Standardized People

It's testing season: That time of year when students calculate and bubble and read and underline and write. That time when high-stakes, stress-inducing moments burst into the lives of children of all ages and the adults who are more and more impacted by the results. Testing season used to be just a few days, then a couple weeks.

Then something happened. Someone somewhere decided that better education is synonymous with more testing. Someone somewhere came to the conclusion that tests are infallible tools of measurement that can quantify the quality of and degree of talent and brilliance in a person. I don't know who that someone somewhere is, but it is certainly not any of the outstanding, caring, hard-working, constantly embattled teachers I know personally.

So testing season has expanded. Weeks and weeks of testing go on seemingly endlessly. There are practice tests and pre-tests and tests and post-tests and make-up tests and re-tests. There are resulting scores made from complicated formulas using mysterious, sometimes even imaginary, variables. The system wants standardized answers taught in standardized lessons by standardized teachers in standardized schools. But human thought isn't standardized. Creativity, innovation, problem-solving, invention, imagination, humor, beauty are not standardized. Problems and challenges that we all face are not standardized. Life is not standardized.

The national trend in education is depressing, demoralizing, deadening for all the good teachers out there who still try to do the right thing by their students in spite of our march toward Bubble Nation. Florida has been the epicenter of much of the experimentation. The experimentation is wrong. It is a failure. But there is no standardized test I can come up with to prove that to anyone.