By Marion Brady | Special to the Sentinel
Posted May 5, 2004

I began my teaching career in the era of low-four-figure starting salaries. Like the other married male teachers at the first school in which I taught, I worked a summer job trying to make ends meet.

Fortunately, I had some construction skills, the required union membership, and a heavy contractor willing to take me on every summer on the first Monday after school was out.

Anyone who's worked around construction knows that inexperienced kids employed as helpers often get initiated on their first day. Sometimes this means being told to go to the tool crib and ask for a non-existent tool-a "left-handed monkey wrench," a "pipe-stretcher," or a "rubber tape measure." If they immediately trot off to do as they're told, they may be in for a rough summer.

"Rubber tape measure."

Next time you read an editorialist or other pundit pointing to standardized tests scores to prove that schools are better or worse, think "rubber tape measure."

A study in England gave a large group of 11-year-olds a series of simple problems in arithmetic. Each problem was worded three different ways.

For example, one problem read, "3 added to 14 makes ____." Ninety-seven percent of the kids knew the answer.

The same problem, worded differently, read, "What number is 3 more than 14?" The number of right answers dropped from 97% to 67 %.

A third wording read, "What number is 3 bigger than 14?" This time, 54% got the answer right.

What can be said with certainty about which kids knew what? Is mathematical ability or language facility being tested? Both? And if the answer is "both" for something as straightforward as a simple addition problem, how accurately is mathematical understanding being measured when the test items get more difficult?

Rubber tape measure.

Several hundred 12 and 13-year-old kids in New Zealand were asked a multiple-choice question about why daylight and darkness occur. Thirty percent bubbled in the right answer. But when they were given a flashlight and a globe and asked to show why it was sometimes day and sometimes night, 68% could do it.

What can be said with certainty about which of those kids knew what? Which-30% or 68%-is a more nearly accurate indicator of understanding? What about those 30% who bubbled in the correct answer? Can we know for certain that none were lucky guesses? Can we know for certain that even those who "knew" the right answer weren't just parroting it from memory and didn't really understand what the words meant?

Rubber tape measure.

The experiments in England and New Zealand involved native speakers of English. Given the problem the experiment suggests, how reliable and useful are math and reading scores coming out of schools attended by kids who grew up using non-standard English? Speaking different languages? Suffering from hearing and sight problems affecting language skills? Struggling with language-related learning disabilities?

Figuring out what's going on inside someone else's brain using nothing but words is an extremely crude "science." When those words are written by adults drawn from a narrow segment of American society, about the content of a curriculum which hasn't been rethought since the 1890s, put in a format that resembles nothing in real life, marketed by a corporation primarily concerned with its bottom line, cheer-led by leaders of business and government whose own houses are obviously not in order, and scored by machines incapable of making subtle distinctions, that crude science turns into a crap shoot.

To make an arbitrary number emerging from that crap shoot the main measure of educational quality is ridiculous. To abandon art, music, recess, and childhood merely to raise that near-meaningless number is child abuse. To tie a kid's future to it is criminal.

The standardized testing frenzy sweeping America is nuts. The variation and complexity of what goes on in the human brain can't begin to be measured by items on standardized, multiple choice tests. The testing companies know that, and say so in the fine print. The kind of teachers you'd better hope are teaching your kids know it too, but saying so can get them fired or bring on legal action.

Let me, again, quote H. G. Wells: "Human history becomes, more and more, a race between education and catastrophe."

Sadly, those responsible for the catastrophe won't be the ones who suffer from it.