In addition to all the social-justice questions raised by the MCAS, I think there are terrible implications for education for all students–even the most gifted or privileged. That has to do with the confusion between the test and and what it purports to measure.

As Linda Vitello points out, there are lots of ways of learning, and many of them are hard to measure–especially by a machine. And that leads to the inherent problem with testing: we test the things that are easy to measure (multiple choice questions, e.g.) and then we get stuck in the trap of thinking the test (because it’s measurable) is the most important thing. The problem isn’t “teaching to the test” but rather “teaching to the testing.” Because of the nature of these high-stakes tests, our teachers are spending hours and hours teaching test-taking skills, though those aren’t the skills our students will need after graduation (I for one have taken 1 multiple-choice test in the past 24 years).

Here’s an example of how it affects our classrooms. A discouraging percentage of things my daughter is given to read in school end with multiple choice rather than open-ended questions. I can only assume that is because the school (or, more likely, educational publishing companies) view reading as another time to practice test-taking skills. Multiple-choice tests do make sense when thousands of tests are being graded by a machine, but I see no place for them in a classroom where a teacher is doing the grading. First of all, they’re less accurate in measuring knowledge than requiring children to produce the answer, and second of all, they give the false impression that there is a single right answer in reading literature. But we seem to have them to give children more time to practice that test-taking skill–which is tantamount to replacing education with Kaplan test-prep.

How educated a person is (or how creative, logical, eloquent) is not always easy to measure, as we can see from the very fact that people are always disagreeing in politics, art, academia, and even science. On my bleaker days I feel that focusing on what is easy to measure rather than on what really matters is destroying American education.

One more elitist but heartfelt example. At my (private) high school, we had no AP classes, because they assumed a well-educated person would be able to ace any test on the subject. It wasn’t actually true. In 11th grade however, I had a new Latin teacher who came in from a prep school, and he prepped us for the test using all the tricks. We only read books 1, 2, 4, and 6 of the Aenied, because those were the only books ever tested; we focused on the passages most likely to be on the test; we practiced using previous year’s versions. It was the easiest test I ever took, and yet it was the least meaningful class I had that year. Here we were with that great poem (and it is a GREAT poem), treating it like the Cliff Notes, never seeing the glorious whole of it, and for what? Only where education is viewed as a commodity and not for its intrinsic value is the 5 I earned on the AP worth more than an actual knowledge of the Aenied. (Of course, none of it mattered, as I never took Latin again. Except that it does matter, to me.) Last summer I sat on the interviews for the assistant superintendent position. One of the candidates commented that it doesn’t seem that Shakespeare was the on the MCAS anymore, and that if he wasn’t on the 2008 test, perhaps he could be dropped from the curriculum. I almost barfed. I can imagine serious debate about whether or not Shakespeare is appropriate for the modern child but to decide it based on whether or not it is tested is yet another indication of how the proxy (i.e. the test) is treated as more important than the thing it is supposed to measure (i.e., education).