Across the country, school systems are failing children. These children are not being left back, they do not score below a 65 in their classes and tests, and they have not racked up dozens of unexplained absences. For the most part, they have done nothing wrong academically. Rather, the bureaucrats hidden away in their offices have failed them by dooming them to lives of unfilled potential and unrealized intellectual capacity. While it certainly is not the case within Stuyvesant (and, presumably, the other specialized high schools, although one can never be too sure about Brooklyn Tech), most students are not challenged in their classes. They have no reason to grow and nothing to aspire to, so they settle and stagnate in the muddy waters of mediocrity.
In a world where a set of grades can mean the difference between a wealth of funding and operating on a shoestring budget, many states have been cutting corners on assessments in their never-ending collective quest to meet and surpass increasingly foolish metrics. For example, No Child Left Behind, the oft-maligned act which has been the basis for most of the major education changes across the country over the past few years, requires national testing in reading and math every year. The whole setup has been rendered useless by both the federal and state governments. Rather than following each year to ensure that the same students are improving as they should, the act has created a system that compares the grades of successive years, looking for improvements. All this truly serves to prove is that different students have different abilities and learn in different ways, but the comparisons are still being used to determine whether or not a school deserves to be labeled as “failing,” a moniker which, if held for multiple years, can lead to massive restructuring of the school.
This faulty assessment mechanism, in fact, was doomed from the start. The individual states were given full autonomy in creating and administering the tests. As noted in a piece in Time about No Child Left Behind (“How to Fix No Child Left Behind,” May 2007), states such as Mississippi have simply been giving far easier tests than their counterparts so that they would appear to be meeting the standards that the federal government had created. In 2005, 89% of Mississippi schoolchildren were found to be proficient in reading according to their state exam, as compared to 70% of New York children. On the other end of the scale, there are states like Missouri that have not lowered the difficulty of their exams. In that same year, only 35% of students in Missouri were proficient in reading. It is absurd to think that there is actually such a discrepancy between the abilities of the students of those three states, and indeed, when one views the percentages from each state on the national exam Time highlighted, the differences shrink drastically (33% for New York, 33% for Missouri, and 18% for Mississippi).
Mississippi’s tremendous split between the proficiency levels determined by the state and national exams proves my original point. Standardized tests should serve to help the students by pointing out problems they are having, which can then be isolated and eliminated. Instead, they are being used to improve the image of the states on a national level, and education quality is being marginalized and damaged for the sake of particularly attractive results. Teachers spend months preparing for these annual tests, and once they have passed, students find that they have learned nothing of substance. For a particularly contemporary illustration of this point, one only needs to watch the increasingly popular video of Miss Teen South Carolina being so flummoxed by a question as to lose all pretense of trying to speak coherent English. Years of school have left her confident enough to strut about on stage and look nice, but not confident enough in her speaking skills to pull through and actually end her sentences.
A friend of mine recently pointed out to me that there is no perfect education system, and to search for one would be to waste time in vain. What we need, he told me, are incremental improvements as they become apparent. He makes a valid point, and perfection is not what I seek when I say that students are being continuously left behind. What I do seek is a step forwards instead of a step backwards. If we are to use national guidelines to determine the accomplishments of schools and states, why are we using nonstandard measurements? Using varying (and often overly simple) tests to measure students is doing nothing but harm. Our current system is akin to using classical physics equations while constantly redefining the meter so the math will always be nice. The final product might often seem pleasant, but it is in fact thoroughly broken and useless.