Weigh In

Pigs do not like to be weighed.  This is not an assumption, but an eye-witness account.  In our younger years my brother and I, along with our 4-H friends, spent many county fair days surrounded by unimpressed swine living out their retirement in the spacious Fayette County hog barn.  We showed these pigs and eventually sold them, but before this transaction occurred they had to be weighed.  Although some hogs did march calmly up into the scale, most of them did not.

The procedure was fairly straightforward.  We would block off the pens leading to the scale, which was basically a narrow cage with a wobbly floor.  We would then open up our pen and let the pigs out, moving them down the aisle, blocking their retreat with gates as we inched closer to the goal. 

Finally, when it came their turn, we would carouse the hogs toward the scale.  As mentioned, some pigs would walk right in, but most of them threw a fit.  Most of them tried to back away from the machine and squealed like, well, you know.  

 Regardless, none of our pigs ever avoided being weighed.  No pig was left behind unmeasured, and all the pigs my brother and I ever raised—and “raised” is a term I use quite loosely, being as the pigs were purchased after they were at least eight weeks old and then sold a few months later—succeeded in eventually being eaten.

Now, this column is not actually going to be about pigs, but it is going to be about a measurement of sorts.  Pigs and the weighing of them is often used as an analogy to describe excessive student testing.  To paraphrase the simile, “Testing a student to help them learn is like weighing a pig to help them gain weight.  It doesn’t work and it annoys the pig.” 

This is a reasonable analogy, I guess, but I’m not particularly fond of it.  For one thing, students should not be compared to pigs.  Pigs are nice and all, and some make decent pets, but ultimately pigs are livestock.  Students, on the other hand, are our future.  How we treat our students now will be reflected later.

Secondly, I don’t like the analogy because, as most teachers will tell you, it is not really accurate.  Good testing actually can help a student learn.  A well-written test can be a lesson in and of itself.  It can teach the student and also guide the instructor in making future curriculum choices.  Granted, tests often do annoy the student and they can be a pain to grade, but that’s not a good enough reason not to use them.

The problem with testing, however, is that teachers are not the only ones giving the tests anymore.  As many people already know, standardized testing plays an increasingly heavy part in the drama we call the school year. 

Originally, standardized tests were used to influence student placement.  In my humble opinion, this practice, in and of itself, is morally flawed, because it suggests that a young person’s value as a learner can be measured on the basis of how they perform on one battery of tests over the course of a few days.  That is wrong.  It is a small wonder so many people have such negative memories of school when many of them were told at a tragically young age, “You’re below average.”

To further aggravate the problem, though, standardized tests are increasingly being used by the federal and state governments to influence fiscal policy.  They are being used to influence professional retention.  While even the hardest among us would have a difficult time taking “away” resources from a below average student, this is almost precisely what often takes place to “below average” schools. 

Fortunately, this pendulum could be about to swing the other way.  Increasingly throughout the United States, concerned citizen groups made up of both parents and educators have banded together in an attempt to convince state and federal legislators to decrease mandated, high-stakes, standardized testing.   According to a recent NEA Today article, protests against standardized testing have taken place in a number of states, including Colorado, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Kansas. 

Another bright spot is happening in Congress, of all places.  Representative Christopher Gibson, a Republican from New York, introduced a bill earlier this spring that would significantly decrease the amount of federally mandated tests students are required to take throughout their academic career.  To emphasize the point that this is not a regional or partisan issue, as of right now this bill has over a dozen co-sponsors—eight Democrats, six Republicans— from eleven different states, including Texas, California, New Jersey, Arizona, and Ohio.

Unfortunately, Illinois is not on that list, but it could be.  We have legislators that would most likely be eager to come on board if they knew their constituents were interested.  After all, what’s nice about public education is also what can be the most frustrating:  it’s public.  We own it.  It’s ours.  At the end of the day, we either get the schools we want or we get the schools we can tolerate, wobbly scales and all.