There is an old saying among cattlemen that you do not fatten a calf by weighing it. I have heard it all my life, usually from people who want to make a point about schools. I have never understood the complaint. A weighed calf is a known calf. You can sell a known calf. Nobody at the sale barn wants to hear how the calf feels about itself.
I want to defend the standardized test, which has become the most unfairly treated thing in Texas education.
Consider what a test does. It takes a whole year of a child’s life, which is a messy and private thing, and turns it into a score you can write on a single line. Before the test, all you had was a teacher’s opinion. After the test, you have a fact. I have always preferred a fact, even a small one, to an opinion, even a large one.
Suppose a teacher spends the spring teaching to the test. I have asked myself what is wrong with that, and I cannot come up with an answer. If the test measures what matters, then teaching to it is teaching what matters. If it does not measure what matters, then the problem is with whatever it left out, and I suspect most of what it left out was not that important. Things that are important tend to be measurable. That has been my experience.
A friend of mine who teaches middle school tells me she has had to drop a unit on local history, and a science project where the children raised tadpoles, and most of the time she used to spend reading aloud. She sounded sad about it. I told her she should be proud. She had cleared away everything that could not be counted, and what was left was clean. You could hold it up to the light.
There is a kind of parent who complains that her child is anxious in the weeks before the test. I am sympathetic. But I think a little anxiety in a child is the beginning of seriousness. We are not raising children to be comfortable. We are raising them to perform, and performance begins with being watched.
The people who want less testing always say they want more learning instead. I notice they never tell you how you would know the learning happened. They want you to take it on faith, the way you would take a child’s word that he brushed his teeth. I do not run my household that way, and I do not think the state should run its schools that way either. That is a good part of why I will vote for the Republican for Senate this fall. I have the impression the other side would like to trade some of the testing for things you cannot write on a single line, and I would like to keep the line.
The boy who lives across the road from us finished the year last month. I could not tell you a single thing he learned. I could tell you his score.
D. M.