Testing...testing

Ok, I guess it's best to accept the fact that the current educational panacea is testing and more testing. The high-stakes testing lifestyle seems to be unavoidable these days, though I also sense the mood of educators is starting to shift toward defiance now that it's clear where things are headed: inescapable, unmerited humiliation for all involved--students, schools, school districts, and whole communities.

While schools are doing better, more professional work than ever, solving more students' problems than ever, and tackling more of the obstacles society tosses in the way of their mission, along comes a legion of politicians--from both the federal and state levels--anxious to rap somebody's knuckles with punitive testing and (bend over, please!) "accountability" schemes.

A week or so ago the L.A. Times editorialized passionately against a bill currently kicking around in Sacramento that would offer a very limited number of students in the state to receive a high school diploma even though they'd been unable to pass the state's High School Exit Exam. These students will have fulfilled all their school districts' unit and course requirements, will have taken all possible remedial courses, and have failed the exit exam at least three times.

The Times was horrified that the legislature should even consider backing down on the newly established testing hurdle. Fact is, the State Department of Education backed off two years ago from their original plan to enforce the law for the class of 2004 and dodged the firestorm of protest and lawsuits sure to come their way from some 75,000 (mostly underprivileged minority) families of students denied diplomas at the eleventh hour of their pathetically underfunded, but free public education.

But now the ax is poised to fall and everyone--politicians and students alike--are going to have to live with their shortcomings. Or will they? Predictably, the politicians are looking for a way around the inevitable. Somewhere in the deepest recesses of their prehistoric brains, these people know what teachers everywhere learn in a couple semesters of service--that when you attempt to teach a challenging curriculum to the entire range of pupils and set reasonable expectations for achievement, you will inevitably still have students who don't succeed.

It's just how things are. It isn't a matter of how high or low the expectations for success are set, and it's not a matter of how skilled the teacher is or how much pressure is put on the school's principal. It just can't be avoided.

Let's go even further, though. Let's admit that it's not just that some students don't or won't work hard enough to meet expectations, but, in fact, in any school there are students who CAN'T meet our reasonable standards. There are more of them than we would care to acknowledge. They don't read because after years of trying, they still can't get beyond decoding some simple letter combinations, and words never come alive for them on a page, as they do for the rest of us. They never catch on to the magic of numbers and the power of symbolic logic because they just aren't wired that way.

They are the ones who belie our beautifully stated little mission statements that assert that all students can learn.

Well, all students can learn something, but the days of trying to evaluate what these unfortunate individuals can and can't accomplish individually have long since expired. Schools now exist in the realm of universal content standards and assessment goals. It's all measurable in terms of an Academic Performance Index and precise calculations of Adequate Yearly Progress,

Here's how one state's Web site summarizes it: No Child Left Behind requires each state to define adequate yearly progress for school districts and schools, within the parameters set by Title I. Each state begins by setting a "starting point" that is based on the performance of its lowest-achieving demographic group or of the lowest-achieving schools in the state, whichever is higher. The state then sets the bar--or level of student achievement--that a school must attain after two years in order to continue to show adequate yearly progress. Subsequent thresholds must be raised at least once every three years, until, at the end of 12 years, all students in the state are achieving at the proficient level on state assessments in reading/language arts and math.

As schools fall behind--as any statistician or Vegas bookie can tell you they all inexorably will--they are designated as PIS. The No Child Left Unscrewed folks tell us that's an acronym for Program Improvement School, but we all get the message. Obviously, the fatal ingredient in this witch's brew is the phrase, "until...all students in the state are achieving at the proficient level on state assessments..."

Now, if we can't bring ourselves to admit that's not going to happen, then at least we can acknowledge the consequences and stand behind our choices as resolutely as we launched into the scheme. For instance, the state legislature--and indeed the L.A. Times--should tell us how admirable it is that a high school diploma is beyond the reach of so many young people who have hung in there to the bitter end, how good it is for character building to face one's limitations and accept "no" for an answer. This is doubly ennobling when your experience with English is limited to just a few years and you go to a decaying, overcrowded school in an immigrant neighborhood where standard formal English is rarely heard except on school campuses.

If we aren't quite that cynical yet, then why shouldn't we make some effort to regard a pubic education as a win-win proposition for everyone. If we don't want to hand out diplomas to the undeserving, then let's hand out certificates of completion that testify to a student's motivation and perseverance. By all means, make a high school diploma stand as a credible academic degree, but perhaps we shouldn't push every child toward that degree when our society also needs people with non-academic skills. It's reasonable to assume that even the shiftless, the recalcitrant, and the learning disabled will eventually build on their rudimentary educations and pick up the skills of their trades--whatever they may be.

Let's face it, the extent of unameliorated poverty in this country, exposed by recent experiences with natural disasters, is not the result of faulty schools or languishing academic standards. It's the result of callous attitudes and perpetual neglect.

Would that there were standardized tests for those traits.