10 Reasons Why Standardized Tests Are Not So Standard

So after a minor kerfuffle over the necessity of taking our annual standardized tests--

     Tian: Tell me why we have to take these again?
     Me: Because next year you have to jump back into the box.
     Tian: So.
     Me: The Man would like you to have some proof that you haven't spent the year sitting in front of the TV.
     Tian: But they don't show anything important about who I am. These tests are dumb.
     Me: If you don't take these tests, I will never feed you again.
     Tian: Okay fine. If that's what I have to do to be fed...

--the annual testing rigamarole has begun. This year, some of us were motivated to jam through the tests and just get them done.

Yes, he wins the highly motivated tester
of the spring award. Yes, I was surprised, too. 

Others of us, however, were not so motivated because this year's tests were hard. This someone who will remain nameless throughout this blog post (I am feeling generous with my doofus children today since we are nearly done with school) made me shoot back to my days at the School for International Training, and straight into my Testing and Evaluation Course which, at the time, I just did not get. Okay, so I got the Testing part, because what teacher has never given a test? And I got the Evaluation part, because that is just like testing, right? But all of the other stuff that went with this course? Most of it, frankly, was lost on me, so much so that I cannot recall much of the course content at all. However, two things have stuck with me:

1.) The prof told a story on the first day about a seahorse and its aimless wandering around the Pacific Ocean. The story ended with the seahorse never getting anywhere because he did not know where he was going. The moral of this story is that seahorses do not know how to read maps.

2.) There is no such thing as a national test, or even a state test, that is standardized.

You can perhaps see why this second part threw me for a loop because of course there are standardized tests! Scads of them! And they all have nifty acronyms! The SAT, the ACT, the GRE, the GED, the CAT, the list could go on ad nauseam.

So here is how THE test (I won't say which test we used, but I will say it was one of the biggies) missed the mark on assessing Unnamed Child this year because her reality is not the same reality of the group against she is being normed.

Really, it was fascinating.

1. Climate Conflicts 
When this is your daily reality

 

and then you are asked a question about dew in the morning, you think this at 7 a.m.:

2. Architectural Conflicts

When this is where the leader of your current country lives, and all important buildings are flat and sort of simplistic

and then you are asked to identify where the most important decisions are made in the USA, you are going to choose this place, 

which is also flat and sort of simplistic, saying as you do so, "This looks like a place the Sultan would make a good decision in" as you bubble in choice C.

3. Sporting Conflicts

When you play rugby in your spare time and hang with a million other little kids who play rugby or soccer, the words "baseball pennant" mean absolutely nothing to you, and when you are asked to identify the picture with the baseball pennant in the middle, you are left wondering both "What's baseball?" and "Are you talking about a pen?". Sad but true.

4. Signage Conflicts 

Let's say you are accustomed to seeing this sign

Let's also suppose that you live in a country where signs and signals are more or less optional. When you are asked, "Which sign means that you should continue to drive at a set speed?", which one will you choose? 

Yes, this one:

Your rationale will be that there is a similar one here that no one ever stops for. And you will also rationalize this sign, saying that you sure don't know what "Yield" means since you have never seen that word before, but it sounds like "Yes" and that means to keep going.

I am not making this up.

5. Dietary Conflicts

When you have half of your childhood in a place where corn comes pre-scraped from the cob, in neat little cups, where it has been seasoned with butter and salt and sprinkled with chili, talk of a corn doll only serves to confuse. "Do you mean it is a doll made from corn? Like yellow corn? Like with chili? What?!?" The rest of the question was lost on Unnamed Child since the thought of making a doll out of corn kernels was pretty incomprehensible. I am still trying to wrap my head around what she must have been thinking.

6. A Phone Book? Is That Like a Reading Book? But For Phones?

Enough said.

7. Educational Conflicts

    This is similar to the school that appeared in the test booklet. 

