For those not following me on Facebook, I thought I’d share this post. I mostly do food and puppy but I’m on a mission this morning:

Eduhonesty: Here’s the bit of science that education has been missing in the last few decades: You can damage or destroy a thing by measuring it. The fact that tests suck up instructional time is obvious. Less obvious is what all those tests are doing to miilions of kids. If you damage all the kids at once, it’s easy to attribute poor academic performance, along with rising depression and anxiety rates, to outside factors such as previous COVID lockdowns, poor nutrition, screen time, and changing family dynamics. We can find so many excuses for the steep dip in childhood mental health that the dip even begins to seem natural.

Have we learned so little in the last few decades? In the recent past, we were even arguing about fluoride in the water. Then we repealed the old nutritional guidelines for schools, as if whole milk might help us. (It might, but that’s another post.) Part of today’s confusion no doubt stems from the multicausal nature of the US academic slide. COVID lockdowns did do real damage, damage spread unevenly across the landscape. Districts that had 1:1 computing set up before 2020 made the transition to remote learning much more easily than less-fortunate, cash-strapped districts scrambling to buy backordered laptops. School funding, school staffing levels, available childcare and mental health care almost always favor the financially fortunate.

Eduhonesty: So many small details, so easy to get lost… It’s no wonder we get stuck falling down into rabbit holes. Them we stare up toward the small pocket of light above us wondering what went wrong. Testing is on our list of possibly problematic activities, but it gets lost in the noise of federal policy shifts, overall academic learning loss, falling literacy, rising innumeracy, critical staffing shortages, funding inequities, etc.

Testing absolutely must not get lost.

The tests of today are not the tests of yesteryear.

In my view, annual levels of state standardized testing represent nothing short of unethical human experimentation. Standardized testing wallops kids year after year now, while the emphasis put on scores makes poor and even average performers repeatedly feel like losers and failures. We are losing instructional weeks and even months to testing when test prep is thrown into the larger testing picture. Kids can easily see how much adults now appear to care about these test results. They can also easily see when they have placed in the middle or lower groups within their grade.

How is this not unethical human experimentation? No one is asking those kids’ permission. For the most part, no one is asking their parents permission, either. In some states, parents are supposedly not “allowed” to let their children opt out of testing. Barriers have been put up to stop parents from removing students from standardized testing pools all over the country.

We are talking about forced participation in possibly harmful trials for the purposes of gathering data… regardless of the effects on test subjects. How can we call this anything other than human experimentation?

Jocelyn Turner

Yes, I took those tests as a kid in the sixties and seventies, but only for a few days in the spring. I wasn’t also taking multiple benchmark and practice standardized tests, and adults around me were not making a huge to-do out of that spring test. In “Stranger Things” terms, that test used to be a demigorgon flower, not a mindflayer.

Those numbers add up to one in five adolescents with diagnosed mental health issues. How many adolescents remain undiagnosed? How many are just toughing out their days until someone sees the cuts under their sleeves? How many are not receiving any mental health care because their cuts are still invisible, their facades still intact?

As control of state education returns to the states, I hope at least some U.S. states will attempt to answer my questions. Educational leaders have become enamored of numbers, often too many numbers that are being spewed out at too fast a rate to process. Those leaders need to remember the numbers in question are not just rolling mindlessly off some A.I. tongue. They are being provided by children, including the more than five million children referred to in the government’s own health brief.