Use Standardized Tests in Schools More?

By Bryan Zepp Jamieson

7/19/01

We live in a country where, if the polls are to be believed, a majority of the inhabitants believe in an omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient being who is concerned over the welfare of each and every sparrow in the world.

No word on why said world is populated with lots of things that eat sparrows. Perhaps this being wanted a challenge.

Some of the people who believe in this being like to tell us, with depressing obsessiveness, that said being is deeply concerned with the sexual habits of the most populous group of primates on the planet. This would be despite the fact that said being knew, before the universe was created, exactly when we would be born, when we would die, what would happen to us after we died, and that we should try and change our behavior to please him – mostly by following such strange rules as not dancing, not building statues, not cussing, always keeping our nipples covered, and voting Republican – just on the off chance that he would change his mind.

Even though we are taught that, being perfect, he never has to change his mind.

People who are capable of such beliefs like to ask, with persistent regularity, "What is wrong with our educational system?"

The simple answer is "Not as much as they like to pretend." The evangelicals and other fundamentalists routinely smear the schools, the teachers, and above all, the kids, in an effort to convince the public that the educational system – the public, secular educational system – has failed. They feel that the state should be supporting schools run by the churches, schools that will teach the kids important things like how the whole world flooded to a depth of almost 30,000 feet for 40 days, and how despite that, there was lots of vegetation for the survivors off the ark to eat when the waters went back to wherever they came from.

Of course, there’s lots of room for legitimate complaint about the schools, too. With tens of millions of kids, and employers who want some sort of standardized measurement of education for quality control, schools are forced into a "one-size-fits-all" format, striving to meet the needs of the upper half of a bell-shaped curve, and not really addressing the problems faced by the brighter kids or the ones who aren’t so bright.

Mass education by its nature is ill_suited for individualism, and as a result, often devolves into mere mass indoctrination. The only problem with fixing it is that the only other option that was available to a society was to get the kids on career tracks, the sooner the better. The downside to this is that kids were getting slotted – for life – often before they were 10 years old. And in America, the idea that a kid at the age of ten should be designated for what’s seen as menial work is unthinkable. Angry parents would be confronting school counselors, wanting to know why their genius son is being put in vocational classes, and the counselor would be in the position of explaining that the kid is something of a George W. and would never have the brights to be a brain surgeon, like mom, or a CEO, like dad, but would be happy and productive as a shoe salesman.

Parents are convinced their children are intelligent and bound for glory – as Heinlein noted, it’s what stops them from strangling the little monsters – and they will erupt in rage and remove large portions of a school counselor’s anatomy if he dast suggest that junior is an incurious slug with a room-temperature IQ.

It's not very liberal of me to say this, but many kids won't benefit from liberal arts and high_end tech courses. The problem, of course, is that the parents, understandably, push their kids toward such because they don't want the kids to end up in dead_end jobs that don't pay worth a damn. The alternative, the school system that puts kids on a career track at an early age, is not flexible enough to meet the ever-changing needs of kids as they grow.

There’s a term, "opsimath". It means, "One who learns late in life". Some kids don’t develop acquisitive mentation until after they hit puberty. Conversely, a lot of precocious kids flame out at adolescence. Some switch back a few years later.

Schools try testing, and while testing is a decent indicator of short-term retentive ability, it doesn’t tell you a lot of important things. Standardized testing is a politician's stance, and not an answer of any sort. If you want high scores on tests like those, forget putting kids in class. Just have teachers enter the data into database programs. And then test the programs on what the teachers have entered. I guarantee scores of 99%+, every time.

I would like to see kids be able to take electives starting with kindergarten. If we don't screw it all up and turn it into another vast wasteland of consumer kitsch, both computers and the internet will be a terrific tool for allowing kids to explore and learn. You can set things up so the kids themselves will realize that they need basic skills in math, science, social studies and so on in order to understand what's going on. To me, an ideal lesson/show for kids is one where kids are gleefully figuring out what the denouement of the show (the solution) will be before it's revealed. If we put half the effort into that type of broadcasting that we do into selling them crap they don't need, we will end up with some smart, inquisitive kids.

The internet/computers as a learning tool is hardly a new concept. Newt Gingrich was talking about that clear back in 1994, despite the fact that he was an intellectually pretentious ninny. But that particular tool has gotten a lot more versatile since then, and if there is one thing kids love to do, it’s problem-solve – provided, of course, that it’s the right type of problem for each particular kid. Some kids want to get an engine to run. Some kids want to know what makes a bug tick. Some want to know how the Jedi Knight is going to get out of this fix. Thanks to the internet and the fantastic advances in cgi that we’ve seen in the past 12 months, problems can be utterly realistic, or utterly fantastic, curiosities to enthrall any kid.

It also gives kids – and their parents and teachers – more flexibility in adapting to the changes that many kids go through as they grow up.

That leaves the question about all those kids who aren’t on track to be in the top 10% of wage earners or win the Nobel Prize. And it brings about a mistake many people make about the concepts of egalitarianism – equality – and opportunity.

It doesn’t mean that every kid gets to be President no matter what (despite the present example), or a surgeon, or a CEO. It doesn’t even mean the same opportunity past a certain point.

What it does mean is that if a kid doesn’t have what it takes, or simply doesn’t want to be a surgeon or a CEO or whatever, he or she still gets a life with a decent standard of living, with a secure home, reasonable security, medical coverage, and a few weeks vacation time each year. Not being in the top 10% shouldn’t mean life is an empty, bleak hell.

In our ever more dichotomous society, where the gap between rich and poor, already the largest among developed nations, grows at an accelerating rate, parents frantically pressure their kids to achieve on the SATs and other tests, hoping that one small burst of effort for a couple of tests can make up for twelve years of indifferent scholarship.

If a kid wants to be a store manager or a truck driver, that shouldn’t be a source of grief for the parents, and rage at the schools for having "failed".

That requires some rethinking of our social structure. The best thing we could be doing is giving CEOs and pro athletes and the like a pay cut, and using the money to give janitors, nurses, mechanics, and so on fat pay raises. We could start with teachers. Telling a kid with no aptitude in math that he has to do well in math to succeed is cruel and self_defeating. It won't make him better in math, and just makes school that much worse for him. It'll help if we can remove the stigma our crazed society attaches to unglamourous but utterly necessary jobs, pay what those jobs are really worth, and remove the pressure from kids to be ballerinas when all they really want to do is drive a truck.

Does that sound like social engineering, commies under the bed, booga booga? Sure. But then, what do you call a system that regards 90% of the best educated children in history as being failures because they aren’t in the top 10%? What do you call a system that is run by the rich, of the rich, and for the rich only? One where schools are perverted into silly bet-the-pile tests in order to present a false picture of accountability for items that are not material? We already have social engineering. But this is America. Let’s strive for something that is both fairer and works better.

Schools aren’t perfect. But as long as the public has full access to see what the kids are being taught, and have the opportunity to look over the texts and see examples of how the kids are doing, the schools are as accountable as they need to be, and adding silly be-all tests so politicians can strut and thunder is no answer.

Instead, let’s work on giving the kids challenges that they can actually benefit from.