(Editor’s Note: The following is part one of a fifteen-part series entitled, Things Would be Better if I Made Most Decisions. It is the goal of the author to have most pertinent issues cleared up prior to December 21^st, 2012, when, according to the Mayan calendar, time ends. Today’s topic is Standardized Testing. So, you know, have fun with that.)

Remember grade school art class? Remember how you looked forward to it, whether or not you were any good at art? Remember how it made you feel to create something—a drawing, a painting, a clay sculpture of a marble—using just a few supplies and your imagination? For many students, art class made the rest of the school day tolerable, because in art class you used a portion of your brain that was otherwise still during math and reading.

Or maybe music class was more your thing. Where you and all your classmates could sing songs at the top of your lungs with redundant lyrics, like “She’ll be coming around the mountain when she comes!” And, if your teacher was really brave or legally deaf, she’d give each person a plastic recorder and let everyone whistle on them like a room full of dying sparrows.

Those were good days, right, at least for many of us? Well, hold onto those memories ladies and gentlemen, because in less than a generation, in many parts of America, art class, music class, along with a number of other subjects, could end up being just that: fond memories from a different era.

You see, the problem with art, music, physical education, and many other standard school curricula, is that they are generally not assessed on standardized tests. In Illinois, many grade school and junior high school students take the ISAT every spring, which stands for the Illinois Standards Achievement Test. In high school students enjoy the snarkier version, the PSAE; the Prairie State Achievement Examination. Unfortunately, these tests do not ask students to draw a self-portrait of themselves the day the school canceled art class, nor are students required to sing a ballad about the lack of funding in the budget for music instruction. The ISAT & PSAE, along with the standardized tests many other states are required to give, focus primarily on reading and math.

And there is nothing inherently wrong with that. As an educator, a parent, and an American citizen, I would argue that reading and math are the two most important curriculum-related skills a student should learn at school. There’s a reason why my wife and I read Hop on Pop fifty-three consecutive evenings in a row last summer, and it wasn’t because we enjoyed seeing Pop, who seemed to be a decent, guy, really, get hopped on by his children. We read to our daughter because she loves it and also because, even though she’s adorable right now, we eventually want some of our money back.

The problem, then, is not the standardized tests themselves. These measurements can be a useful tool to help gauge how well a student understands a particular subject. They create data that can then be used to improve teaching methods or modify curriculum. This, needless to say, is all well and good. The problem lies in the misuse of the test results themselves.

To illustrate, imagine a little league short stop walks into the U.S. Senate chambers and declares, “Hey, I’m here; put me on a committee and let’s get started.” Regardless of how talented that individual was or whether or not his last name was Roosevelt, Kennedy, Bush or Smith, the kid would probably be asked to leave. He would be out of line. Maybe he would be listened to, but what he had to say would be taken in the context of him being a seven-year-old shortstop, not an elected member of Congress.

ISAT data, on the other hand, along with information garnered from similar tests, is being used to make profound and life-altering decisions. Test scores that should, at best, influence what is being taught and how it is presented, is increasingly being used to answer questions such as:

How much money should this school receive from the state? Where does this teacher belong in our school? Does this teacher belong in our school? What courses will we provide our students? What schedule can these students have? Should this school even be open?

Now, before I go any further, let me be very clear. Those are all excellent questions that must be answered. However, just as we wouldn’t ask a little leaguer to oversee a nuclear arms treaty with Russia, we wouldn’t use data derived from a few tests to convince us to shut down an entire school.

Or would we?

To truly understand how these test scores became so potent we would need to delve back in history a few years and, let’s be honest, it’s late and we all have other things to do right now. Thus we’ll end part one of our examination of standardized examinations, which, for convenience sake, I have entitled What is Standardized Testing and How is it Similar to Little League Baseball? This subject will then be continued with part two—Why it’s Stupid to Judge an Entire School District Based on one Acronym—before we conclude with If You’re Serious About Improving Public Schools Then Sit Down and Listen to This.

And don’t worry. None of this will be on the test.

New Year's Edition

The New Year’s Edition of Cancel My Subscription has been, ironically enough, canceled due to PTF. (Potty Training Fatigue) We’ll be back on the 15^th of this month. In the meantime, please enjoy chapter one of the J.W. Robison classic, The Incredibly True Adventures of Mustard Tater.

The Incredibly True Adventures
of Mustard Tater
Chapter One: The Introduction of Mustard Tater

They called him Plastic Man.

No, scratch that.

He called himself Plastic Man, and one day, after a ten-minute lecture as to why he was a kind of plastic man, a fourth grader, Tyson Wynn, shrugged his bony shoulders and muttered, “OK. I guess you’re Plastic Man.”

Mustard could convince the occasional fourth grader to talk to him for short, anemic moments during the bus rides to and from school. This was due to the fact that most fourth graders did not really know who he was. They did not walk the same hallways with him, nor share the same teachers.

Mustard Tater, to them, was just a weird-looking, smelly, comically-overweight sixth-grader; an older kid, who, for some peculiar reason, wanted to talk. So sometimes they talked.

But mostly they just tried to hold their breath.

Mustard Tater, of course, was not his real name but a moniker born out of the stunningly creative depths of the Junior High Collective Mind. He had once been caught, probably around the beginning of the fifth grade, putting what looked to be mustard on his tater tots.

And that was that. Simple. Mustard Tater. The fact that it was not actually mustard but a yellow ketchup brought from his grandmother’s home in a tiny plastic cup, brought from Ina’s house in yet another desperate attempt to make friends, fell irrelevant into fifth-grade ears.

There was no such thing as yellow ketchup. Ketchup was red. You’re fat and you smell and you’re obviously poor, so just deal with it.

Case closed.

But he knew, deep down, that he was not Mustard Tater.

He was Plastic Man. And eventually everyone would know it.

Mustard’s mother was a remarkably stupid woman. This fact went a long way in explaining why she allowed her youngest son to construct a bizarre shrine to a man who was not even dead but in Mexico, somewhere on a coast, somewhere with his even stupider teenage girlfriend, somewhere burning through what may have remained of the lottery winnings from two Christmases ago.

This shrine sat on the top of Mustard’s hand-me-down, four-drawer dresser; the only piece of furniture his brother had offered him before going to prison. This shrine consisted of exactly six items in no particular order of importance: his father’s mustachioed senior picture; a picture of his father dancing too closely with a teenage niece at a family wedding; another picture, taken by his mother, of Mustard, his father and his brother at Fun Time World, shirtless, wet, still smiling from a quick trip down a water slide; a ticket stub from a baseball game given to Mustard by his father one evening two years ago while in a drunken stupor; his father’s donkey-shaped cigarette dispenser that spat cigarettes out of the creature’s anus; and an empty can of his father’s favorite beer. This foul collection of trinkets and failed responsibilities was the last thing Mustard looked at before leaving for school each morning, and the last thing he looked at before falling asleep at night.

He stared at it in a drowsy and entirely irrational hopefulness that was fueled, at least somewhat, by another nightly ritual: the perusal of a Plastic Man comic book.

Mustard’s Plastic Man comic book collection— twelve tomes in all–was put on a two-week rotation, meaning he would peruse each comic about twice a month. The word “peruse” is used instead of “read” because reading was a skill that Mustard had not, despite his age and grade level, as yet, mastered. Mustard, then, would peruse these books and would, on occasion, pick up a new word here and there–often-monosyllabic interjections that rarely fit into everyday conversations. These intense perusals, a combination of second-grade-level reading skills and thorough examinations of the faded pictures, allowed Mustard to summarize the plot almost perfectly.

It was truly unfortunate that the curriculum at Lake Village Junior High School was not more closely aligned with DC comic adventures.

“Aren’t you too fat to be a super hero?”

This was a common rebuttal to Mustard’s request for comic book heraldry. Today’s response came from Sara, easily the prettiest girl in the class, mere moments after Mrs. Wendling had instructed them to break up into their groups and identify as many dead-dog characters in children’s literature as they could in two minutes. That Plastic Man, as a literary icon, was in no way related to Old Yeller, nor those unfortunate coonhounds rotting beneath the red fern, seemed beside the point to Mustard on this particular day.

“The fat stretches. When I’m all stretched out I’m pretty skinny. And awesome.”

Sara, along with every other member of the group, spent the remaining ninety-seconds of their allotted time trying desperately not to laugh. Thus, when the moment came for them to add to the list being written on the whiteboard, all Sara could say was, “Mustard is pretending to be a super hero again.”

“Mustard,” Mrs. Wendling began, clearly unimpressed but trying to hide that fact, “I can’t think of a single dead dog superhero, can you? Let’s try to focus on the assignment.”

And that was that. Mustard Tater fails again. But he was Plastic Man, or at least would be in the near future. Most super heroes, he knew, came into their powers sometime during a period of life known as “adolescence.” And this era, according to his mother, was only a few months away.