Those with a mind for controversy or whimsy may recall the outrage last year over a certain talking pineapple on the New York State eighth-grade reading exam. The unfortunate pineapple passage was sliced, diced, and served up as an example of all that is wrong with standardized testing. Asking students to inhabit the shared mental landscape of some chatty anthropomorphized forest animals and tropical fruit, as the questions did, was deemed both ridiculous and unfair. The author of the excerpted passage criticized the exam’s adaptation of his story as “barely literate.” And the state quickly announced that it would not count on the test’s scoring.
And so the talking pineapple joined the long tradition of conflict and contention over educational reform in America, from Thomas Jefferson’s revolutionary plan for public education in Virginia, to the Texas State Board of Education’s recent demotion of Jefferson from its ranks of revolutionary thinkers. The current obsession with testing (and pineapples) belongs to the standards movement, which began in the nineteen-eighties. Now, one of its more unusual battles is being fought in Seattle, where, in December, teachers at Garfield High School voted to boycott the Northwest Evaluation Association’s Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) exam.
The Garfield teachers are not boycotting all standardized tests. Their complaints, as outlined by Kris McBride, the school’s testing coordinator, are focussed squarely on the MAP, which, as an assessment tool, can be categorized as a low-stakes test: according to the MAP-makers at the N.W.E.A., it is an “interim assessment.”