What a Test Score Can Never Tell Us

One day, as a 14 year old high school freshman, an announcement came over the intercom informing us that a classmate had been murdered. Aubrey Porter, they said, was shot and killed; his body found discarded on a playground near the high school. Within weeks, LaSalle Anderson was discovered brutally beaten, shot, stabbed, dead. He'd been thrown in a trash dumpster behind the old, condemned bakery on Sarah Ave. Soon thereafter, my brother Willie, while playing with a loaded gun, shot and killed his best friend, Wilbert. It was a single bullet to the head. He arrived home with blood and brain matter still on his clothes.



You could only imagine that solving for the value of X on the upcoming state proficiency exam was, to say the least, unrealistic. These horrific and traumatic events were consistent, and permeated our lives almost to the point of numbness.



Those memories came flooding back as I continue to read the consistent stream of editorials bemoaning and insisting that additional academic services are to these children are of no measurable consequence.



I found myself wondering how it was possible for apparently detached, privileged, ill-informed, number crunchers on Capitol Hill and elsewhere to understand what goes in the lives of students growing up in urban areas around this country?



There is far more that meets the eye regarding student achievement than bottom line test results. Many urban kids are required to navigate a myriad of obstacles that threaten their survival and well being every day. As a student in similar circumstances, my mental, emotional, spiritual and psychological health was constantly besieged. My academic needs did not even make the top ten on a list of my most urgent issues!



It is not unusual for the average child growing up in urban America to face the realities of not only poverty, but, hunger, despair, homelessness, abuse, neglect and dysfunction. Many children contend with ruthless, prevalent criminal activity that pray on their innocence, seeking to recruit them into malevolence. They are forced to wade through drug and alcohol addicted streets under the prayer of arriving home safely. Therefore, tests and their subsequent results are a minor consequence in the minds of not just a few urban youth.



Test scores are not now, nor have they ever been in my opinion, the primary indicator of a student's intrinsic capabilities and talents. They tell us nothing about our students other than how they performed at one moment on one isolated day. If we are to use standardized exams for the purposes intended, we would concentrate on extrapolating the date to building individual program aimed at helping the child succeed.



Instead of pitting school systems, parents and educational service providers against one another in this absurd game of "gotcha," we should all be focused on how to improve upon what we have started. Rather than using the information as a legitimate quantitative measure to gauge performance and create real solutions, tests have become a tool to humiliate hard working teachers who struggle to keep these kids from sinking further into academic abyss. It is the hammer that will come down hard on the principal, working an average of 80+ hours a week, doing everything their training has taught them to reach parent and child alike.



Teaching is a humanistic endeavor and it is not for the faint of heart. Giving from one's soul every single day can leave you drained, overwhelmed and exhausted. You need only ask those who have left the profession all together.



We must encourage the millions of teachers around this nation who are dedicated to delivering quality learning experiences. Teachers plant seeds of knowledge that will not manifest and bear fruit, in many cases, for decades.



So whose study do we believe: Rand, The Center for Education Policy, The National Education Association and the National Association for Educational Progress? Whose numbers represent a true depiction of what works?



Clearly, if we are looking for substantive results from our students, we must do more to consider the entire human being and hold the test results in their proper perspective as a tool to design an appropriate strategy for academic improvement.