I came of age amid the opening cusp of the time of the standardized test. During elementary school, the California Achievement Test came around every year to classify the dumbs from the smarts, and offer parents tangible quantification of their child’s intellectual worth.
I loved the tests. I was great at them. I didn’t have to pay attention to any boring teacher lectures, or put off cartoon watching in favor of homework doing. It was just me, my number two pencil, and the bubbles, and once I was done, I was done. The result was an unambiguous number, and if my score was high, which it usually was, it gave me full authority—in my elementary age perception—to tell the authority structure of the school to suck it.
Standardized testing was good to me. Until it wasn’t. As a member of the American nomad nation—my family moved so often, I never finished two full years at the same school—the process of getting all my records brought up to speed in a new school district was always a challenge, especially when moving between states.
This was the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, before everything was digitized, so actual pieces of paper had to be physically mailed from one district to the next, verified, and then incorporated into a system that may operate according to vastly different parameters. In sixth grade, I moved from a small suburban town in upstate South Carolina to a rural little village in the coastal plains of eastern North Carolina.
In my previous district, sixth grade was the first year of middle school, and in my new district, it was the final year of elementary school. This incompatibility, combined with some missed communication between administrators, meant I had to be placed in classes before my test scores had been transferred. The only thing that had made it was my disciplinary record and most recent grades.
I wasn’t a bad kid. I never hurt anyone, or destroyed anything (intentionally). I did have a slight problem with sticky fingers, but the teachers never discovered my pilfering, so that particular ethical discrepancy was absent from my official record. My main issue was that I found class intolerably boring, and had the self-discipline of Homer Simpson at a “Free Beer” festival. This meant I was constantly talking—to myself if no one else was interested—reading books that had nothing to do with class, sketching out elaborate plans for secret clubs, or just plain checked out, lost in some vivid daydream.
In other words, I had a lot of write-ups on my record for not paying attention in class, or otherwise being disruptive.
Without my invincibility cloak of high test scores—my actual grades were more in the mediocre range—my new school district saw no reason to waste space in the “academically gifted” class on such an obviously subpar student, despite the protestations of my parents. Up until that point, I had been treated like some sort of misfit prodigy, my test scores convincing teachers and administrators to cut me a fair amount of slack in the grade and discipline department.
In my new school, I was just a plain old misfit. While it would be easy to criticize the school system for punishing me for what amounted to clerical inefficiency, that misses the point.
The truth is that the treatment I received based on my high test scores was bullshit, and did me no favors, even though I enjoyed it at the time. A few of my teachers recognized this, and did their best to foster some self-discipline—the thing I needed most—within me, despite a lack of cooperation in this regard from the various school systems. Even though they met with mixed success at best, those are the teachers to whom I’m most grateful, because they recognized the idea of reducing a human being to quantitative value was ludicrous.
In the intervening decades, the reliance on standardized testing has only gotten worse, as the for-profit “education reform” movement seeks ways to slice and dice the education system for profit. Hard numbers are good for the bottom line.
But for the human connection that good teachers make with their students, that they use to perceive what their individual students really need most, not so much. Not only do teachers often not have time to develop that connection, due to having to spend so much time focused on “teaching to the test,” but even if the connection develops, they don’t have the freedom as educators to really do anything about it.
Gerald Conti, a long-time high school educator who made social media waves with his recent public resignation, dealt with this issue in his letter and stated that his “profession no longer exists.” Feeling unable to do the work he believes himself there to do, he had no choice but to walk away from teaching.
That’s a shame. Our kids need good teachers now, more than ever. But to have that, our teachers need an education system that lets them do their jobs, especially when effective performance of that job doesn’t lend itself to easily quantifiable data.
