Summative Standardized Tests Are A Crime Against Our Kids

No, standardized tests are not valid, nor reliable. Absolutely they are not. Standardized tests are a vestige of a bygone era that, in this age of acceleration, are irrelevant at best and complete and utter nonsense at worst. Actually, check that. Standardized tests at worst are robbing our youth of their natural imagination, their innovation, their creativity and their sense of self. Standardized tests are, in my humble opinion, evil. Every minute a young person spends preparing for or taking a summative standardized test represents a crime of theft against that young person. There was not a single summative standardized test that I took as a student in school, or that I prepared students for and administered in my 17 years teaching history, economics and Hawaiian studies at the high school level, that was worth a damn. Not one. The tests I took in school 40 years ago measured nothing about me. Not a single thing. The 80 hours I spent in the math tutoring lab at the University of Iowa are hours I will never get to live again. The summative tests I prepared and gave as a teacher, never measured anything other than a perverse show of grit by my students, the kind of determination that kills hope and optimism, and instills an insidious form of competition. That any college used the scores of these tests to admit a student is a black mark on their ability to assess talent a one's sense of the world.

These summative tests I gave never measured kindness, compassion, resilience, collaboration skills or the ability to communicate with real people at a high level in real situations. They earned me the reputation is "tough." Ugh. I apologize, former students! I thank the education gods that I realized my erroneous assumptions and conclusions about standardized tests in time to replace myself as the sage on the stage and torture-master-in-chief, with a version of myself as guide on the side. Studies show that students taking these "smarter balanced" type of tests remember practically nothing about what "was learned." What students recall years later is the form of PTSD they experienced after sitting in rows of desks like these answering questions that mattered nothing to them. Do I have credibility in making this argument? Yes. I graded thousands of APUS exam essays in Texas for four straight years. Those tests, and the AP classes, by and large did nothing but engender a hatred of history, which is incredibility sad. Enough testing already. If we can send a spacecraft to Mars, if we can discover CRISPER, we can do better than these stupid tests. To read the full and very thoughtful Honolulu Civil Beat article which caused me to write this article, click here.