By: Kirk Tran
Imagine a world where it is entirely reasonable to grind instruction to a painful halt for two weeks, in order to facilitate mind-numbing and widely despised standardized testing. Imagine that, for those two weeks, half the student body is trapped in a stifling classroom setting, half-asleep, staring at an unpleasantly bright ChromeBook screen, while the other half of the student body hardly attends class at all.
The cruelest irony of this hypothetical nightmare world? Those entrapped students may escape their little slice of hell, with no personal consequence at all, simply by enlisting the aid of a parent’s pen–nothing more than a signed letter to the principal can suffice.
You never had to imagine anything. That is the world you live in.
It’s an open secret that all you really have to do to get out of taking the SBAC for another agonizing time is get your parents to write a letter to a school official, according to the California Teachers Association (CTA), the premier teachers’ union in California politics, “California Education Code section 60615 allows a parent or guardian to submit a written request to school officials to exclude his or her child from any or all parts of state-mandated assessments.”
By law, there is no personal consequence to opting out of testing, “Currently, there are no state-mandated consequences for students who do not take the Smarter Balanced Assessments or other state-mandated tests…While there are federal laws requiring states to administer these tests to at least 95% of eligible students, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) recognizes a parent’s right to refuse testing in states that have opt-out laws,” according to the CTA.
Your parents won’t have extra taxes levied on them, you won’t go to juvie, God won’t send a divine bolt of judgement towards your way, and the world won’t end just because you skipped out on what really amounts to a waste of your time.
But what about the school as a whole? According, once more, to the CTA, the federal government encourages states to create sanctions on reluctant school districts and may withhold federal funding to states where less than 95% of students take the test. Well, no such sanctions exist in California yet and the sizable student population at MHS of around 3000 is a good deal less than the overall population of 6 million in our state.
Now, some high-horsin’ stickler for the rules out there might decry me for compelling you to play fast and loose with standardized testing. I can almost hear him. What if the school does lose funding? It’ll be all your fault for not trying your best on the test. Oh, the horror!
Remember this mantra regarding standardized testing: it’s for the school, not you.
The fact remains that we don’t have any individual incentive to care about the state’s needs or our fellow student’s needs. We are not paid to care. We are not graded to care. We are not graded on our ability to understand that our actions may have consequences for people other than ourselves.
We are graded on our ability to take tests our teachers give, our ability to complete assignments our teachers give, our ability to work with our peers on projects our teachers give. In short, we are only given incentive to care about our academic performance, which quite unfortunately the great and golden State of California plays no direct hand in. But it wasn’t always and doesn’t have to be this way.
In the past, students were given something called a “Trojan Access Card” (TAC). The TAC imparted many benefits, but perhaps the most noteworthy benefit was the opportunity, once it was hole-punched at the office, to eat an off-campus lunch. It wasn’t perfect. You had to meet an arbitrary benchmark on the annual standardized test (then called the STAR test) to get one and sometimes it could take way too long to get a card hole-punched, but the important thing it was something. In the past, there was a reason to try, especially if one wanted to escape the shoddy lunches of MHS or the overcrowded eating areas.
The TAC isn’t the only form of incentive that MHS could introduce to encourage students to put effort into the SBAC test. For example, MHS could implement an open lunch policy for every year that students meet a certain testing benchmark. In fact, there’s not much stopping MHS from implementing open lunch in the first place, as the California Education Code proclaims “the governing board of a school district may permit the pupils enrolled at any high school to leave the school grounds during the lunch period of such pupils.
Neither the school district nor any officer or employee thereof shall be liable for the conduct or safety of any pupil during such time as the pupil has left the school grounds pursuant to this section.”
Of course, granting lunchtime freedom based on standardized test performance is not the only reward MHS may bestow. Any incentive would be better than the nothing we are given now.