Unnamed Child thought it was a villa and so she was completely flabbergasted, missing the rest of the test question. I guess to the untrained eye it looks like an apartment building. I don't know, I guess it is hard to believe that schools look like that when you are used to seeing this in the private schools that we regularly frequent here:

British School Muscat

Royal Flight Muscat

8. Clothing Conflicts

If the coldest the weather gets for you is a summer day in Europe, then this kind of coat is going to throw you for a loop:

And why did Unnamed Child not choose this as an answer for, "Fill in the circle under the item you would wear if you forgot your hat on a winter's day"? Because, as she said, "Is that a real coat? I have never seen one like that. And winter isn't even cold. Duh."

9. Equatorial Conflict

"Fill in the circle under the number that tells how many hours of sunlight are in a day in the summer in the United States." She was completely floored by this question as here it is 12 hours of sunlight in a day almost all year round. So I totally unstandardized the test and said, "Look, think of Europe in the summer. How long are the days when we go to Germany? Or England?" That fixed it. 

Don't tell the testing service.

10. "What?!? You can have a license plate with your name on it?!?! What the..."

The information that followed, "Suppose you see a license plate with the name 'Susan' on it..." went unheard and unnoticed.

Okay, so I can already hear my mother trying to puzzle this one out. How can she not know these things? She spends almost three months out of every year in the USA! The best I can do is say that, when kids are young, what is here and now is what is real and what dominates their perception of the world. What was nine months ago is so, well, nine months ago. 

Yes, sometimes standardized testing is a necessary evil. But how much validity does it hold? Culture is measured just as much as information acquired. I hope next year's school administration is kind and understanding. 

And I hope they don't laugh too much at Unnamed Child for not knowing her behind from her elbow.  Thank goodness there was nothing about that on the test. 

School Photos

Teaching. It isn't the job it once was--0ne that came with a long-term pay off in the form of a guarantee of job security and a generous pension. As we were leaving Greensville there were daily reminders as to how the state of education was changing, with talk of reduced or cancelled pensions. The spring was lay-off season for the next school year. With each day leading up to the inevitable announcement of job cuts, the school felt more and more like a shark tank...the questions was always one of "Who will get eaten next?"

I felt like I was teaching constantly, which was ironic since my job was often one of support instead of one of pure instruction. When I wasn't teaching, I was running recovery for some crisis or another with a student (referred to as "putting out fires"). And when that wasn't happening, I was planning for what I would teach next. And when I wasn't doing either of those things I was recovering from teaching and putting out "fires". I liked the work and loved the students, but I found in the day to day schedule that I felt I wasn't really teaching much, and in the three seconds a day that I had free I would reflect upon the questions of "what is learning?" and "what does it mean to be educated?" and "why are we doing this anyhow?"

And then some other student would show up, a teacher would call, or a crisis would brew. And those questions would be set once again upon the back burner in favor of the more immediate need to respond to a parent who was looking for a translation, or to feed a child who hadn't eaten since the day before, or to help someone pass a benchmark test or a quiz, and there would be no more time to think upon such things as "why are we doing this anyhow?"

It took me months to rehabilitate myself after four years of the exhausting teach/extinguish-->plan-->recover-->teach/extinguish-->plan-->recover cycle. In retrospect, the absence of time to reflect upon why I was investing so many hours a week in something that didn't clearly justify such immense and intense energy was sapping. However, just this year, I am feeling like I have recovered enough to start to reflect on the whys of education again. This, of course, brings me no closer to an answer but at the very least I am feeling like I have the clarity of thought to entertain these questions once again, and that clarity of thought is affording a bit more freedom to move beyond pencil paper and look at the possibility of education away from what is conventionally thought of as education.

Last month we did the unthinkable and took a whole day off from school to travel to Nizwa, about an hour away, and study things unrelated to our regular course of study. We looked at dungeon designs and torture techniques in the historic Nizwa Fort.

We studied cultural differences in non-verbal communication and toilet signage.

We looked at big rocks and then climbed up and down them.

We studied armory and battle techniques.


