Standardized Tests Standardize Minds

I don’t want all students to have the same base knowledge; it’s culturally devastating for the students and the society they will soon help shape. I don’t want millions of carbon copied minds. I don’t want armies of the young marching to the beat of direct instruction with visions of number-two-pencils and bubble sheets dancing in their heads.

Students’ tests scores are used to determine the merits of the students themselves, their schools, their school districts, and the overall education system. In typical news articles about the state of public schools in America, sleek graphics and charts will compare the test scores of American students with the test scores of Chinese students and Norwegian students and Moroccan students. Then the article will shuffle in statistics about the globalized economy. At this point, education becomes nothing more than a foot race. Which society will produce the most productive citizens?

In Jonathan Kozol’s “The Shame of the Nation,” Kozol describes the philosophies of “primitive utilitarianism” and “commodification,” traditionally used to increase the productive efficiency of industry, when applied as teaching methods at an inner-city public school in Columbus, Ohio: “Children, in this frame of reference, are regarded as investments, assets, or productive units—or else, failing that, as pint sized human deficits who threaten our competitive capacities.”

I don’t want students to feel the pressure to perform, lest their school be marked as a failure, a label for the whole community to see. How does it affect their self-esteem, to be a part of a “failing” school, to be one small contribution to a large failure?

Standardized tests don’t contribute to the education of the students. They cause high-stress learning environments and force the curriculum to focus strictly on the subjects to be tested, leaving aside all else, cutting the unnecessary. According to Americans for the Arts, there has been a “22 percent decline in art and music instruction because of No Child Left Behind,” Bush’s public school accountability program.

Some countries and governments have sought to control all art and music, such as Mussolini's Italy, with the Ministry of Popular Culture in the 1930's. Singapore and other countries today have highly regulated internet access, paying particular attention to the filtering of subversive art. While NCLB does not ban any art programs, it creates an environment where a choice must be made during the creation of curriculums. States are being forced to administer standardized tests at almost every stage of the education process. There is no test for art. There is no test for music. Shouldn’t we eliminate this necessity to choose? Shouldn’t America try to stay as far away from cultural control as possible?

What do you think they will choose? The curriculums must focus on the core knowledge that will be tested, or the educators must resign themselves to failing numbers.

We must know that numbers can’t tell us everything about a person.

Students need to know that art is important and that it can change the world on every level, from the personal to the political and the infinite layers in between. And this is why it has been devalued. Art has been cast aside because it embraces change and free thought. It has not been conspicuously banned, but slowly and subtly marginalized, constricted, strangled into silence. We cannot allow generation after generation to go through school with little or no access to art and music.

Let’s not think of students as investments, or assets, or productive units. Let’s not force upon them the perfect business model, or the laws of international trade. Instead, let’s teach daydreaming and doodling.