Testing Aside, Students Should Decide Their Own Future

Take a look at your average 10th-grade physical education class. You’re bound to see some kids who are great athletes. You are also bound to see some who are overweight or unmotivated. How do you suppose we should make the kids in group B look more like the kids in group A? One idea would be to have a test, say a mile run, and grade the students based on how well they perform. In order to pass the class boys should run an eight-minute mile and girls should run a 10-minute mile.

The result you inevitably would find is that many students would work hard and pass the test, and many students either could not or would not pass. No matter where you set the time standard, certain students would not meet it unless you made it so ridiculously easy that it rendered the test meaningless. This leaves the PE teacher with the puzzling question of what to do with students who don’t pass and never will.

This very thing is happening in the state of Washington and all over the country, except the tests we are talking about are mental rather than physical. And the questions involved are a lot more numerous than the answers.

By the year 2008, the state of Washington plans to test 10th-grade students in what it deems the “essential learnings.” If a student does not pass this test, he or she will not be given a high school diploma.

Teachers, principals and superintendents will all be held accountable for making sure an acceptable number of students pass this test.

This raises the first question: What is an acceptable number? No matter where you set the standard certain students will not pass the test unless it is so easy that anyone who can breathe will pass it. So what is the magic number that is acceptable to fail - 20 percent? Thirty percent? Remember that all students are required to take this test, special ed through honors.

Somewhere in that range is a number that lawmakers are going to have to decide is the target. Yet not a single lawmaker in the country has said what the number should be. Are they all so idealistic that they believe every student can meet the standard? If they are this idealistic I would like ask them to get an entire PE class to run an eight-minute mile.

Let’s say for the sake of argument that lawmakers choose 30 percent. What happens to the students in that 30 percent? (Right now, the failure rate is at about 60 percent). Perhaps these students shouldn’t be wasting time in school. They should be out learning a trade, right?

This is not such a bad idea. In fact it has been around for ages. We in education call it tracking. That is to say, certain students are put on different career tracks based on their academic ability. Some are prepared to enter a four-year college; others are prepared to learn a trade.

What is troubling about this aspect of the 10th-grade testing is that it tracks students after the 10th grade. Make no mistake; we have tracking in this country. The difference is that our tracking currently is after the 12th grade. Students with a certain ability go to a four-year college. Others go to a two-year college and learn some job skills. Some go to technical schools, while others go straight into the work force without taking time to learn additional skills.

This type of tracking is largely voluntary. A person can decide what their interests are and follow that track, provided their grades are good enough for their desired track.

The new state testing would force students into a track. A student gifted in language and social science might be denied a high school diploma because of a lack of ability in math and science or vice versa. I was on the dean’s list at the University of Washington with a major in English and yet I would not have been able pass the math and science portions of the test.

The question is not whether the 10th-grade tests will change education; they already have. The question is how they will change education.

On one hand, teachers are motivated with a clear purpose, even if that purpose is only to teach to the test. Undoubtedly, many students will be likewise motivated when their future is on the line. But these tests will also force some students into a career track that they may not wish to take. Countries like Germany have been tracking at much earlier ages and their economy is healthy. This is not the question.

What is at the heart of this matter is whether students’ futures should be decided by a test.

I believe in freedom - the freedom to decide your own course and set that course yourself, rather than having lawmakers in Olympia or Washington, D.C., or anywhere else tell you what you can and cannot do.

Make no mistake about it. The Washington Assessment of Student Learning is a device to track students into varied careers. I believe our current system of allowing students to choose their own destiny is the most democratic.