TESTING: ONE, TWO, THREE

It's that time of year again, when the sweaters come off, the annuals come out, and the students prepare. For the test, for the test scores, for the test schedule for next year. The kids of America are drowning in multiple-choice questions, No. 2 pencils and acronyms. Along with the ABCs, there are the GQEs (Graduation Qualifying Exam), the SOLs (Standards of Learning), the TAKS (Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills) and of course the SAT. A group called the National Center for Fair & Open Testing estimates that public schools give more than 100 million standardized tests each year.

Full disclosure: in the interests of informed punditry I recently took a practice SAT test, the first standardized test I have taken since 1969, and by the end I thought the top of my head would blow off. Perhaps it was the reading-comp section on Keats. Perhaps it was the fact that I believe geometry is the Devil's work. Perhaps it was simply that doing any task for nearly five hours challenges what Mother Theodosia used to call the ants in my pants.

But more than anything I was enraged by the process, and by the forced march that seems to have replaced creative thought, critical thinking and joyful learning for so many kids. In "High Stakes," a look at the issue aired recently by CNN's documentary unit, one teacher in Florida reported third graders sobbing because they were so unhinged by the prospect of yet another standardized test. "These kids are just tested out," the teacher said. Third grade?!

Our education system is broken; accountability and standards will fix it. This is the mantra of government testing programs, from local certifications to the federal No Child Left Behind program, which might as well be called No Child Left Untested. That last grew out of something called the Texas Miracle, in which the use of standardized tests in that state quickly led to marked increases in student scores in a way that seemed too good to be true. And it was. Whistle-blowers reported that teachers helped some kids to cheat in elementary and middle schools, and that some ninth graders were being repeatedly held back so their performance wouldn't depress scores for tests administered in 10th grade. The CNN documentary reported that Austin High School, for instance, had 1,160 ninth graders in 2000, yet fewer than 300 were enrolled in 10th grade the next year. Figuring that one out would make an interesting SAT problem.

But even with testing free of that sort of fraud, the useful endpoint of all this remains unclear. If test results were deconstructed to reveal that phonics, say, was a weak point in a classroom, there might be curricular value, but most of the time the tests are merely scored up or down for the sake of the system--and the press conferences. Teachers are under so much pressure to teach to the test that they are sometimes forced to move on hastily and concentrate on the narrow and tedious, to skip over the interesting side issues or questions that make for dynamic learning.

And what does this metastasizing testing, for every subject, at every level, at every time of the year, do to kids? It has to mean that students absorb the message that learning is a joyless succession of hoops through which they must jump, rather than a way of understanding and mastering the world. Every question has one right answer; the measure of a person is a number. Being insightful, or creative, or, heaven forfend, counterintuitive counts for nothing. This is: (a) benighted; (b) ridiculous; (c) sad; (d) all of the above.