So here’s a thought.
My son Sam has his state reading test today and his math test tomorrow. He’s in fourth grade. And the deal is this: he’s really good at mandated tests. I don’t mean to brag (much). It’s just that he’s one of those kids who seems to like taking them and he does well on them. So he takes them, we wait for his scores, and then we buy him a Blizzard. It goes something like that.
We don’t stress about these tests, and thankfully, nor does his school. They do send a letter home encouraging us to make sure he gets enough sleep the night before the test and a good breakfast the day of.
So last night when he asked if he could stay up later than his 6-year-old brother and read a bit, we said no since we did want him to get a good night’s rest. He was cool with that.
But then around 3:00 a.m. a major thunderstorm blew in. Real fire and brimstone lightning. The “shake your windows” variety. I didn’t really sleep well (or at all) from 3:00 onward.
As it turns out, nor did Sam. He awoke looking pretty beat.
But today is test day. There’s no “Acts of God” clause that says the school can wait for calm weather. I’m guessing EVERY kid at Sam’s school didn’t sleep well last night.
Yet we’ll sit them all down and have them dutifully take their tests, knowing that each and everyone of them probably is pretty sleepy. And then in a few month’s time, the school’s scores will come back and we’ll use those scores to somehow quantify the school’s overall effectiveness.
I’m not saying a random thunderstorm on a random night before a random test is actually going to lower the scores. But I’m not saying it won’t.
And that’s only one problem amongst many of high-stakes testing. Think about that. Somewhere over the Pacific Ocean some sort of storm system moved inland, sweeping through the plains, finally arriving in Minnesota in the middle of the night and there’s a chance a school’s tests aren’t going to go as well as if the storm hadn’t arrived.
Perplexing.
As for Sam, he’ll get a Blizzard regardless.
It’s not unlike looking at a snapshot of a blinking subject and inferring that they have a chronic eye disorder. Conversely, even a good test day is like looking at a well-manicured, well-lit headshot and supposing that the subject looks like that just waking up, on the treadmill, in an argument, or in countless other “real” situations.
We miss the nuance on both sides unless the “snapshot” of the test is just one part of the overall assessment of a school’s performance.
Casting directors don’t look only at headshots. They’d miss most of the best performers.
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