The Testing Has Begun...

We have started the winter rounds of testing this week, with the Terra Nova test, which is administered to unfortunate 5th and 7th graders in order to properly torture them. In the next couple of weeks we will have the ELPT, which sounds like an especially nasty sexually transmitted disease, but is actually yet another fraudulent test concocted by evil gremlins hidden in caves in the Wasatch mountains. After that will come the NAEP, which is actually the only thing that resembles a nationally consistent test, but has its own issues. Finally, there is the SBA/HSGQE, a test so corrupt that the Alaska EED has designed a sneakily dishonest little push poll intended to con parents into believing that it is a good idea. I read that thing last year and was amazed at what an artfully designed con job it was. We were supposed to actually give this thing to parents, and have them answer it. Whatta crock.

Finally, to demonstrate that we can also design inefficent measures of nothing in particular in other languages, there is the YPT, designed to yardstick little kids in Yup'ik. All of it strikes me as an enormous racket. Test after test, especially effective at lining the pockets of the companies that design and sell them.

I came up in the dark ages, when we would get some silly bubble test that required us to whip out those old #2 pencils about every three years. How the hell did we ever learn to do one damn thing then? I do realize that our kids out here have some fundamental challenges that I did not. English is not necessarily their first language. I do not understand, however, the thought that giving them two to four tests in the course of a single semester somehow will make them academic all-stars. Nonetheless, test we must, and test we shall...