As a kid, my family, friends, and teachers called me Kenny. I was a bit nerdy, and something of a perfectionist. So when we had to take the annual California Achievement Test, I tried my best to get every answer right. I was annoyed when I didn’t understand the questions or the vocabulary. I was further frustrated when I found out we wouldn’t receive the results for months, and that when we did, the results would be given to our parents as an attachment to our report card. These would be “secret” results, used for private conversations between our teachers, the principal, and our parents about our strengths and weaknesses. I learned years later, though still as a student, that these tests might be used to identify us as having “learning disabilities” or being “talented and gifted” and to offer us further services by the school system.
I never resisted these tests, but I know I thought that they were a waste of time. Now, some forty-five years later, I have some words and analysis to project backwards on to this elementary school experience. By the way, I really liked my years at Sussex Elementary School and continue to feel loyalty and friendship with my classmates there.
Causation vs. Correlation
I might have been younger than twelve years old, but I certainly knew that the reason I did well on these tests had nothing to do with my teachers and my school. I learned how to read with my parents, before kindergarten. We did puzzles and games at my house. We went to the library to get books. I happened to be good at the skills school tried to teach, for the most part, but not because my teachers taught me those skills.
I remember most of my elementary school teachers as nurturing, creative, and tolerant adults who cared about offering us interesting projects. They get credit for working with our group and making school a reasonably fun and decent experience.
Looking back on this time, I contend that intuitively I knew, as did other kids, that schools claiming responsibility for their students’ tests scores was mixing up correlation and causation. I lived in a middle-class suburban neighborhood of Shaker Heights, and most of my classmates possessed the basic skills measured by these tests. Of course, some did not, for any number of reasons. But as kids, we didn’t think that “school made us smart” or that these tests measured what our teachers had taught us that year. And though we didn’t have words for it back then, we might have guessed that the tests had cultural biases that tilted in favor of many of us compared to other students in the United States.
Whatever these tests showed, as an elementary school student, I knew that the school was the place that conducted these tests, but it wasn’t the reason we all scored as we did.
Range of Skills Measured
As a kid, I knew I was good at “school skills.” I could read, write, and count pretty darn well, and I was in the top reading group starting in first grade. I usually understood our teachers’ intentions and completed the tasks as they expected, and felt comfortable asking questions when I was confused. I had good attendance and cooperated. I was an “excellent” student, and I was praised for it. This was good for my ego!
After school, I played sports with my friends – enthusiastically and with at least average skills during the elementary school year. I had a solid group of friends and felt secure among my peers. I helped organize games after-school, among other things.
At the same time, I was aware that other kids had hobbies and talents that I knew nothing about. In school, I remember art class being a place where others excelled while I felt self-consciously inept. In music class, others sang confidently or played instruments while I quietly observed. Some classmates spoke foreign languages or had their unique family activities. At home, my brother was the one who played with tools and tried to fix things. He took up photography and built a darkroom in our basement.
During these years, I don’t recall feeling jealous of others or bad about myself. I stuck with the activities that I was good at, and avoided most things that required creativity. What I must have noticed (but didn’t have words for back then) was that school only really cared about a few skills. The testing used to identify “disabilities” or “giftedness” focused on the sorts of things I actually enjoyed and did well. Lucky for me, I was good at the things that “mattered.” If the testing had focused on the arts and creativity, my childhood ego would have been severely challenged.
Looking back on this situation gives me considerable pause. We now have a vocabulary of Multiple Intelligences (thanks, Howard Gardner), and challenges to testing (thanks, Alfie Kohn) and we can question my so-called “normal” experience. When I finally learned about neuroscience in college, I could joke that as a young child, my left brain must have conquered my right brain and expanded its operation with the extra cortex. I now deem this sort of testing to be terribly unfair, and until testing regimens acknowledge and expand the set of skills in the testing domain, I view testing as measuring a very limited aspect of the our lives.
Why Try?
Why did I even try my best on these tests? I can think of a few reasons. First, I tried because I wanted to show that I knew it all. I still see tests and quizzes as a challenge (on the “Which character would you be on The West Wing?” quiz, I was pleased to have the results confirm I would be President Bartlett.) I just wanted to get the right answers. Second, I had the confidence that I could do well, and to the extent the adults were watching, I wanted to be at the top of the list among my classmates. Third, I wasn’t a rebel, and refusing or not trying was outside of my imagination at that time. I wouldn’t have wanted my teacher to call my parents to say that I wasn’t cooperating.
However, if these tests had been about music or art or creative writing, I might have found a way to opt out or minimize these results. I can remember a few occasions of feeling sick and staying home from school when I knew there were activities planned that I didn’t want to do because they made me feel inadequate. I suspect I would have tried to avoid a standardized test if I thought I was going to do poorly on it.
And what about kids who didn’t try to do well on these tests because they were having a bad day or a hard year? They might be having a fight with friends, or difficulties at home, or perhaps a conflict with our teacher that week. What if they just sat down and filled in the bubbles without really trying? Without overstating the case, I knew then, as everybody did, that these tests results showed a snapshot of our effort and focus on that particular day in our lives as much as they claimed to show some overall innate “intelligence.”
Tool for Group Comparison
Even if I thought that the tests measured something real about my skills, even as a kid I know I was surprised to think they would use these test scores to measure our class as a whole, or our teachers, or our school. My group at Sussex had an unusual number of “good students” compared to the classes ahead of us and behind us. We knew were a particularly “smart” grade – our parents and teachers even told us so. To think that our group’s higher test scores compared to the scores of the group from the year before showed some sort of improvement in the teaching or the school’s approach was laughable. How could you compare our group of forty-five kids to a totally separate group? It just made no sense. I don’t recall if I thought back then that someone was comparing the Sussex School results to the other eight elementary schools in Shaker Heights, but surely that would have seemed strange.
Now I have a vocabulary about “controls” and “variables”, and it makes me cringe to think that educational institutions that teach the scientific method simply misuse data in ways that every student intuitively knows is wrong. Comparing one set of kids’ scores to another set of kids’ scores simply because they attend the same school and had the same teacher a year apart violates the very concepts we claim to teach in school.
Summary
As a kid, I knew that standardized tests weren’t measuring what I was learning in school and that they focused on a limited set of skills. I realized the scores reflected some of our emotional health and cultural advantages. I knew they might be used for individual labeling but should be used for group comparisons.
In the 1970s, these tests scores were not used by the state of Ohio the way that modern state standardized tests are currently used. These tests were a mostly forgettable blip in our experience, and the main thing we learned from them was how to carefully and completely fill in the bubbles on the answer forms. We also gathered that some adults took these scores seriously, and that the results might be used to put us in to special programs. Our teachers did not “teach to the test” and there were no “high stakes” about passing school.
I think the tests mostly confirmed what we already knew. Perhaps in some cases they were used appropriately to identify hidden strengths or weaknesses that allowed the teachers to make private adjustments in their work with us. I hope so.
Standardized testing was a trivial part of my childhood, though I tried hard to have it confirm my self-image of being “smart.” In my next piece, I will share my experience of standardized tests in my life a few decades later, as a public school teacher in the 1990s. No longer Kenny, I’ll be Mr. Danford in that one.
