‘Testing mania’ should be opposed

Having taught school in Maine and New Hampshire for 28 years, I have seen “educational” fads come and go: Transformational Grammar, The New Math, Back to Basics, Values Education, Career Education, Character Education, and now Learning Results and the standardized testing movement. Like the proverbial bad penny, these fads come and go. Some come back around every four years; some reappear every eight years; some die a nice quiet death.

That’s what I hope will happen with the latest testing craze. Testing merely tells us what we already know; the poor are not learning. Across the country, the percentage of students who don’t do well on standardized tests matches the percentage of students who are eligible for free lunches.

The current vision is a business model: specific objectives are set; performance is measured; teachers and students will be held accountable. How can teachers be held accountable for things that they have no control over: students’ genetics, nutrition, television watching, school attendance, and emotional and physical well-being?

That’s just one reason we should oppose the current testing mania. Tests don’t solve any of education’s problems. School funding, creative curriculum development, student participation in their own learning and other issues are taking a back seat to testing. Creativity, conceptual thinking and curiosity can’t be measure by standardized tests. Standardized tests measure isolated skills, specific facts and trivia. As Albert Einstein said, “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.” If testing were the answer to solving our schools’ problems, these problems would have been solved years ago.

Tests stop real learning. Test companies are inaccurate and lax in their security. Tests are a waste of money and valuable time. Last year the states collectively spent more than $400 million to test students. At 17 hours long, the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment test is longer than the Massachusetts bar exam. Tests place too much emphasis on a single examination. Tests turn schools into stock markets where students are only numbers, and teachers are merely technicians, and schools are factories.

The standardized testing movement meets the needs of the corporations not the hopes and dreams of our young people. Success in the global economy requires a docile populace and obedient, unskilled workers who are afraid to organize and who will settle for less than what their parents had. If students are convinced that they are failures because they didn’t pass the “test,” they will blame themselves for not doing better and will settle for minimum wages as hamburger flippers and big box store clerks.

Since the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS) tests went into effect, dropout rates in some schools have soared to over 75 percent; the average for the state of Texas is 40 percent. In Texas, 25 percent of minority high school freshmen are retained, and 98 percent of those retained drop out before their senior year. Texas needs thousands of fast food servers and stock yard workers. Texas is, also, one of a number of states where schools are driven by companies like McGraw-Hill, a major producer of text-books, test prep materials and tests.

Constant testing turns reading and writing, which should be natural, joyful and rewarding activities, into dull school subjects. If kids learned to play baseball the way standardized testing requires they be taught, no one would play ball. Instead, students would measure the length of the bat, measure the distance to first base, and practice filling out score cards .We can help our young people to take the road of creativity, real literacy, conceptual thinking and individuality, or we can take them down the path of mindless drill and repetition and memorization of isolated facts.

MaineRefusal has joined with groups of parents, students, school principals and teachers in at least 38 states demanding an end to standardized testing. Many teachers in Texas keep their own children home on TAAS day. In New York 2/3 of an eighth grade class in one school boycotted the tests. A second-grader at Martin Elementary School in South San Francisco got so nervous about taking the Stanford-9 test that he threw up on his exam. A fitting response to a test that requests the regurgitation of trivia.

Teachers in Maine are the finest in the country. They are dancing as fast as they can preparing their lessons, mediating student conflicts, attending endless committee meetings,grading papers, supervising extra-curricular activities, motivating, encouraging, and educating our young people. Let’s support them in that effort.

For politicians, testing means votes. For testing companies, it means more millions. Do we want to trust our children’s education to politicians and to McGraw-Hill and Prentice Hall, or to teachers who have a strong sense of commitment to the welfare of children?

Gerald Oleson of Bangor is the director of Viking Associates, an educational consulting group. Readers can contact him at geraldole@aol.com.