This Article May Be Illegal – Lifting the Veil of Silence on Standardized Testing
Warning!
What you are about to read may be a criminal act.
I may have broken the law by putting this information out there.
Edward Snowden leaked data about civilian surveillance. Chelsea Manning released top secret military documents.
And me? I’m leaking legal threats and intimidation students and teachers are subject to during standardized testing.
Not exactly a federal crime is it?
No. I’m asking. Is it?
Because teachers are being fired and jailed. Students are being threatened with litigation.
All because they talked about standardized tests.
The US government mandates public school children be subjected to standardized assessments in reading and math in grades 3-8 and once in high school. Most schools test much more than that – even as early as kindergarten.
And since all of these assessments are purchased from private corporations, the testing material is ideological property. The students taking these exams – regardless of age – are no longer treated as children. They are clients entering into a contract.
At the start of these tests, students are warned of the legal consequences of violating the terms of this agreement.
In particular, the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment (PSSA) tests require students to read the following warning on the first day of the assessment:
DO NOT PHOTOGRAPH, COPY OR REPPRODUCE MATERIALS FROM THIS ASSESSMENT IN ANY MANNER. All material contained in this assessment is secure and copyrighted material owned by the Pennsylvania Department of Education. Copying of material in any manner, including the taking of a photograph, is a violation of the federal Copyright Act. Penalties for violations of the Copyright Act may include the cost of replacing the compromised test item(s) or a fine of no less than $750 up to $30,000 for a single violation. 17 U.S.C. $ 101 et seq
So the first act of testing is a threat of legal consequences and possible fines.
There are no such warnings on my own teacher-created tests. Sure I don’t want students to cheat, but I don’t threaten to take them to court if they do.
The school has a plagiarism policy in place – as just almost every public school does – which was created and approved by the local school board and administration. The first infraction merits a warning. The second one results in a zero on the assignment, and so on.
Moreover, this is something we go over once at the beginning of the year. We do not reiterate it with every test. It would be counterproductive to remind students of the dire consequences of misbehavior right before you’re asking them to perform at their peak ability.
Okay, Brady! Go out there and win us a football game! By the way, if you deflate that football, you will spend the rest of your life in jail. Go get ‘em!
But that’s not all.
In Pennsylvania, we also force kids to abide by a specific code of conduct for test This Article May Be Illegal – Lifting the Veil of Silence on Standardized Testing | gadflyonthewallblog:
