Pearls of Wisdom

It only seems fitting for the week of NJ ASK to have a short dissertation on testing. 

As one walks outside Fort Lee High School or any other high school in the United States, one can always hear the all too familiar lament from a disconsolate mother, “Well, my son is very bright, but he is just not a good test taker”.  To many a listener, these words ring all too true. Masses of parents join in, forming a general assemblage of malcontents, desperately worried that John or Jane will not get into Harvard because of his or her SAT scores.  The result is a Shakespearean tragedy at worst or a Gahan Wilson cartoon, depicting hordes of students bleeding from their brains from the trauma of taking these tests. 

We live in a society of testing in our schools.  Parents spend a substantial part of their lives worrying about how their children will perform on these tests.  Educators and teachers are constantly being questioned about our testing methods, the quality of the tests, and whether the tests are really necessary at all.   Hopefully, the following will put a little perspective on this issue.

In the United States, children are tested from the third grade forward as a general rule. In the glorious state of New Jersey, we have the infamous NJ ASK tests.  These tests are a comprehensive assessment of how students in any given school rate against students of the same age in schools throughout the state.  These tests do not affect the grades of the students per se, but strongly impact on the individual school’s state ratings.  These test scores may however affect recommendations of a given student for honors, gifted & talented programs, or advanced placement courses.  For months prior to the exams, school curricula careful prepare students with programs to enhance test scores in order to preserve or improve district ratings.  Creative and innovative programs of learning may be discarded in favor of test-geared course study. 

Some parents take the NJ Ask tests very seriously or are very concerned about placement of their children in honors courses or “gifted & talented” programs, even at a very early age.  This often puts an inordinate amount of stress on young children. 

Some parents are thinking about college while their children are in elementary school.   Special preparatory books may be used as well as private tutors.  After-school and weekend honors Math and English courses are available through private companies like Honors Review right here in Fort Lee.  Over the summer, there are Math and Science camps, or special university courses for young children.  Pressure, pressure, pressure!

When it comes to general testing or NJ ASK, I have always advocated less pressure on the children, preferring to make sure my kids had a good night’s sleep the night before an exam and a healthy breakfast the day of the test, while reassuring my children that the tests were not all that important.  For whatever reason, that approach seems to have worked with my children, as they have performed well on these exams.

As for honors or “gifted & talented” programs, teachers and test results remain the most  accurate and reliable assessment of children’s abilities in the vast majority of cases.  If a parent believes that a child has been left out of a program incorrectly, there are channels of appeal available.  In the high school, the last few years proved conclusively that placing children in honors programs and/or AP (advanced placement) programs upon parental insistence was an abject failure.  That failure was a major component of the severe drop in the Fort Lee High School state ratings. 

Nevertheless, the chronic undercurrent of complaints regarding all this testing of children remains.  Community advocacy groups petition against these exams, with claims of racially biased testing, gender bias, i.e. that tests are slanted toward males versus females, inner city bias, i.e. that tests discriminate against urban communities, etc., etc., etc.  Of course, none of these groups have come up with any viable alternatives to testing.   Rather, they vaguely imply that teachers should be able to recognize intellectual potential by class performance, grades, effort, and other general data.  Of course, that does assume that all teachers are highly capable of making this type of evaluation independently, without formalized testing, a formula which has never proven out and is speculative at best.   

So for better or worse, testing is ultimately necessary. And all the whining and complaining is not going to change that, at least not until someone comes up with a superior idea.  And just for the record, for those parents, who feel it necessary, there are special private courses and tutors strictly to instruct children on how to perform better on tests, regardless of the subject matter. 

Returning to the subject of SAT exams (or ACT exams), taken predominantly in the junior year of high school, the pressure on the students becomes monumental.  The child’s future is in jeopardy, or so the parent assumes.  I can’t speak for every community, but in Fort Lee and Bergen County, if the student is to be competitive, he/she must be enrolled in an SAT prep course, generally costing thousands of dollars (guilty!).  And these courses do work for many students, elevating scores several hundred points from what the student might have scored on his/her own.  This permits some parents to issue a legitimate claim of financial discrimination against those students who cannot afford these SAT prep courses. 

There is one provocative fact that we may want to consider during this conversation.  Parents whose children score well on the SATs generally are not the ones complaining about how unfair or biased these exams may be.  For the record, having taken these exams, albeit many years ago, I personally fail to see the bias in having to solve x2 + 4x + 4 = 0.  Word problems should not have to relate to a specific ethnic group by naming the characters with international names.  As for language barriers, it just is not feasible to offer the “English” sections of the SATs in multiple languages for obvious reasons. 

Urban language bias issues present some interesting possibilities.  Perhaps the College Board organizations can have Kanye West and Jay-Z develop a Hip Hop SAT test for Los Angeles inner city kids.  Jersey City and Brooklyn representatives can compete for the right to prepare a “street language” SAT exam, although Newark and the Bronx may feel slighted. 

Even if universities are declaring publically that SAT scores are only one component of the admission process, please do not be deceived. That is just good PR to appease all the anti-SAT groups that permeate the American public.   Since the inception of these exams, major universities have used SAT scores as a major qualifying tool in the process and will continue to do so, because it works!  The truth is that, with the deluge of applications to the most prominent universities in our country, they need every tool available to whittle down the number of applications to a workable number for each incoming Freshman class. 

Sometimes, excellent test results may have negative ramifications.  Those students who “overachieved” on the SATs may be accepted by Ivy League or other fine universities that might have otherwise excluded them based on the lower scores.  But when they enter these fine universities, some of these “overachievers” find themselves “overmatched”.  “Oops”, they weren’t really bright enough to compete at that level.   The pressure to survive and please their parents may create severe bouts of depression or, even worse, isolated cases of suicide.   “Water seeks its own level”, may be the applicable expression in this case. Students have a certain ability and potential.  Accepting a child’s innate ability is not easy for every parent.   Parents who constantly push children to “exceed” this level are most probably not doing their children any favor, possibly even causing damage to the child’s psyche. 

Some interesting statistics on the SATs regarding the quality of education in Fort Lee High School (Scores out of perfect score of 2400):

NJ State Average Score     1550

Fort Lee HS                         1618

River Dell Regional HS         1627

Cliffside Park HS                   1367

Palisades Park HS                 1456

Ridgefield Memorial HS         1528

Leonia HS                             1596

Northern Valley HS                1726

Glen Rock HS                        1689

Indian Hills HS                        1628

Dwight Morrow HS                  1426

There is one simple and undeniable truth that everyone seems prone to forget.     There are many, many fine universities in the United States of America.  There are colleges, large and small, providing amazing educations for matriculating high school seniors.   For the student that truly wants to excel, it is not absolutely necessary to go to Harvard, Princeton or MIT.    And while going to Cornell was a wonderful experience, I could have saved a great deal of money for my parents had I chosen to go to Rutgers, one of the best state universities in the entire country (excluding a few verbally abusive coaches).  

So, maybe we should all relax just a little bit and allow our children their childhood.  Less pressure to perform well on State exams is a solid approach.  Try to accept that tests, like it or not, are the only measuring stick of knowledge and potential that has been proven effective over the years.  Recognize that once in a while, like it or not, a child may do poorly on an exam and the world will not end.  NJ ASK and SATs are just little bumps in the road to the child’s future and he/she will survive.   And let’s remember that there are always athletic scholarships. 

Do not train a child to learn by force or harshness; but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each.” ― Plato