Pass the test, please

The intent was well-meaning, to find ways of educating the young uniformly around the country by adopting common standards. No child left behind was a great slogan until it was formally requiemed to death as provisions of law and the policies from boards killed the spirit.

Unfortunately, it also organized anxiety over passing tests, and as a former 6th grade teacher at PSS, I was made aware that our pedagogy is naught if it did not result into higher passing grades of our classes in the standard tests. Learning became an exercise in pat answers to commonly asked questions, save that a group somewhere decided which questions and answers were pat.

Chinese education since the royal houses adapted to the teachings of Confucius (Kung Zi) memorized text rather than educate folks on what the teachings meant and be in dialogue with them. Familiarity became the measure rather than knowing significance and articulating with others what the materials meant. Imperial exams until the end of the last dynasty (Qing) consisted of knowing the “standards” of writings and musings of revered scholars. It was no accident that the red book of the Cultural Revolution was about Mao-think, not how the ordinary citizen sensed, felt, thought and acted!

Deng Xiao Ping broadened the thinking base in the mid-’80s. Now comes the Obama administration inviting Congress and America to rethink the course of public education, particularly on the entrenched practice of teaching to pass standard tests. 

China, Korea, and Japan go into annual paroxysm of testing its young so it can determine which ones head for the prestigious schools. Gaokao is such an exam in June that this year, 9 million students took the test for 7 million university placements. Thus, the bottom 20 percent of the test takers didn’t have a place to go but the workplace, self-education, or vocational training offered by the state through employers. Talents and gifts demonstrated in music and sports were exempt from placement quotas.

Our eldest, like her parents, had her foot firmly on the muddied waters of the earth, but where she was smart was to put her thinking cap on the needed skill required by the economic engine of the times, information technology. There are those who focus on the hardware, which the market requires that units be innovative every six to nine months. Between G3 and G4 smartphones was a matter of months. My daughter went with the software, which is an ongoing 24/7 concern; no one can afford to be left behind. She does not intend to.

Did her SAT helped in her education? Not much is my guess. Did her sense experience growing up enable the learning, the confidence to think on her feet, be compassionate in her expressions, clear and cogent in her articulations? It probably did. She also had an incredible exposure to a variety of settings, sometimes without Mom and Dad, and she learned to survive with her native intuition and intelligence. Ditto for her younger sister three years behind.

My eldest finished high school with unruly but creative kids of the diplomatic corps, foreign business executives, and the country’s elite at the International School in Makati, MM, Philippines. A teacher, either out of reverse psychology or spite, told her that she would never speak French like a native speaker so she spent a year in Avignon the south of France. Later, she worked in a Francophone North African country and her “frogginess” was not wasted.

Her younger sister lived with a native homesteader in South New Zealand on her last year in high school. The experience was worth the adventure. Did she benefit from her SAT? I guess not much. She decided to attend community college wherever she and her husband were located, eschewing her Dad’s valiant offer to send her to a residential church-related college in the Midwest. When she was done, she graduated magna cum laude.

Standardized tests intend to be meritocratic but prove to favor certain sectors over others. China puts a placement value according to residency, so the likelihood of a Beijing student being accepted in a Beijing university is much higher than one coming from outside the metropolitan area.

Teaching to tests, which many teachers on Saipan fearfully adhere to in case they lose their job on performance demerits when students do not fare well in standard tests, puts the anxiety on the testing result rather than on the quality of one’s pedagogy. In some cases, going to higher education is an option given by raters of tests. In my second daughter’s case, she went to college on her own option and did so at her own pace. There lies the merit of the U.S. community college system.

Now we are mired in tests. Obama desperately tries to get out of the shackles of the measuring rod, but having crossed the skin color line at the WH (a white man at a Fiorina GOP campaign called him a “black Muslim”), he’ll sing, “We shall overcome.” Scrutinized for allegedly being Muslim, he’ll pass.