Failing Efforts

By Margaret Renkl

After our youngest child was born two years ago, the nurses whisked him to a warming table to give him his first test. He scored a 9 on his first APGAR evaluation, a 10 on the second. “He’s a very organized baby,” a nurse called to my husband and me about our 20-minute-old son, and we beamed at each other. We had another wonderful little boy, already so smart and organized, a boy who would no doubt go far in the world.

Though as veteran parents we understood perfectly clearly that APGAR scoring of newborns is no prediction of either future intelligence or future success, we both felt a kind of primitive, utterly irrational pride when our baby’s initial score of 9 magically rose to a perfect 10. Our child: the gold medalist, the Rhodes scholar, the Nobel Prize winner in the great book of life.

Among the dozens of middle-class parents I know, there’s not a single couple who didn’t at least start off entirely persuaded of their own child’s brilliance. “He walked at 8 months,” they brag at the park, in the grocery store, in the preschool parking lot, at family reunions. “She spoke in complete sentences by her first birthday and taught herself to read by watching Sesame Street.” But none of these qualities, child-development experts tell us, necessarily indicates a particularly smart child—not walking early, not talking early, not reading early. Children develop according to a broad human outline, but the details inside those lines are infinitely various.

Still, we Americans, obsessed with success—especially early signs of success—persist in believing that achievement can be measured, that faster is better than slower, and that more is better than less. Even worse, we often make the mistake of assuming that something which cannot be quantified is somehow not there at all. Consequently, test anxiety for a lot of middle-class parents starts very early. For well-off Nashville children whose parents choose private schools, there are entrance exams to sweat—starting at the ripe old age of 4. And while by definition public schools are not selective, they force kids and parents to contend every year with their own brand of test anxiety, the Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program, otherwise known as TCAP.

There’s been a lot of talk about TCAP lately, partly because individual score reports went home Monday in students’ report cards, and partly because the testing company from which Tennessee buys the tests, CTB/McGraw Hill, was several months late in reporting test results, for the second year in a row. We’ve been hearing repeatedly in local news reports about how damaging it is to a school system when scores arrive too late to be used in determining which kids should go to summer school, or how teachers should plan their lessons. We’re hearing state officials demanding to know why the scores are late and what the testing company intends to do to make sure they aren’t tardy again this year. But we’re not hearing any of them ask whether our kids ought to be taking these tests in the first place.

Because Metro administrators tend to be middle-class people who have to answer to the state politicians—themselves largely middle-class people—who fund our schools, it’s not all that surprising that they operate according to the typical middle-class faith in external measures of intellectual aptitude and achievement. The two bedrock principles underlying a test like TCAP are the belief that what kids have learned can be accurately measured, and that those measurements can accurately determine the academic success of a child, a teacher, a school, and a city’s school system.

So with increasing intensity, Metro teachers emphasize and prepare for this annual set of fill-in-the-bubble tests that are supposed to tell both schools and parents how well our children in grades K through eight are learning. But if we look beyond the political rhetoric of “raising standards” and “school accountability,” there’s little reason to believe that the TCAP does a very good job of telling us what’s really happening in our classrooms. As a former student, as a former teacher with 12 years’ classroom experience, as a journalist who researches child-development and education issues, and as the parent of a child in a Metro school, I don’t believe the TCAP—nor any standardized, multiple-choice test—truly can give an accurate measure of what a particular child has learned, or of how well that child’s teacher has taught him.

But when both major-party candidates for the U.S. presidency claim that they will be “the education president”—and bolster the claim with promises to institute mandatory testing for every child, every year, in every school—it’s hard to blame Tennessee’s state Department of Education for spending $13 million over three years to buy these tests for kids in grades three through eight. It may even be hard, in this political climate, to blame Metro officials for kicking in another $148,000 to buy the tests for grades one and two as well, despite the fact that they aren’t required to do so, and the fact that even testing experts agree that any standardized diagnostic tool for very young children is extremely unreliable.