Kim brings us an excellent point: how many brilliant, scholarly, scientific, creative, brilliant minds have there ever been that belonged to lousy test-takers? Fortunately for all of us, they all found a way to rise above their inability (I'm not going to call it a disability, because test-taking shouldn't be classified as an "ability!" It simply isn't that important in the scheme of things) and gone on to express their brilliance. And I'm sure that our brilliant minds of today will find a way to rise above our misguided attempts to measure such brilliance, but let's be honest--should we really have to be apologizing for ineptitude to the people we're trying to help along? "I'm sorry, Mr. Einstein, but based on your CSAP scores, we're cutting funding to the science program in your school district, and we encourage you to drop out of high school and become a streetsweeper. We're so sorry, but, after all, you are a terrible test-taker! What could you possibly have to offer society with scores like those?" It's worse than an embarrassment to educators--it's an outrage. But what do you expect when you have the decisions made by people who only know a little bit about what they're overseeing?
Which brings me to the topic of school boards. Could somebody tell me, once and for all (I've been asking this question for 25 years now) why educators are the only body of professionals to be governed by non-professionals (i.e., people who are not trained in the profession)? Once again, about the only professional experience--that is, experience within the profession--most school board members have is that they attended school. Why are we not outraged by that (well--I am...but no one else seems to be!)? A simple explanation is that school boards were never supposed to have the power that they've come to possess and, often, demand. It was never envisioned that a school board would determine what a school district would and would not teach, for example, because it was understood that lay people were really not qualified to make those decisions. But this idea has changed radically, even in the relatively short 25 years I've been teaching.
For example, many people in this area remember when our school district was sued by a local fundamentalist Christian organization for making Greek and Roman Mythology a mandatory part of the sophomore curriculum (and, as it happened, I was the Sophomore English teacherwho had introduced mythology into the curriculum, and since it was a mandatory class, it became a mandatory subject). Now--while this lawsuit created a horribly distracting circus-like atmosphere in our school district that year, the suit was predictably dismissed after two rounds of litigation (in both cases being termed "frivolous" by the judges). But I became painfully aware of the effect such a frivolous action had on our district and, in particular, my teaching. I found myself looking over my shoulder all the time, constantly wondering if the risks I was taking in order to make my teaching more effective were going to stir up trouble ahead. As it happened, I was finishing grad school at about the same time, and I wrote my Master's Research Paper on efforts by the "New Right" to influence and determine curriculum in U.S. public schools. So why do I bring this up? After all, tthis litigation wasn't brought by a school board member.
During my research, I learned that the New Right--Fundamentalist Christian groups--all over America were making it a routine practice to anonymously "develop" and support candidates running for school boards who could be counted upon to push their agenda; infiltrate school boards, they reasoned correctly, and these organizations could go far to limit "non-Christian" curricula (ranging from sex education, of course, to "controversial" novels like Huckleberry Finn to Darwin's theories of evolution). And this method of infiltration has been staggeringly successful, largely because school boards now have such enormous power over matters that, sadly, they aren't trained to address from the perspective of effective educational practices. The other reason they are so successful is that they issue challenges to curriculum even when they know those challenges won't have the apparent desired outcome; this is because there's another desired outcome that will be met--namely that teachers like me that have gone through the challenge experience tend to come out of it as more conservative teachers--once again, looking over their shoulders to make sure they aren't ruffling any feathers out there. No teacher who has gone through this cares to go through it again, which these organizations are counting on. It's very effective, and the people who end up getting hurt the most, of course, are the children for whom these organizations claim to be looking to "protect." If you want to limit dynamic, innovative teaching methods, thereby making it "safe" for all who sit in classrooms every day, all you have to do is persist in going after the teachers. It works and these organizations know it--after all, they've been doing it successfully for years, and very, very often, they're doing it while sitting on our school boards.