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Thursday, Jul 9, 2009
The biggest case against standardized testing might be the people who score the tests -- people like me, for instance.
Jun 5, 2002 | I always tested well. Amid the tedium of worksheets and rote reports, I welcomed a standardized test, because it was something different. It would not affect our grades, and we couldn't "fail," our teachers assured us. It was just "to see where we were at." Today, a standardized test comes with a lot more pressure, especially for 12th graders. In many states, if you don't pass the test, you don't graduate. And if you do pass the test, but the company your state hires to grade that test screws up, you also don't graduate.
In the year 2000, 8,000 Minnesota students flunked a test they actually passed. The company the school district hired to grade the tests erroneously down-scored them. Fifty of these tests belonged to seniors, and for them this was a life-changing screw-up, derailing college admissions, graduation parties and the chance to stand in cap and gown with their classmates. A year later, another test-scoring company mis-scored 1,800 tests in Pennsylvania. In a few weeks, we'll surely hear about this year's blunders.
I read these news stories every year around graduation time. I pay attention, because I've taken these tests, and for one brief summer, I scored them. And that experience led me to believe with absolute certainty that standardized tests are an utter waste of money and valuable teaching time, and that they measure nothing more than a state government's willingness to waste money.
Like many of my friends, I left college approximately as unemployable as I'd been when I arrived. My degree was in English, which qualified me to continue my previous summers' employment at Dairy Queen, where I had perfected the classic loop-de-loop soft-serve cone. Instead, I ended up scoring public-school students' standardized tests. It paid a dollar more per hour, although I'd have to bring my own lunch. "Grade student essays! Be a part of the education process!" the ad in the classifieds had said. Most exciting of all, "Must possess college degree; submit proof of graduation at interview." Someone aside from my mother actually wanted to see my diploma! This document and my Sallie Mae loan repayment coupon book were the only proof I had of my college smarts.
The ad spoke right to me: "English and art majors a plus!" But it wasn't that the company wanted to hire people who stirred to the music of great literature and art. It was simply that art and English majors were the only graduates who would be grateful to make $6 an hour.
The interview was a little like jury duty. I appeared at the required time. I twitched in a room with 20 or 30 people until my name was called. An intake person photocopied my diploma and assigned me to the Georgia Basic Skills Test. I was asked to report to work the following Monday. That was it. I did not have to interview, network or submit a résumé. I did not need a background in K-12 education. I did not need to care about or understand children, although it was obvious I'd been one, pretty recently.
The case against standardized testing generally pits the kid against the test. The criticisms are familiar by now: Is it fair to put a kid under the stress of a test? Are standardized tests really an accurate measure of anything a kid knows, or needs to know? Do tests give unfair advantages to white kids, well-off kids, kids from suburbs?
But no one talks about the real inadequacy of the standardized testing process: the relationship the kid, the testee, had with me, the test scorer. I was underpaid, treated without dignity and reminded daily that I was disposable -- and I held the power to affect the lives of thousands of kids.
We were English and art graduates, musicians, displaced tradespeople and telemarketers. Some of us were so spectacularly sociopathic that we could find no other work. Some of the scorers had earned their degrees in prison. There was a tense and hostile woman who worked as a freelance bookseller, evidently not making a living at it. There was a teacher -- just one -- waiting for her real contact with kids in the fall. If she hated children as much as she seemed to hate adults, her students were in for a miserable year.
We mingled at lunchtime and learned a bit about each other, and cliques formed, just like in school. I became good pals with an unemployed meter reader who regaled me with thrilling tales of garbage houses, basement shrines and naked housewives until one day he simply never showed up -- whether his choice or the company's, I never knew.
We were hired to score the tests children took in the spring, and the work would last through the summer, maybe into the fall, depending on how fast we worked. Each test was scheduled for a two- or three-week time frame, and if we finished early, we'd go home without pay until the next test started. That encouraged us to dawdle. If we were going too slowly, the test administrator would urge us to burn through the remaining tests extra quickly. Easy enough for us, but unfair to the kids we were speed-scoring. But we were used to unfair.
