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Is that (the test) all there is?
By John Young
 Pick up the major metro daily and there’s a story about your favorite public affairs topic: education. “Study: Fit kids do better in school.” More specifically, the story says those fit kids do better on tests. A few pages later: “Older fathers’ kids score lower on tests.” Another major metro paper: “Schools offer inducements to pass TAKS” — meaning days off from school, even a trip to Hawaii.
Still another: “Principal pushes blacks to boost TAKS scores.” We’re not talking “Stand and Deliver” in this case. We’re talking of rounding up an ethnic group and making its members understand that when it comes to this school being rated too low, they are the problem. We are to assume that this is OK because the principal is black. He’s only thinking of them.
Actually, that may very well be the case. This principal’s heart may be golden. But we’ve absolutely got to stop putting every ounce of attention and emotional investment into a standardized test. Do children of older parents do worse on tests than those with younger parents? So says the study. But children of older parents might have a better hands-on aptitude for, say, making internal combustion engines sing or mastering the inner workings of a centrifuge. I have no idea if that’s true, but what are we really learning from this test fixation?
In the case of TAKS, we are learning about levels of adequacy. Put a cork in the “raised bar” defense or the “higher-level learning” explanation when comparing TAKS to TAAS. No matter how “rigorous” the test, you can’t have a criterion-based test that is a true measure of excellence for every child.
I don’t know who more grievously overstates the significance of TAKS — school policy makers, lawmakers or newspapers. Call it a three-way tie.
No thought is given to the underlying purpose of TAKS, which is to truly serve the children. It remains the lamest means of diagnosing what they know and how they grow. A “growth model” using TAKS is going to be comparable to seeing if a fruit fly prospers in a mayonnaise jar without light or oxygen.
I see educators who have TAKS in perspective. I see parents who do too. They know how little significance it has relative to children’s future success. Ask parents, and if anything, they’ll say it is the worst thing that ever happened to their children’s education, and there’s no second or third place.
For those learners in the bottom quartile who supposedly are most assisted by TAKS emphasis: Is that really so? Is a narrowed curriculum — a classroom experience that’s mostly rote and of little relevance — good for anyone? No need to answer that. We know the answer.
No parent would opt for that, even if it meant his or her child would meet state standards. The parent would say, “I’ll take a flyer on the Technicolor approach and see how we do.”
Some Texans deeply interested in quality schools went to Finland recently. They found that (surprise!) the secret to the Finns’ success wasn’t a narrowed curriculum and test emphasis. It was freedom for teachers, who also were well paid and highly qualified. It was professionals encouraged to deliver Technicolor.
Test that, Texas.
JOHN YOUNG is opinion page editor of the Waco Tribune-Herald and author of Ghosts of Liberals Past. He can be reached at jyoung@wacotrib.com.
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