Pineapple Rebellion in full swing
Sometimes it happens that way. A single insipid test question has sparked a rebellion and shone a light, not only on current standardized testing practices, but on the whole testing industry and its leading profiteer,Pearson Publishing.
The N.Y. Times reports:
Anti-testing activists have taken up the cudgel, saying that the passage and the multiple-choice questions associated with it perfectly illustrate the absurdity of standardized testing. And by Friday afternoon, the state education commissioner had decided that the questions would not count in students’ official scores.For its part, Pearson took a passage from Daniel Pinkwater's nonsensical story, The Hare and the Pineapple, distorted it and then asked N.Y. 8th-graders some stupid, irrelevant multiple-choice questions for which there were no right answers. As Pinkwater explains:
I was caught up in the brouhaha that arose from an excerpt from a book of mine, edited out of any resemblance to what I wrote, and included in what was described to me as a “high stakes” test administered to all the eighth-graders in New York....On the test, the story makes even less