News Flash: Students S.O.L. in Virginia

Isn't it Ironic (non-Alanis Morrissette version)

Irony – the use of words to convey a meaning that is the opposite of its literal meaning.

I was sitting in my small group (a group of guys from church) last week and I asked my buddies to pray for my students because they would be taking the S.O.L. tests in the upcoming days. While I was going over specifics of what to pray for, my buddy stopped me in the middle of a sentence.

“SOLs? That’s a pretty interesting name for the test. What exactly does that stand for?”

For those of you that don’t know, the SOLs are Virginia’s Standards of Learning. They are the state’s version of standardized testing for students from 3^rd grade until 12^thgrade. It is meant to give us a tangible and effective way of evaluating students, teachers and schools so that Virginia – and, as an extension, our nation – makes adequate progress. I'd say it's pretty ironic we named these tests "S.O.L."

I believe in standardized testing like I believe in Satan –it’s the cause of everything evil. As humans, we are S.O.L. with the existence of evil, and as teachers we are S.O.L.with the existence of standardized tests. OK, maybe I’m exaggerating just a bit. I don’t argue that standardized tests have a place in our educational system. They give us a quantitative means to look at students and monitor them. They can help us understand deficiencies and strengths as well as individual areas to work on with individual students. However, where I am not in agreement is the extent to which we rely on testing to determine the success of a school, the abilities of a teacher, or the comprehension of a child. In today’s educational world, pass rates are the be all and end all. Students look at year-end testing as the most important day of the year. Parents look at testing data to determine if a school is good or not. Teachers pray for high scores to ensure job security. Administrators look at scores to determine the effectiveness of a teacher. Superintendents look at pass rates to see if a school is making enough progress each year.

Uniquely and Wonderfully Made

Children – like all of us – are each intricately woven beings who are uniquely and wonderfully made. Shouldn’t they be assessed as a sum product of the parts, not just a snapshot of what they know? Any teacher worth their weight will tell you that standardized tests only give you only a small glimpse of what a student knows. In other words, standardized tests don’t accurately measure the progress of a child, nor does it show us their reasoning skills and thought process – the very aspect of humanity that sets us apart from the rest of the living world. Only individual teachers – those who work day in and day out with these precious children – can measure these things with any level of accuracy. Besides, test data never accounts for test anxiety, good days and bad days, or for good and bad testing environments. Personally, I’ve had students who have barely passed – or even failed – the math SOL who I know have a far superior understanding of math concepts and can apply these skills in new ways than students who have passed with flying colors. This begs the question,

“If working with a child regularly is the best way to understand and gauge their development, why is our judgment of students, teachers, and schools based almost exclusively on standardized test data?”

The optimistic answer is,

“Testing data is the one constant that all schools have.”

The pessimistic answer is,

“Those that can, do. Those that can’t, teach.”

This infers that teachers are barely capable people; therefore they can’t be trusted to assess children. Whichever camp you are in, all of our opinions are based on data which gives us a picture that is blurry at best. Shouldn’t we be relying on multiple sources of data when it comes to our children?

An Unlikely Source

Entertainment, competition, excitement… there is a lot to like about professional sports. Perhaps one additional thing we can admire about sports teams is the way they evaluate players when they are looking to graduate from the ranks of amateur athletics to being paid professionals. Perhaps it’s because there is so much money at stake when it comes to the industry, but pro sports take every measure possible not to make mistakes when deciding what players they should pick to be on their teams. Multiple people go and watch them perform live to get as many different opinions as possible. Then, separate people watch these same performances on film. They pause, rewind, and fast forward so they can see – frame by frame –every aspect of the subject’s performance. Throw in a battery of intellectual, physical, and psychological tests and you’re still missing a crucial element: what family, friends, and coaches say about the player.

The organizations that spend the most time and effort evaluating human beings include the NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL, and FIFA. They have the evaluation of human beings down to a science because they are multi-billion dollar industries and there is a lot riding on their ability to judge people. When there is a lot at stake, many forms of evaluation are utilized, and the subjective opinions of experts are taken into account in order to form an opinion on a person that is as accurate as possible. I applaud these organizations for the effort they make to truly gauge an individual.

There is much more at stake when it comes to education than entertainment, excitement, and wealth. Not only is the future of our children at stake, but in their hands is also the future of our country, our world. But, because we can’t quantify the importance and value of education with dollars, instead we have turned to standardized testing as the be all and end all and minimize the importance of all other aspects of assessing children, teachers and schools. In the end, not only are the students S.O.L., but all of us are also – children, adults, teachers, parents, and Americans alike.