And we practiced looking like punks in photos. It was quite the day.

The forced me to reflect back upon the last time I traveled anywhere with a large group of school-aged children, since we had traveled to get where we were, and all 11 of the kids were definitely of school age. I was teaching in Greensville and we had taken the entire second grade on the annual voyage to North Carolina to visit a life sciences museum. The museum itself went down a treat but two of the buses inexplicably broke down an hour from the Virginia border on the way back.


All 240 students were wonderfully patient and, even though countless baseball games, scout meetings, and church functions were missed, everyone was understanding. The museum was great fun, of course, and properly aligned to our science standards for the year. The kids were threatened within inches of their lives that they must behave properly in this public place and they behaved accordingly. It was a really nice field trip and went off without a hitch--more or less.


Now fast forward two years to the trip to Nizwa. It was totally unaligned with any suggestion of a standard that I might have been following. The kids ran and screamed like banshees through the dungeons, which were a health and safety nightmare with no lighting, extremely uneven flooring, and thick authentic chains hanging from the walls. There were no guard rails on the stairs but we managed to not lose a single attendee.


Tehva found the historically accurate toilets and went so far as to pull her pants down before I could stop her. No one read many of the well-written informational plaques. Many of the children nearly wet themselves with fright after they stepped on a motion sensor and triggered a recording of bomb blasts, meant to simulate this passage during a battle. No one signed a permission slip.


My teacher brain kept muttering that this was quite possibly the worst field trip I had ever coordinated, simply because there were no standards, no outcome goals, and no clear way to define what the kids had learned.


And yet, this is the trip they keep coming back to day after day in school on their own, without my prompting. They have painted pictures of the mountains surrounding Nizwa. Silas wrote a fictionalized account about a battle fought in nearby Tanuf after we visited the remains of the mud village there. They look at the photos and laugh at how goofy they are. They have looked on the internet for additional information about the "murder holes" we saw built into the side of Nizwa Fort, from which defending troops would dump boiling date syrup on intruders.


And throughout this spring I keep asking myself about the nature of learning and what it means to be educated, simply because we have done more of these types of trips this year and less of the worksheets and book work with which I had become more comfortable while in Greensville. I am sure that the quality of the education they are getting is enough, but does it allow for enough quantity? Muscat is a competitive place for quantity of educational input and, in comparison to the ones going to the gold standard schools here, I question what I am doing.


Many of the children around us attend the Choiefat School, which is known as "the test factory"--kids are hit with several tests every week. Their job is to study study study and then score high on these exams. Failure brings instant remediation classes. Others attending the Indian School here memorize large portions of text to prove their academic acumen. We do none of that (although Tehva has inadvertently memorized long sections of The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere this week) and sometimes I feel bad as a result. In comparison, what I am doing seems not enough, especially when we go joy riding off to Nizwa or other surrounds on a fairly regular basis.


At the end of each day I ask myself, after reflecting on the lessons du jour, "Did we do enough paper-pencil work today? Hmmm...not sure. We did do a bit away from the school room today. Hmmm...Maybe tomorrow we should really sit down and write for six hours straight. Does it really matter, when 13 years of primary and secondary education are done, whether one has been outside of a school building? Does it matter whether or not school has been undertaken as a paper-pencil experience rather than a hands-on one? What to do...what to do?"


The general feedback I get from people in reaction to hearing about these types of experiences we have undertaken in school this year is, "Wow...that is an amazing education those kids are getting!" Many of these people are other parents who say they wish their child was getting such a rich and varied education. And yet I wonder, what kind of education is it that they are getting? Yes, others are exuberant about what we are doing, and yet it often still feels like I am jumping off of a precipice when it comes to actually doing these things.


In the end, because I lack the enormous fortune it would take to enroll three children in the English-medium schools here (does anyone have a spare $60,000 to $70,000 just sitting around that they would like to roll my way?), this experiment in education will continue as, quite likely, will my anxiety level. Stay tuned.