How We End The War Over Standardized Testing
Anyone who grew up in the 1960s, during the time of the Cold War, remembers our nation’s response to the threat of nuclear war by enforcing “duck and cover” drills in our schools.
The drill would start with the shrill whistle blast over the PA speaker at the front of the classroom – once, twice, then again.
“Class! Class!” the teacher would shout, “Stop what you’re doing and duck and cover.”
Duck and cover entailed dropping to the floor, on your knees, under your desk, being sure to rest your forehead on one arm, while covering your head with the other. The purpose of this perverted yoga pose was to protect your head from getting hit by the shattering windows and falling chunks of concrete caused by a nuclear bomb explosion.
While you’re in squat mode, the teacher paced through the aisles to inspect which students were doing it right and which needed correcting. With only the tap-tap of the teacher’s shoes breaking the thick silence, your knees would grow hot with pain, and your head would gradually turn into a sweaty meatball under the pressure of the self-imposed headlock.
Your only hope was that some kid would fart, and the whole class bust out in laughter. But eventually, the principal would come back on the speaker and whistle an “all clear.”
A generation removed from that time, you have to agree it’s preposterous we ever went through such a ritual.
Of course, a silly drill wasn’t going to save us from nuclear holocaust. But we did it anyway, because… Because it made the adults feel better? Because we didn’t know what else to do?
Today there’s a similar sort of charade carried out in schools across the nation. It’s called standardized testing.
Only this time, we’re imposing the schoolhouse drill, not to protect our children from nuclear annihilation, but to protect them from supposed widespread education malpractice being carried out by classroom teachers and school administrators. And the drill isn’t over in fifteen minutes.
If you feel that analogy is over the top, consider the rationale for testing. Too many schools, we’re told, are “failure factories” that doom poor kidsand imperil the middle class. Public schools have been branded a national security threat.
The tests, we’ve been told, are the only way we know “as parents, as teachers, for students themselves to know how they’re doing.” They are“key to student success.” They are as essential for our children as “a trip to the doctor.” People even go so far as to compare standardized testing to the need to vaccinate children against deadly infectious diseases. Ending the tests would “endanger students” and would “endanger schools.” The tests ensure “every student matters,” especially the low-performing ones.
Yet, as testing season rolls out this school year, loud protests are breaking out in school districts across the country. While politicians and policy leaders insist the tests must go on, educators and parents are painstakingly pointing to evidence the tests do more harm than good, and we’re sliding into a Cold War of a different sort, where earnest proponents of “school accountability” square off against ardent activists who demand freedom from “government regulation.”
At a time such as this, when anger is setting in and ideological positions are hardening, it’s good to remember what really did help protect us from the threat of nuclear extinction. It wasn’t duck and cover. It was a dialogue.
A Nationwide Rebellion To Standardized Testing
As Valerie Strauss reports from her blog at The Washington Post, as testing season started to roll out in New Mexico, hundreds of students in different cities took to the streets in protest. “In New Jersey and other states, thousands of students refused to take the tests,” Strauss writes.
In a recent issue of US News & World Report, education correspondent Allie Bidwell writes, “Tens of thousands of parents and students nationwide are engaging in civil disobedience by refusing to participate in federally mandated standardized tests.”
PBS education correspondent John Merrow went to the scenes of protests and demonstrations in New Jersey to find thousands of students How We End The War Over Standardized Testing:
