(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.