What is it like being a kid in the standardized testing labyrinth of American education? I wonder if those of us who aren’t kids ask that question enough. I also wonder if kids themselves understand their own feelings about being tested, understand that it isn’t an inevitable aspect of being educated.

So many people comment on the unfairness of the standardized testing juggernaut, the money being made by those who run it, and the way it frustrates most educational goals. But how often do we hear from the victims, the students, about their own awareness of and reflection on their experiences? What would we have if did get more of a perspective from the kids themselves about what being testing feels like or if we provided platforms to communicate those feelings?

When I talk to my Drexel students about standardized testing, they respond with eye-rolling exasperation — I mean, who likes tests? — but testing to them has moved into the realm of death and taxes: Inevitable and unchangeable. (Also, to be fair, the students at Drexel are smart and in general have done extremely well in school and in tests. In some ways, they are the winners in the standardized testing rat race.) In our conversations, it rarely dawns on them that many people involved with their learning hate these tests too. Or maybe they know but have given up worrying about it, and why not?: Most of the folks in my professional spheres — especially my colleagues who run writing programs — are furious about standardized testing, but our conversations about testing sometimes enervate me. As thoughtful as these dialogues can be, we don’t seem to end up doing anything. So when I, just one little professor, try to share their frustration with testing, they are like, “Yeah, but what are you able to do about it? Nothing. Let’s get on with it.”

They don’t think about the fact that their human potential, broadly speaking, is being measured from when they are young. As Don Peck, in a recent article in The Atlantic, “Can the Middle Class be Saved?”, says, “Among the more pernicious aspects of the meritocracy as we now understand it in the United States is the equation of merit with test-taking success, and the corresponding belief that those who struggle in the classroom should expect to achieve little outside it. Progress along the meritocratic path has become measurable from a very early age. This is a narrow way of looking at human potential, and it badly underserves a large portion of the population.”

They don’t think about the fact that while they are encouraged to engage in outside-the-box thinking we keep trying to find ways to measure that skill by filling in bubbles.

While they don’t articulate what they think because the testing environment is probably so transparent now, the effects aren’t. I see them, even in my own writing classes. These smart Drexel kids come in having been drilled for years in writing formulaic five-paragraph essays. They are great at it. But when they have arrived in a college writing course and you ask them to add a sixth paragraph, suspicion and doubt arise. They look at me skeptically, wondering where this mysterious sixth paragraph might go. But any annoyance and frustration they feel is more directed at me than the tests that have made them this way.

So most of them don’t think about any of these things; they are too busy competing and surviving to reflect. But some do. A few students created this video gem, “Love Letter to Albuquerque Public Schools”  (for those worried about time, it’s only two minutes long). These students express a collective outrage at the way they are ranked, judged, metricked, counted — largely through the testing to which they are subjected. It’s a bitter cry of social protest.

Maybe one day we will test someone literally to death. Then the kids, who can organize now faster than ever, might rise up, en masse, a class, a school, a whole district, and say “no” to the tests. If they did, could we look them in the eye and tell them their rage — although simmering and unvoiced — wasn’t justified all along?

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Scott Warnock

Scott Warnock is a writer and teacher who lives in South Jersey. He is a professor of English at Drexel University, where he is also the Associate Dean of Undergraduate Education in the College of Arts and Sciences. Father of three and husband of one, Scott is president of a local high school education foundation and spent many years coaching youth sports.

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Tags: education, virtual children by Scott Warnock // 5 Comments »