Standardize Me
The number one question students ask in class is will I ever use this outside of the classroom. They feel as though most things they do in the classroom is purposeless. They have no motivation in their lessons unless it is something that just really sparks their interest or something that they feel could benefit them in life. However, students are constantly given information that they cannot relate to and simply end up regurgitating it or not getting a clear understanding for it. Then we test students on this material and expect them to excel. For some students this method works, but for others it is highly detrimental. Everyone is different so how can we create a standard test to determine how knowledgeable they are. A standardized test does not measure the intelligence of a student nor does the education system seek what is best for students learning abilities.
Children from all different walks of life and backgrounds are put into classrooms across the nation and expected to learn some of the same material. They read literature written by some dead white man that lived in a European country back in a time period when English was a lot different and almost seemed to be a foreign language. Then the education system, trying to add some diversity, throws in a little literature from the 1800s by an ex-slave that could be a little more relatable to some African American students. Students are forced to write many a bunch of useless literary pieces that include the standard five paragraph essay to determine how literate they are. Finally they are tested by a test that is the same across the board for different regions. Has the education system forgotten how diverse these students are or just how diverse people are in general?
The education system needs to take into consideration that students learn differently. Their literacy looks different from student to student, background to background, and area to area. In A Search Past Silence: The Literacy of Young Black Men, a novel written by David E. Kirkland (2013), Kirkland follows the lives of a group of black male students over the course of several years. He discusses how the young men are very literate but chose not to do schoolwork or participate in class because the lessons and material does not relate to them. They see the in class literacy standards as being oppressive because they were created by rich white men with political power (p 139). They express their literacy mainly through raps, or “cyphas”. Even their teacher is shocked to see how well they use literary practices when she discovers one of their notebooks (p 19–20). The scene in which this happens shows just how educators assumes that certain students are not smart, or incapable, just because they chose not to participate, not do their work, or just do not perform well in class.
In addition, standardized testing helps generate these false accusations of students because just because a student does not test well does not mean they are any less smart that the person who scored the highest. It just may not be the best way to access that student. Let’s take for example the college entry exams such as the SAT. The National Center for Fair and Open Testing (2007) tells us that minority students tend to have lower test scores which make it unfair when trying to qualify for scholarships. Even more surprising is that females score lower on SAT because it is timed and multiple choice format is heavily used on this exam. Standardized testing simply is unfair and biased. Just as Nick Sousanis explains in his book Unflattening (2015), the educational system tries to make “cookie cutter”, or model, students (p 13). His illustration of how all students are expected to come out of the educational system the same is very powerful and unrealistic. This is why some students are almost set up for failure — not everyone can fit into this mold.
In summation, standardized testing is unfair and biased. They are not an adequate measure of how much a student knows but more so how well the student can perform on that test. They should represent nothing more because no two students are the same. The educational system needs to also incorporate other means of exploring literacy such as how some programs have been created to implement hip hop into the classroom. However, maybe standardized testing and the educational system serve their intended purpose, which is that one type of model student that the educational system and society has deemed as ideal.
Sources
Kirkland, D.E.. (2013). A Search Past Silence: The Literacy of Young Black Men. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.
Sousanis, N.. (2015) Unflattening. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
University Testing: Bias. (2007, August 22). Retrieved July 09, 2016, from http://fairtest.org/university-testing-bias
