By James Arnold
Are you defined by a test? If you were born before 1985, chances are the answer is “no.” If, on the other hand, you were born after that date, you and your public education experience are data points on administrators’ data walls — all required by the high-stakes standardized testing policies that started in the No Child Left Behind era and that have turned America’s classrooms into test-prep factories.
(Notice that I said public education.While a test-based “accountability” regime has been imposed upon students in public education, no such laws or requirements have been extended to the 10 percent of U.S. students in private or religious schools. Do you hear the outcry from teachers, parents and politicians over the omission of that 10 percent from the “mandates and benefits” of standardized testing and accountability? Of course not.)
Right now your child in public education, from kindergarten through their senior year, is being bullied by those who insist that the only way public schools and public school teachers can be held accountable is through ever more standardized testing and data-driven instruction and data points and data walls and data analysis.
Almost all of the tests I took during my educational career were made by teachers. Remember those? They are tests that individual teachers constructed and designed particularly for the students in their classes that covered a well-defined content area or subject. That was back when teachers were trusted and allowed to teach without legislative and federal over-the-shoulder intrusiveness. The scores we made on those tests ended up being a significant part of our grade at the end of each grading period. There were few, if any, abortive legislative attempts at legislating excellence and teachers, for the most part, were not only allowed but encouraged to actually teach."
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