Fear and Trembling of Standardized Tests

In a recent letter to the editor (2/23/2011) a candidate for WMRSD (White Mountain Regional Schood District) school board said that the recent NECAP (New England Common Assessment Program) scores show that all of the students in the district are "pretty much on par academically." "On par" according to whom?

Unfortunately NECAP tests have little to do with anything academic. The NECAP tests are not only unreliable and invalid, and time-wasting, but they are also very discouraging to those teachers who want to teach students...not prep them for some meaningless test.

The way to evaluate student performance is to read students' written work, look at their portfolios of work, observe how students interact with each other, and listen to the questions that students ask. And who is best equipped to do that evaluation? The teachers who work with the people on a daily basis.

We don't evaluate basketball players by giving them a standardized test; we look at their performance. We don't evaluate our car repair person by giving him a standardized test; we look at his performance on our vehicle.
Years ago when I was teaching in a high school in Maine, our English department was tasked with coming up with a standardized test. We hired two test consultants to assist us. When we asked them how really important the standardized tests were, they said that if you spend more that 15 minutes analyzing the test scores...you are wasting your time.

Schools should be much more than test centers for NECAP. Schools should be places of creativity, imagination, and personal challenge.

Students, teachers, parents, and school administrators should resist standardized testing with every fiber of their being. Students are not widgets on an assembly line; they are real live people and should treated with respect.

The Wars Without End

According to an article by Thom Shanker which appeared in the New York Times on February 25, 2011, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates bluntly told an audience of West Point cadets that it would be unwise for the United States to ever fight another war like Iraq or Afghanistan, and that the chances of carrying out a change of government in that fashion again were slim.

Secretary Gates said, "In my opinion, any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should 'have his head examined', as General MacArthur so delicately put it."

So......This is what Veterans for Peace, The War Resisters League, Military Families Speak Out, etc., have been saying for YEARS.......If the pinheads in the Department of Defense and the White House had listened to us and the millions of people who took the streets before the invasion of Iraq the nearly 6,000 US military men and women who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the 100,000 or more who have been have wounded might still be with their families and friends.

And the billions of dollars that the US spends yearly on guns, tanks, and weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and Afghanistan might have been spent on something worthwhile like healthcare, education, housing, roads, bridges, etc. Last year the US spent $160 billion in Iraq and Afghanistan. The total deficit for the 50 states last year is $130 billion. Do the arithmetic.

But in the United States of Amnesia ...outside of a small circle of friends ..the dead and wounded will be soon forgotten; but surely, the families of the tens of thousands of Iraqi and Afghan men, women, and children who have been killed and wounded....the citizens of those countries that have been destroyed.....they will never forget.