Measurement Incorporated: Good Seasonal Work, and Life Lessons

Measuring Students: A Tale of Two States, Power, and Necessity

Located in downtown (enter city name here) is a little educational company that contracts with public schools to grade essays. While most people say that what the company does is "grade tests," a brief perusal of the website will show the inquiring mind that they actually help produce, develop, and grade the tests, and have several other locations nationwide. I found out about it through a wonderful lady in my local church. She encouraged three friends and me to apply for "reader" positions there last fall.

Four of us completed electronic applications and we talked about how fun it would be to carpool to work together. I didn't really know what the company did. Specifically, I didn't know about the connection to public education. I had had mental images of correcting and making comments on a young man or woman's (private school) math paper or essay. I had no idea how regimented it would be.

We started hearing from them in the spring. One by one, they started calling those of us who had applied. For reasons of circumstance it came down to two of us, "George" and myself.

George and I had a pretty intense philosophical discussion at that time about schools and specifically the public education system. He said he did not believe in tests as an educational tool, nor in the compulsory public school system as an institution - and I asked him about each point.

Tests do not promote thinking, he suggested. They are a means to advancing an agenda, in this case the agenda of the public education system. He reminded me that this system has the power of shaping young minds for 7.5 hours a day, 180 days a year, over 13 years in a lifetime (K-12), which comes out to 17,550 hours, or approximately 2.004 entire years of a life. (And some states are talking about adding a thirteenth grade!) This system is backed up legally at the point of a gun - by compulsory school attendance laws. The target of these laws is not the child, but the parent.

A parent, of course, retains the freedom to home-school her child or send him to a private school, but if she doesn't have the time or money to do either of these (as most apparently don't), then she must send him to a public school - or else face fines or a jail sentence. She is not free to, for example, exercise her own good judgment about what would be a proper balance between education, work, and recreation for her own child. She couldn't, for instance, have him attend classes a few hours a day at the local community college, then work a few hours, then enjoy some recreation. The state makes these decisions for her, unilaterally, on a mandatory basis.

As a person who is acquainted with necessity - the necessity of having a job - I had to take this one. I also thought it would be a good chance to test my ideas on public education by getting an insider's view of how the system works from the test-grading perspective.

My first task at this company was to grade essays written by tenth graders in a Southern state's compulsory schools. The kids responded to "prompts" given by the state. This particular prompt allowed for a narrative option where they would describe the sights, sounds, images and details of a memorable time. Most of the kids chose this prompt over the expository and persuasive prompts.

The essays for this state were consistently heartfelt, emotional expressions of experiences in the students' lives. Many students wrote about traumatizing incidents: a breakup with a boy- or girlfriend, the loss of a parent, a physical accident. The students poured their hearts out on these pages, or at the very least, knew how to "ham it up" convincingly. I was deeply impressed by how expressive these Southern students were, across the board.

My next project was a Northern state; the prompt was expository. In this essay response, students were to address a safety issue involving their local school. Specifically, they were given a school rule to dissect and debate. They were supposed to provide evidence for their stance, whether yea or nay about the rule.

What I found with these responses was disappointing. It is hard to explain the sense I had, but I felt an overwhelming lack of originality in the responses. It reminded me of a few of my own school days, where I would write what I thought adults wanted to hear, rather than actually use my own mind.

Sure, reasons were given (occasionally), evidence was cited (not very well). The grammar and usage was, overall, even better than that of the Southern papers. But the responses were mechanical, dry, devoid of personal expression. That, at least was my impression. And it was shared by other test graders with whom I discussed the issue.

This led me to speculate: is there some fundamental difference between the way children are being educated in the North versus the South of our country? Why would the Southern responses be so full of feeling, of pathos, and the Northern responses so utterly mechanical?

Are Southern students being taught in such a way that they put themselves out there more in the classroom? Do they feel that more is at stake for them?

If we are to judge schools' success by test scores alone, I think we would have to say that the Northern states are doing a better job, overall. States like Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana are consistently in the bottom of national rankings, using objective measures of reading, arithmetic, and other fundamentals.

And yet, let's look at another criterion - school violence. Where are most of the violent school shootings taking place? Colorado, Ohio, both Northern states, are at the top of that list. What struck me the most about the differences between the essays I read was that, when I finished a Southern student's paper, even if the grammar was poor, I felt that by the end of the essay I knew that child a little better. He/she had revealed something of him/herself on the page.

Conversely, when I finished a Northern student's paper, I felt that the child was just as much of an enigma as when I had begun. The child's soul seemed distanced from the educational process.

It's possible that I'm making too much of the differences. And I would hate to perpetuate some sort of North-South stereotype with these remarks. But I was convinced I saw a real difference.

The "education debate" today is about a surface, methodological issue - the issue of "tests." Specifically, debate is fiercest on the point of the "No Child Left Behind" act and the overwhelming emphasis it places on tests to determine a school's AYP (Average Yearly Progress).

It is said by critics of NCLB that some schools make substantial progress, but they still don't meet the quantitative standards of "AYP," so they still have to invest resources in helping students transfer out, rather than in improving their education.

By working as a test grader, I gained a sense of what I would call the circularity and arbitrariness of the test-taking industry. As a student, you are told the tests are near sacred, with few reasons given. That is to say, you are brainwashed.

As a grader, you realize that you are susceptible to error, misjudgment, or simply having a bad day, in which case you may mis-grade many of these important pieces of writing. Not all tests are double-checked, so in some cases one grader's best judgment stands as the final grade. There is an appeal process, but it is long and difficult.

I even witnessed a woman spill her coffee all over a student's test, which made their essay ungrade-able. The student will have to take a retake because of the careless mistake of an adult grader making $10.00 an hour.

I experienced a certain frustration as I read the child's words and wanted to be able to communicate with them. But the only communication I was allowed, as a grader, was a single number on a scale of 1 to 5. This single digit was to be the entirety of my message back to that child.

As for the future, I have decided to return to tutoring, where at least there is some personal interaction with the student. The test-grading gig is seasonal and temporary, and there are some severe discomforts that come with it. You sit in a wooden chair in a quiet room full of people for 8 hours, staring at test after test. There is an expectation that you will grade around 150 tests a day by the time you've been at it for a week.

If you like sitting at a hard desk in a room so quiet that you can hear a pin drop, and passing students' sometimes illegible handwriting in front of your eyes for hours at a time, then this job is for you. If not, be forewarned.