Standardized Minds

Standardized Minds

Education
I imagine few of us are big fans of standardized tests. At the
very least, we don't enjoy the experience of sitting for hours,
filling in bubbles under time pressure, knowing something big and
important--say college admission or job acquisition--is at stake.
Many of us who prove perfectly competent and even gifted in meeting
the demands of school or work just do not test well. Many of us have
heard that those tests people have placed on pedestals do not do a
good job of predicting what they're designed to. A quickly growing
number of us are dismayed by the extent that schools are teaching to
the test to raise scores rather than giving students the education
they need and deserve.
If you want a truly comprehensive book on all that's wrong with
this insideous and ubiquitous practice you can't do better than Peter
Sacks' Standardized Minds: The High Price Of America's Testing
Culture And What We Can Do To Change it. Sacks has studied the
gatekeeping tests that divert us into educational and career channels--
the measures used by elite preschools, college and military
admissions, and company personnel offices. In well delineated
chapters (even if you may not be up for the whole 300 page volume you
can probably find some that are relevant) he discusses issues such as:
*how education centered around standardized test hurts children,
particularly the most vulnerable;
*how it greatly harms schools;
*how it underestimates the abilities of people with wholistic thinking
styled;
*and how corporations are making big bucks off all this misery.
Sacks ends the book with encouraging signs such as the decision
of Maine's Bates College to go test optional and how its not going to
academic Hades in the proverbial handbasket.
This is a book I would strongly urge teachers, educational
admin, guidancee counselors, and educational reformers to read.
On a personal note, I think I have one of the most extreme tales of
standardized test overreliance in any book. Back in my freshman
college year when I met my first academic adviser she told me that she
was pleased to meet me and that I was on a Ph.D. track. In other
words, before I received a single undergraduate grade I was destined
for highly competitive grad school. It was assumed that I would go
along with this based solely on my SAT scores--two numbers. She was
determined to get one of her students to get a doctorate and feeling
her chronological clock ticking. I looked like her best shot. Of
course we know what happened. I rocked the GREs, was accepted to a
PhD program, and could not complete it. A twenty-five year marriage
and three wonderful children later I am ready to try graduate work in
a more appropriate field with intrinsic motivation and relevant
experience on my side. Oh, yeah, and the program requires Millers
Analogies instead of GRE. No math (my bête noire). Might as well
test the Colonel on his ability to chow down on fried chicken.
A great big shout out goes out to all who fight against what what
Diane Ravitch has succinctly named Reign of Error.
Julia Emily Hathaway


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