“Repetition, monotony, and discipline”

A lowly employee of a standardized testing company describes his experience. A few excerpts:

The work is mind numbing, so scorers have to invent ways to entertain themselves. The most common method seems to be staring blankly at the wall or into space for minutes at a time. But at work this year, I discovered that no one would notice if I just read news articles while scoring tests. So every night, while scoring from home, I would surf the Internet and cut and paste loads of articles—reports on Indian Maoists, scientific speculation on whether animals can be gay, critiques of standardized testing—into what typically came to be an eighty-page, single-spaced Word document. Then I would print it out and read it the next day while I was working at the scoring center. This was the only way to avoid going insane. I still managed to score at the average rate for the room and perform according to “quality” standards. While scoring from home, I routinely carry on three or four intense conversations on Gchat. This is the reality of test scoring.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -. . .

I remember reading, for twenty-three straight days, the responses of thousands of middle-schoolers to the question, “What is a goal of yours in life?” A plurality devoted several paragraphs to explain that their life’s goal was to talk less in class, listen to their teacher, and stop fooling around so much. It’s asking too much to hope for great literature on a standardized test. But, given that this is the process through which so many students are learning to write and to think, one would hope for more. These rote responses, in themselves, are a testament to the failure of our education system, its failure to actually connect with kids’ lives, to help them develop their humanity and their critical thinking skills, to do more than discipline them and prepare them to be obedient workers—or troops.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -. . .

An entire education policy that thrives on repetition, monotony, and discipline is being enacted, stunting creativity and curiosity under the guise of the false idol of accountability.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -. . .

If the Obama administration asked test scorers whether the solution to this country’s education system would be more standardized testing, I think most of them would laugh. I’ve never gotten the sense from my coworkers that they feel that what they’re doing is helping kids or the education process.

Read the whole post.
.