The Question Too Many Legislators and Educational Bureaucrats Neglect to Answer: What if You Are Not Hermione Granger?
I want to go sideways today to make a sobering observation, one I don’t recall seeing elsewhere. The people who rise to high office are usually good or even excellent test takers. That man or woman with decision-making power within a government hierarchy? The trauma of test taking may be utterly foreign to that person. While not always true, the ability to do well on standardized tests helps predict a person’s chances of getting into the best colleges, and the best colleges have always made pathways to success shorter and easier. The following example illustrates this fact.
From How many American Congressmen have attended Ivy League schools? – Answers:
“…In the present 112th US Congressional session, there are 27 Senators with at least one Ivy League degree–either undergraduate, graduate or both. More interestingly there are 44 US Senators with at least one degree from an Ivy League school or other comparable elite institution of higher learning. This includes top law schools like New York University, University of Michigan, University of Virginia, and University of Texas. Also included are the top three liberal arts colleges in the nation–Amherst, Swarthmore and Williams –and prestigious institutions like Cambridge, Oxford and the London School of Economics in the UK, and Georgetown (which is heavily represented), Duke, Stanford and other highly regarded non-Ivy universities. Couple this with most Senators being millionaires, and you start realizing how unrepresentative Congress–or at least the Senate–really is.”
Eduhonesty: How do you get into those schools? Especially in the past, ACT, SAT and other standardized test scores were often deciding factors. My point is simple. No doubt we can find exceptions but, overall, the people deciding to test and add more tests cannot viscerally understand the impact of their choices. They may even have enjoyed test days. Back before test score emphasis felt so frantic — back when most of these legislators and top educational bureaucrats were young — that test was an annual feather in their caps, another 90% or higher in most or all categories that resulted in a guidance counselor pointing them toward Stanford, Williams, Cornell or the best their region had to offer.
These leaders do not and cannot understand the impact of their choices to increase testing. Too many of them were the Hermione Grangers, or at least Ron Weasleys, of their student body.
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From my next post: Parents, teachers say state plan to increase student testing in Illinois will hurt most vulnerable kids – Chicago Tribune by Karen Ann Culotta, Jun 22, 2021 at 5:36 PM*
“During springtime, our units with children and adolescents would fill to capacity during testing season,” said (Katie) Osgood, recalling the years she was a teacher at a Chicago hospital’s psychiatric unit.