Musings from a Not-So-Master Teacher

I walk down the hall with a large stack of test booklets and mentally rehearse the rules.  I am an alter boy - a mere pawn who, if all goes well, can fly under the radar. Here in Arizona, AIMS testing is the Holy Week of Arizona’s education, where students spend a total of eight hours taking a grueling standardized test.

Every part of this system resembles a religious rite.  A week ahead of time, we sit through a sermon about how important these tests are.  Any small infraction will lead to a virtual Hell called School Improvement.  From Mt. Sinai (otherwise known as Capitol Hill) we receive instructions about the punishments and rewards assigned by No Child Left Behind.  On a more local level, we receive a set of commandments entitled “Test Administration Directions.”  This sixty-six page document explains everything a teacher can and cannot do, as well as precise directions of what to say.

There are an assortment of rules that I must follow.  For one, I cannot have anything about reading or writing on my walls.  I cannot let a student touch another student’s test booklet- as this is a taboo that what make the test booklet impure.  I must make sure that I do not read the test or the answers of students.  After I have agreed to these rules, I have to sign a covenant- some sort of contract that says that if I screw up, I can lose my job. 

We instruct the students a week before how this test is “very important” and we give them another set of rules regarding what they need to do at home: eat healthy, get a good night’s sleep, review what you have learned. The entire process resembles a ritual: I line up at the office to receive and count the test booklets.  I must keep the booklets with me wherever I go.  It's their first communion into a religion of the American Dream, where Heaven is defined as a large house in the suburbs and an SUV and kids who earn shiny plastic trophies and a shiny plastic trophy wife to go with it.

When the bell rings, I distribute snack foods for the students, followed by attendance.  Class must remain absolutely silent as the procession begins.  I read the purple instruction booklet with the sincerity and severity of a priest, reciting each line of the liturgy with absolute accuracy.  Any delineation can lead to “invalid” test scores.  Students, for their part, work hard on the test and some of them genuinely believe that they are being judged.  Here, the religion will rank them, set them into the categories of super-holy (exceeds), holy (meets), approaching holy (approaches) and outcaste (falls far below). 

At first glance, this appears to be a farce- some sort of sick joke to mock religion.  Yet, people really buy into this golden cow.  With all reverence, they quote the scores, print them in newspapers and trumpet them on school web pages.  The government uses them to rank schools and dish out rewards, namely money and punishments.  Student scores determine graduation, high school tracking programs and eventually college admissions.  Parents use the scores to determine where they will raise their kids.  Businesses create their strategic plans based upon how well districts score.  Thus, our economy, our government, our family planning all connect to how well a group of kids do on a fill-in-the-bubble, rote memorization test.

Like any fundamentalist religion, what we miss in the process is the dialogue.  Critics ask, “Are these tests valid?”  or “Is this test too expensive?”  Some even venture to ask, “Is there a test bias?”  A few renegade teachers decry this form of assessment for more alternative ways of testing students. Instead they advocate portfolios, reflections and other ways of measuring growth.

What no one asks though, are the following questions: Why bother with testing?  How can education be measured?  What is the point of an education?  Why do we send students to school?  What is the purpose of learning?  What is the major goal we want to accomplish in our schools?  We raise the banner of achievement, excellence and effectiveness; but we never question what it is that we are trying to achieve, what it means to have an excellent education and what effective education actually looks like in life.  We are running around frantically, but going in no direction- like a hamster on a wheel.