I hereby invite any politician�or anyone, period�who advocates standardized testing as a viable means of assessing our country�s public schools to spend a week where I work.

I won�t divulge the name of my employer. It�s probably not illegal to (and this thing has a readership of, like, three on a good day) but I�d rather play it safe. Let�s just say I am temporarily employed by a corporation with offices in Iowa City, a corporation which is paid by school boards across the country to score their standardized tests.

Long before the big W was appointed dictator, there was a general push by politicians from both major parties to make schools more �accountable.� How do we know our kids are getting an education in there? Who�s keeping track of our teachers? After all, our tax dollars are going towards their outrageous salaries�upwards of $40,000 in the most egregious cases�and where is the quality control? Where is the status report? How do we know that money is being well-spent?

Well, rather than bother with messy cross-curricular or interdisciplinary assessment, or come up with portfolio assessments that would take a good look a student�s accumulated body of work from the last year or two of their schooling, it was decided that the best way to guage the performance of our schools was�and always has been�the hard and fast science of standardized testing. After all, it�s what the admissions departments at our nation�s colleges have been using for decades, and no one gets into Harvard that doesn�t deserve to, right?

Yep�actually looking at the work a student had done in the classroom made no sense at all. Too time-consuming, too wildly varied, too unscientific. Better to design a test with arbitrary criteria, confusing directions, computer-scored multiple choice questions. Better to have a test with a cultural bias towards native English speakers with middle-class backgrounds. Better to have a test with absolutely no bearing on what the students have been studying in school that year. Better to derail the last four weeks of a teacher�s syllabus so she can spend that time drilling her students to prepare them for a test which, if they flunk, will mean they get to repeat the eighth grade, and she gets her salary docked or maybe even fired. That seems to make the most sense, doesn�t it?

Well, to the politicians, yes. A great many of them have no background whatsoever in education (surprise, surprise). They�ve never set foot in a classroom during their political careers, except maybe on campaign stops. A majority of them have professional backgrounds. And their experience in the corporate world tells them that if a system isn�t working, it must be shut down. Do we have factories operating in the red? Lay off the workers, close them down.

So they apply the same philosophy to education: Inner city schools are underfunded and overcrowded. Teachers don�t want to work there, kids don�t want to learn there. So, shut them down. Bus the kids out to the suburban high schools. Or put them on one of those voucher programs that makes so much sense and is going to work so tremendously well, you have to wonder why so many educators are opposed to it. We need to start treating schools like corporations, the politicians say. If they aren�t pulling their weight, we need to cut them loose.

This approach is so fundamentally wrong that I don�t think I really need to get into it. If you�re reading this, chances are you�re a person who can already see why it�s such a backasswards way of doing things. The crux of the problem is that a corporation�s job is to make a profit�a school cannot pay attention to profit. Sure, they�d all like to have100% of their seniors graduate�but that�s about as far as the numbers game can honestly get a school. The rest of education is not about making a profit. In fact, it often means expending the greatest effort in the areas with the lowest returns. Teachers don�t stay three hours after school every day tutoring the straight-A students; they don�t stay up all night preparing study guides for the brightest kids in their class. The slowest kids need the most attention�that much should be obvious�and so looking at education as a profit-making venture is absurd, whether the net gains are monetary (which they are, in the form of federal aid, when you play the standardized testing game) or just the intangible qualities of good character, common sense, and human kindness that we hope to foster in every kid out there.

But many say the battle is already lost. Standardized tests are now de facto at almost every grade level in almost every public school in the country. Iowa was one of the last, if not the last, holdouts, and they just recently caved. I never realized how grateful I should be that my advancement from grade to grade was not dependent on such a sadistic system.

�No Child Left Behind� is the name of Bush�s initiative, and like many of his schemes, the irony is so delicious that even the people who voted for him should be able to taste it. Really, I�m surprised his board of directors couldn�t come up with a slogan whose rhetoric doesn�t backfire so magnificently. Here it is, folks, the Bush Regime�s sparkly new educational agenda: �No Child left Behind, Unless Of Course That Child Flunks This Test, And Then That Child Shall Be Left Behind.� Great job, guys. Bulletproof, really.

But I never really saw how dangerous�and depressing�this New Educational Order is until I started working at my new job last week. There it was for me to read and weep, up on my computer screen�example after example of how bright kids are going to get royally screwed by a system that doesn�t honor their intelligence, their common sense, their integrity. Standardized tests are already a nightmare for kids and adults alike�anyone taken the GRE lately?�and now we want to have more of them? Really? I know politicians are out of touch, but have they really forgotten just how awful these tests are, what a pants-wetting anxiety-fest they are?

