Standardized Tests Wound The Soul

                It is not a terribly warm day today, but the sun is shining and Spring is screaming through the air. Both children I babysit after their school day were out on the playground when I picked them up. There was laughter, screaming, joy, and energy coming from every angle. All I could think was how wonderful it was to see children being children; playing with reckless abandon because most of them have no homework this evening or really all week. Why? It’s MCAS this week so the kids need to rest and relax because there is nothing wrong with stressed out children who have to take a test that will determine nothing about their lives. What can’t it always be like this? Why can’t every Spring afternoon at 4 p.m. look like that?
                My best friend’s 8 year old daughter wrote a well-crafted letter to the Easter Bunny asking all sorts of questions about the over-sized hopper’s personal life; Is it hard to get all the eggs delivered in one night? Do you have any friends? She ended her letter to him with a heart breaking, alcohol inducing statement: “....Bunnies ate lucky because they don't have to take the New York State test”. Well done America. We now have 8 year olds worrying about tests when they should be worrying about the kind of candy they will be receiving and if the damn bunny is even really based on the nutritional value of the candy.
When I began teaching, the MCAS was completely new to me. I had some familiarity with the concept of making certain all students were being taught the same thing in all schools at the same time especially since I needed to match my lessons plan for grad school with the standards in the ELA Frameworks. For those of you unfamiliar with the Frameworks and MCAS and all other Massachusetts teacher jargon, the Frameworks are guidelines for the instruction of specific portions of subject matter. For example, the Frameworks I used to create lesson plans and organize my curriculum as an English Language Arts teacher focused on language, reading and literature, composition, and media. Within each category were sub-categories that focused on various elements of what people my age know as the subject of English; poetry, fiction, speech, essays, non-fiction, etc.
The idea behind the Frameworks was that each year students would meet the grade appropriate standards, building on what they had learned in prior years so that when given the state assessment, they would reveal their skills and comprehension. Essentially, by being educated in, say, non-fiction standards, a piece of writing could be given to the students and they could easily assess and be questioned on anything regarding that piece of writing specific to non-fiction. Overall, it was not an unreasonable concept. It made sense and the MCAS didn’t seem so bad. I didn’t love the idea, but could understand why it was somewhat necessary. There was still room to, you know, TEACH the subject.
I couldn’t have been more wrong in my naïve green teacher thinking to assume that this installation of ‘guidelines’ was any more than an attempt to streamline education into a business model created by people who hadn’t been in a classroom for more than a year if that. I was foolish enough to trust that this country was run by people who believed in and encouraged knowledge with education. I had no idea that every single human, whose DIFFERENCES we are to accept, had to learn everything in the exact same manner, be tested with the exact same information, and forget that any other hard work done in the past twelve years could account for anything.
The first time this hit, square between my big brown eyes like a 50 bag of bricks, was when I was doing my internship at Arlington High School. My mentor was a kick ass woman whose name I have not yet gotten permission to use and she taught two sections of Creative Writing to juniors and seniors. One senior student in particular, who I will call Laureen, had struggled passing the MCAS since her sophomore year. All Laureen wanted to do was go to school to be a vet tech, possibly a veterinarian. She loved animals. She was not an academic by any means but had a dream, which was slowly being crushed by the MCAS and its hold on her diploma if she didn’t pass her third retake. The poor thing even wrote a college essay about it and I was beyond confused. There was no way, NO WAY this wonderful country with all of its freedoms and opportunities would keep someone, a paying someone, from going to college to better herself, especially if she wasn’t that great of a student.
But, indeed, that was the way, and I was sick to my stomach. How was that possible? Okay, maybe not an honor student or even a C student, but one who was close to finishing high school, with passing grades and a goal for her future; what sense did it make to ruin her life at seventeen because she was not a brainiac? Unfair didn’t even begin to describe how I felt. It was more like hopeless, and helpless, because I knew, at that moment, any work this girl had done in four years with the hopes of doing something with her life hung on the score of a standardized test. There was nothing I could do to change that reality and it killed. It still kills me.
Perhaps it was my shock and nerves that kept me from holding her after school until her next retake and shoving the information down her throat so she would pass. Perhaps it was my total and utter disbelief that she would actually be allowed to fail one exam after four years of passing, albeit barely, grades. Whatever it was, I can still feel that hot, burning, gut wrenching pit in my stomach for the disservice done to an American high school student. This was before elementary students were vomiting on themselves the morning of their MCAS out of nerves. This was before teaching and knowledge were forsaken to ensure ‘success’ on the MCAS. This was before I could possibly understand how disgraceful and hurtful such a test would become in our society. This was before I would come to see that I won’t ever be able to conform to such a closed minded idea of what marks actual student success. These days, children who don’t have blood pressure pills by 7^th grade will be considered a success in my book.