Bob Shepherd, our resident scholar, wrote this insightful comment:

Anyone who has taught high-school kids knows that they are extremely emotionally unstable. It’s a difficult time. It’s the time in which we all struggle with establishing an identity that will be acceptable to/accepted by the others around us. One way in which kids do that is by rebelling against their parents and teachers and older authorities in general. This rebellion can take forms both positive and negative.

On the positive side, many turn to resistance against how older people have messed things up for them–have given them human-caused climate change or dying oceans or Trump and his stupid wall. On the negative side, many turn to destructive behaviors of which older people disapprove–drinking and drugs and petty theft (shoplifting) and dangerous sexual experimentation for which they are not ready physically or emotionally. High-school kids tend to be extreme about everything–extremely idealistic and extremely inclined to go further, in their beliefs about the world, than their actual knowledge and experience rationally allow. They are sensitive and volatile and more than a little bit crazy, like caged tigers.

For a long time, great teachers in the humanities (English, history, art, theatre, music, languages) and in the sciences approached as a humane undertaking were able to harness that youthful idealism, that desire to define themselves as change agents over and against the adult world. In every classroom, there is the overt curriculum and then there are the hidden curricula that get taught incidentally. An extremely important part of the hidden curriculum in those classes in high school was always that a great teacher would use great cultural products from the past to harness that idealism and desire for an identity: “I am a writer, a musician, a linguist, a historian, a biologist, in the making,” the student would learn to say of him or herself. “I am Yolanda the poet.” An English class in which the overt curriculum as, say, study of Slaughterhouse Five, would become one in which, because the class was focused on what authors had to say, the hidden curriculum taught that people do (and rationalize to themselves) really stupid and evil things in war. And the kids would get all fired up about that. One in which the overt curriculum as American literature of the Puritan Era would become one in which the hidden curriculum taught Puritan values like individualism and local government and rebellion against tyranny and the horrors that can occur when people don’t practice acceptance and toleration (e.g., the genocide against the indigenous population in the Americas). And because kids were getting something from it–a sense of their own identity or a purpose or cause to be fired up about, they would learn that learning itself was of value. And what would last and be important from that high-school experience–what would not, perhaps, bear its fruit for years but would, indeed, bear fruit, would be that learning.

Not so now. English class has become all about applying item x from the Gates/Coleman bullet list to text snippet y in preparation for the ALL IMPORTANT test that will determine whether the kid will be acceptable for advancement. Kids have been robbed, by Ed Deform, by this testing mania, of humane education, of the hidden curriculum that taught them, most importantly, to become intrinsically motivated, life-long learners. No one ever got fired up by a set of test prep exercises.

We have an epidemic, now, in the US of high-school kids who are extraordinarily stressed out, who don’t see a future for themselves, who cut themselves and suffer from depression and anorexia, who commit suicide. If you teach in a high-school, you see this all the time, but especially at the end of the year, as testing season approaches. The kids, having been herded and cajoled and threatened all year; having spent a year sitting in class for an hour, getting up and moving for three minutes, sitting in another, and doing this six or seven times a day; now face the very real prospect of failure on invalid, capricious standardized tests, and they are stressed, stressed, stressed and ANGRY. The testing is AN ACT OF VIOLENCE AGAINST CHILDREN.

An entire generation of students has now been subjected to the standards-and-testing regime. And the results are in. We now KNOW that it has fulfilled NONE of its promises. It hasn’t improved learning outcomes. It hasn’t closed achievement gaps. But it has narrowed and distorted curricula and pedagogy and made our children SICK.

Enough. Standardized testing is a vampire that sucks the lifeblood out of education. Put a stake in it.

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