This will, almost certainly, not be on the test

I picked up Nicholas Lemann's The Big Test because public school teachers are, I think, contractually obligated into listening to fellow teachers complain about and "analyze" the futility of standardized tests. Since circumnavigating these discussions is clearly impossible, I figured I'd beef up on how America went from this:

In football he electrified the crowd at the 1926 Harvard-Yale game by throwing what one of his classmates later called the "greatest of all forward passes, and also the most artistocratic." Sitting in the stands that day was Richard Gummere, headmaster of the Penn Charter School in Philadelphia. He was so impressed by Chauncey's performance on the field that he offered him a job as a teacher and coach — that was how things worked then.

To this:

This doesn't need to be offset as a quote because I, rather hilariously, may not (the legal disclaimer at the bottom of the email is quite clear) reproduce the content of the message without permission (I don't have permission). However, I suppose I can tell you (without having to digest the fear of legal punishment) that these emails implore me to receive very important training that, once completed, will grant me a seat on a distinguished panel. This panel is tasked with conducting rigorous and formulaic teaching position interviews. Sounds fun.

I'm really reading the shit out of this book (annotating and everything) with designs on doing a bit of writing regarding testing and... well, I don't really know yet — as it should be, doesn't matter. Anyway, the Chauncey who could throw a football so aristocratically (what the fuck would that look like?) is Henry Chauncey, the man largely responsible for the SAT, among other standardized tests. An interesting character, no doubt. Shortly before his death, he gave an interview to the folks at PBS; when asked how standardized tests were helpful, he posited:

Helping people to understand themselves. To think sensibly about what they might want to do. And then to assess how well they've done it. There are a lot of different things that testing gets used for... It seemed to me that we knew more about the horses in the country than we knew about the people of the country. And that it would be useful to know more about all the different people.

A few questions later, he is asked about whether he foresaw the delirium that the test would engender amongst concerned parents and desperate-to-achieve high school students (which is a hilarious question, imagine if he said, "yep, that was always part of the equation"):

I didn't foresee this. And in fact, I and others in the field of testing have tried very hard not to have people put as much emphasis as they do.

Who hasn't created and championed a remedy for societal ills that ultimately (and perhaps inevitably) slips — or projectile launches/explodes — out of the creator's control and doesn't do, you know, what it's supposed to. I know I have.


I'll stop there: I have some reading to do. This is a taster, I suppose, of what I'll try to write more about in the coming days.