Peter Greene writes here about Sara Holbrook, a poet whose poems have been used on standardized tests.

Back in 2017, Holbrook wrote an essay for Huffington Post entitled, “I Can’t Answer These Texas Standardized Test Questions About My Own Poems.” The writer had discovered that two of her poems were part of the Texas STAAR state assessment tests, and she was a bit startled to discover that she was unable to answer some of the questions….

To approach any poem with the notion that each word has one and only one correct reading when language at its most rich involves shades and layers or meaning–what my old college writing professor called “the ambiguity that enriches”–is one way to stifle thinking in students. In many states, we are doing it in grades K through 12.
There are so many layers to Holbrook’s situation. The test manufacturers could have contacted her and talked to her about her poem (though Common Core architect David Coleman would argue that doing so was both unnecessary and undesirable), but they didn’t. So here we sit, in a bizarre universe where the test writer knows the “correct” answer for a question about a poem, but the person who wrote the poem does not. And at least Holbrook has the option of publicly saying, “Hey, wait a minute,” which is more than the deceased authors used for testing can do. But she was only able to do so because somebody risked punishment by sharing test materials with her. Particularly ironic is Mentoring Minds’ promise to build critical thinking skills in students, even as Holbrook, by taking reading, writing and speaking out to students in living, breathing, dynamic workshops, is doing far more to promote critical thinking than can be accomplished by challenging students to guess which one of four available answers an unseen test writer has deemed “correct.”