THE BOY I tutor one night brought home an assignment to write a poem. He enjoyed himself at work more than I had ever seen before. In large part, children most love learning when teachers ask them to use their own creativity and innovation to solve problems. After he finished, the boy asked why his school didn't give him more assignments like this one.
In the weeks before, we had worked on a dry test packet his teachers had sent home to prepare him for Virginia's Standards of Learning tests. We paged through a thick stack of photocopies taken from a past Texas Assessment of Academic Skills test, which President George W. Bush expanded and renamed as Texas's governor.
In the end, my little drama unfolds only as an anecdote from the national experience of recent years. The nationwide onslaught of school testing, fueled mostly by Republicans (and Democratic centrists) with their desire for "accountability" in a school system they see as stubbornly failing, has not helped our children learn or expand their minds. Not only do these policies usually make for worse educations, but they head students in a fundamentally wrong direction.
It's difficult to tell where to start assaulting the stupidities of the testing regime. Over 40 states and the federal government require repeated standardized tests, and many tie their education funds to various performance standards. Not only do these laws make a gargantuan mistake by tacking funds onto school performance (so that schools that are "failing" often due to their few resources actually receive less), they also make a second and even larger one: They measure "failure" or "success" with test scores.
Indeed, as any principal at a "failing" low-income school could tell you, their first successes come when children from their neighborhoods, raised largely without college expectations, show up in the first place and demonstrate a love of learning. Strangely enough, these factors rarely enter the states' calculations of "success," while principals (especially in poorer districts) now face losing their jobs if they can't turn around superficial test scores with fewer and fewer resources.
The paranoia the testing regime brews among school administrators has poisoned our education system. In Texas, many school principals have purposefully manipulated their test populations -- taking preparation focus off those on the bottom deemed "hopeless," limiting the amount of students taking the tests -- to keep their jobs. Of course, non-tested students do not advance. Teachers nationwide have to burn valuable class time teaching their students multiple-choice guessing strategies in order to secure state and federal moneys. Ultimately, the system does not principally penalize lazy or underperforming school workers. It punishes the students, and no government can heal the thousands of neglected minds and children left behind.
The funding schemes and success metrics enacted in the name of "accountability" only create a system where middle-class schools meet standards and drain funding from money-starved "failing" schools, usually poorer. This dynamic creates the perennial underperformance that conservative testing regime proponents cite as a reason to implement stricter standards. In the meantime, the same legislators fund barely-regulated charter schools, voucher programs and school-change provisions that mostly exacerbate white or middle-class flight. These legislators will do anything to solve the education problem -- except create an equitable system.
But even if legislators engineered a just funding system, even if they measured school performance more accurately (and even if the White House fully funded its own bill), the aim of the testing regime is fundamentally false. In fact, this education scheme perhaps represents conservatives' biggest gift to big business. Not only do these regulations feed large-scale publishers in a standardized testing industry, measured at $234 million in 2000, but at the expense of learning and creativity, they design the type of "problem solvers" that large employers have requested of the states: ones that think inside the box. Learning has become a matter of "inputs and outputs," both to the testing companies that profit from this legislation and to the big businesses that prefer well-oiled automotons to creative thinkers. At the point we design our schools as feeders into cubicles, we have betrayed our children. These policies have abandoned the idea of liberal education while sacrificing our children's minds at the altar of productivity.
Soon, another class will graduate from the University's Curry School. They will leave aiming to inspire children despite their expanding role as drill coordinators. And when their students enter the University, will they present the same mental energy and creativity that a good education should feed? Indeed, education should not only train the mind, but free it. But in an abstract sense, our children remain prisoners to fumbling policymakers with the wrong intentions.
Michael Slaven's column appears Fridays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at mslaven@cavalierdaily.com.
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