Maybe these politicians advocating these tests are the same smug jackasses who loved the tests when they were in school. They strutted into the room with their freshly-sharpened Number Goddamn 2 pencils, finished each section of the test early, and made a big production of closing their test booklets and relaxing theatrically while the rest of the class pulled their hair out, cried, puked, and bit their nails through row after hellish row of those little ovals. These pricks were the same ones who would compare answers during breaks in the test��What�d you put for the last one in that section? ... Yessssss! That�s what I had!�

But the rest of us shat ourselves with nervousness. Even I, hardly a grade-grubber, got paralytically anxious during the Iowa Test Of Basic Skills. It seemed even more foreboding because it had our own state�s name stamped across the front: it wasn�t until much later that I would realize Iowa leads the country in education and also, curiously, in the standardized-testing industry.

Right now, my scoring team is working on fourth-grade reading tests from Ohio. These kids�nine- and ten-year olds, remember�have taken this test to see if they will get to go on to the fifth grade. A good portion of it is multiple choice, but there is also a section where the student reads a section of text and writes responses to it. That�s where we come in.

We struggle to stay awake while brief essays written in fourth-grade scrawl flash across our screen. We then assign them points based on a rubric we spent the first two days of scoring learning, discussing, and standardizing. There is no room for error; every essay must be evaluated against this rubric. There are seemingly arbitrary distinctions, semantic hair-splitting, and nitpicking of the finest degree. (Example: for one response, if a student writes: �They are friends,� she is not awarded a point; if she writes �They are now friends,� she gets the point. And that�s one of the clearer-cut cases.)

The only entertainment our job allows is the occasional wild card from a student who is either bored, or dumb, or both, and has taken complete creative license with his or her response. Rather than rewrite an essay about Abraham Lincoln in his or her own words, some aspiring Gore Vidals will take off on flights of fancy. Ethics prevent us from sharing the responses with each other or printing them off, but here�s one snippet: �Abraham Lincoln fought a war against South America. Then he died in 1989 and went to live in Heaven with Jesus and the eagles.�

More common are the spelling or grammar mistakes, which, mercifully, are not counted against the student�s score. I forgot how integral phonetics can be for a young speller: �Lincoln was cilled in a movie theater when a person shat him. Then he dide.� And yes, many kids do believe Lincoln was at the movies when John Wilkes Booth stepped in to bring the pain.

I don't want to sound like I'm bemoaning the intellectual prowess of the Youth of Tomorrow�s America. This isn�t one of those doomsday essays where I conclude that we�re all going to hell in a handbasket because the average sixth-grader in California can�t locate Sweden on a globe. I�m just trying to lend some perspective to an already dismally absurd situation. How much a kid has learned or not learned in a given school year cannot be summed up in a day�s worth of testing�even if the test covered material the kid had actually studied. Think of all the factors: the kid might have terrible handwriting, or have dyslexia which prevents him from spelling effectively. I think of my friend Chuck, who is hyperbolically intelligent and had the shittiest handwriting in our entire third-grade class. Or it could be worse: what about the kid who�s just immigrated from Central America and has but a rudimentary grasp of English. Or the mentally challenged child who�s been mainstreamed into the classroom. Or the kid whose father has beaten him the night before.

That�s the thing: These youngsters� little malapropisms might provide a moment of levity for me during an otherwise tedious workday, but for them, it�s high-stakes. I smile at the funny essays, but then I remember that they�re wrong, and I must give a zero to the child who�s cast Lincoln as the second president of the United States who went down with the Titanic. (�Everyone licked his statue.�)

Likewise, we often give perfect scores to kids who have obviously not understood the text. They might be confused as hell, but because they have regurgitated the right facts in the right order in a series of illegible sentence fragments, we give them all the points. Granted, I�d rather be overscoring than underscoring these tests, but it still means the scoring rubric is arbitrary, and the test is no real measure of a students� aptitude.

Fortunately, there are others who have argued this case much more eloquently and comprehensivesly than I have. There�s the Salon essay by a woman who once worked a similar job, an essay I immediately went back and reread after I started this job. There�s Left Back, by Diane Ravitch. I humbly add this rant to the (I hope) growing cacaphony of dissenting voices. And I can say without melodrama that my heart breaks every time a blank page appears on my screen. Even worse, the page is sometimes adorned only by a slight plaintive admission along the lines of �I don�t know� or �I don�t understand the question,� in the handwriting of a child who should be using his creative energies to write his own short story or draw a cartoon, or at least do a mathematical story problem. I mean, come on.

As my one of my vehemently progressive education professors would always say, �Standardized tests measure nothing but a student�s ablity to take a standardized test.� They also measure something else, as I�ve learned when contemplating the fact that the state government of Ohio (an entity our scoring supervisor refers to ominously as �the customer�) has contracted us 200+ scorers to read their kids� essays for three weeks. Standardized tests also measure how creatively the Ohio Department of Education can blow twelve million dollars. Taxpayers should be furious.

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