What They Don’t Want You to Know about Standardized Testing
Two of our granddaughters visited with us this week. The youngest is 5. She’s been reading for a year and can handle chapter books like the Amelia Bedelia series. She’s the philosopher in the family. She recently asked, “Are bad people bad because they’re really bad, or are they bad because good people think they are?” So when I asked her to get me something in the living room, I was startled when she asked:
“What’s a living room?”
Of course! My daughter lives with them in a loft-style apartment. She doesn’t have a separate living room; no one uses that word in her family. What, I thought, if that word was part of a question on a test? Or what if she was shown a picture of a silo and asked to circle the correct word?
Green party…griot…gulag…Guevara, Che….Heaney, Seamus…It ain’t me, babe…Jit
This is a plea to the middle class: Maybe it’s time to reclaim the conversation that will finally stop one-size-fits-all testing. It’s the middle class, after all, who has access to privilege and power. If we can’t change the system, who can?
Hurston, Nora Neale…internment camps….kiva…makossa (music)…Monk, Meredith…mestizo
E. D. Hirsch Jr. acknowledged in his 1987 book, Cultural Literacy, that HIS knowledge counts. So if