Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments Standardized tests and literature

Some of you may have seen this article about Common Core-based tests in New York. The overall message is that scores dropped a lot over last year, when the CC wasn't being used. Hmm. Okay. Predictably, people are complaining. One father complained that the 3rd grade language arts portion on the sample test was "dense (and dull!)." I decided to have a look.

I found the sample questions easily (you can see them here). I looked at the first passage in the language arts section.

Turns out the passage was a very short story written by Leo Tolstoy (The Gray Hare). Hmm. I read it, and agreed with the dense and dull label. It was positively blah and immediately forgettable. Hmm. Hmm. Tolstoy? Blah?

So I did some searching and found a non-multiple-choice-test version of the story (read it here).

The version I found was a peaceful little tale about a bunny on an ordinary winter's night. Human society bustles around him while the snow glitters under a starry sky. He plays with his friends as the night passes, eats grains left over by the humans, and eventually tucks himself in to sleep at dawn.

The high stakes version is rearranged and harder to understand. The gentle portrait painted by Tolstoy is smudged, blurry, and has the additional pointlessness of horses being whipped for no apparent reason. It also substitutes the word sugar for silver to describe how the snow glitters. Question 3 asks why the author used the word sugar. Well, he didn't. The test writers did, presumably so that they could add a misleading answer choice about food (?).

But this stuff is merely the ordinary corruption of literature that we have come to expect from industrialized education. It isn't the achingly painful and soul-destroying side of this story/test passage and how it illustrates the bankruptcy of the US public education system.

I read about Tolstoy and learned that he got a bit of religion in his middle years. He was heavily Christian but investigated other belief systems, preached non-violence, and even became an ascetic. There were goods and bads to this: he wasn't afraid to speak out against brutality and influenced Gandhi. But he also made things difficult on his wife. You may ask what all this has to do with a story about a hare looking for food on a cold night and a high stakes test.

Well.

From what I've read (this, for example), the story is an allegory about living simply and the ways that humans invent to live, well, complexly. The hare seems to represent an ideal Christian life --- one that Tolstoy aspired to.

There's so much you could do with a tale like this one and Tolstoy himself and his other works --- but it would have to wait until 8th or 9th grade at the earliest. Philosophy, morality, religion, allegory, how writing can be used to paint a picture...the list is very long.

All of this subtlety is, of course, completely lost in the high stakes mediocritized version of the story, where Tolstoy's fable and its context are reduced to the importance of such factoids as "In which scene does the hare reach his goal for the day?"

We won't have to worry about this with Common Core since useless literature will be replaced by non-fiction.

My guess is that as teachers get used to coaching students to optimize scores, the scores will go up.

Indeed.

Val-- this is absolutely appalling. I wish that I could say that I'm surprised. But I'm not.

What IS this fixation that test-writers have with rabbits, anyway???

I hesitate to defend anything about multiple-choice standardised testing, but both the versions you posted use the word sugar (the non-test one has "lay in billows and glittered white as sugar", para 3) and the differences in the phrase look like translation differences to me... The horses are "lashed" with "knouts" in one version and beaten with whips in the other, but would the horses know the difference? If I knew what a knout was, perhaps I'd know...

But the point here is-- why use a selection with a deeper-than-age-appropriate context in the first place?

Why use a selection that is not in its original language in the first place?

(I understand that the idea is to avoid skewing scores for kids of higher SES who may have extensive literature exposure that their low SES classmates lack, but it creates some serious problems. If they seriously NEED text to be novel to test-takers, then they need to be developing their own written materials.)

This is standard practice for standardized testing though. The GRE tests reading were all from articles published in popular media such as Time. They then substitute in the big words and complex sentence structure. Because no one in real life writes what they need for testing.

However, it does seem like at the K-12 level, they should be able to find authentic work for testing.

More on the Common Core in the NY Times today.

People are very wound up about high failure rates in New York. I don't know what to think. On the one hand, I see much of this type of testing as largely meaningless in many ways. If the schools had 1) realistic expectations for all the students and 2) taught them properly instead teach using on what amounts to test prep, the tests would be easier for the kids. But we have to keep pushing the ridiculous idea that everyone can perform at age-grade level. So part of me is cynical and assumes that when the test gets a bit harder, the rationalizing and dumbing down will follow. High failure rates get in the way of pretending that everyone should all go college (and assume massive debt while pursuing worthless degrees).

On the other hand, it would be nice to teach meaningful ideas and test in meaningful ways involving thought and discussion, and I cynically suspect that Common Core is simply more of the same factoid drivel, if perhaps slightly harder.