supposedly tell you how well the school is doing.

But the tests, combined with the right wing desire to punish schools that don’t do well, are massively unfair.

Some kids do better than others. That’s a given. A a certain GROUP of kids will almost always outperform a second group. The leading indicator of how a kid will do in school isn’t his race, or the quality of his teachers, or even his native intelligence. It’s the socio-economic status (SES) of his family.

That, more than any other factor, is why School "A" out in the affluent exoburbs, will outperform School "B," which might be in a low middle class neighborhood.

Part of it is opportunity. Kids in monied families have greater access to computers and the internet, books, and other educational materials. They travel more. The parents are better educated, and more interested in the education their child is receiving.

Private school advocates never tire of pointing out that kids in private schools do better. But kids in private schools have a higher SES than kids in public schools. If you take kids from the same economic range, the differences between public and private school achievements vanish. Completely.

Right wingers never tire of talking about how illiterate American kids are, and prattle on about how Americans are 17^th in science or 15^th in math or can’t find Nebraska on a map or what the main three rivers in Poland are. Rarely mentioned are the studies that show that the same tests, given to the general population, follow a distinct pattern, according to age. High school seniors do best, and it follows a straight-line progression after that. Those sixty five and older do worst.

The idea isn’t original to me, but I agree that any politician or "social leader" who is for these standardized tests should be required to take the same tests themselves. Any politician who flunks (gets 10% below the median score, say) loses all seniority and has to take remedial courses. Any politician who flunks twice should have to quit.

But hey, no pressure there. It’s only your life.

For all the rags-to-riches stories with which we populate our psychic landscape, the fact is that kids raised in poverty do poorly, and usually end up raising families of their own, also in poverty.

But if you take the results of the surveys from just those schools where the student SES average is within 10% of the national median, then you discover that America has the finest schools in the world. As the SES goes up, so do the academic achievements, but it’s a diminishing return. Kids from ultra-rich families don’t do noticeably better than kids from high middle class families. Indeed, given the increasingly indolent and lackadaisical manner of our wealthiest elite, there may actually be some regression. Look at our "President" for an example of someone who never had to try in school. Why should he?

So our indolent silver-spoon boy in the White House proposes to face the problem by cutting funding for poorly performing schools altogether. Surely there are some rich children somewhere who could use that money, and as for the poor children, well, how can they pull down average national achievement scores if they aren’t in school at all?