Angela Tonn on Standardized Testing

My name is Angela Tonn, and I live in Dunwoody, Georgia, and I am a public high school teacher. I teach biology and AP biology. Who you are as a person is not defined by some number on a page or a book or a chart or anything else. And yeah.The overemphasis on scores and things, grades again, the commodification of education, it's now a commodity to be got, I think we're shutting out kids whose gifts and talents are other, other, and not celebrating them. I mean, you know, one of the casualties of all this arts programs, theater, band, chorus, visual arts, drama, all these things that make a school experience so much richer, especially at a low- income school. 

This testing mania that we've been going as is we're stressing children to hell and back over some corporate made profit generator. Are you kidding me? You know, uh, so people who live in the, uh, expensive enclaves can say their kids got good test scores. Well, of course they did. Standardized tests came from the eugenics movement, standardized test measures, the square footage of your mama's house period. 

God parents please know standardized testing is for the most part garbage. And again, I'm an AP teacher. I want to help my kids get that. And I work for the AP in the summer grading the darn things, but even their own research is a perfect correlation, right? Graph has to do this backwards here, graph going this way. Perfect correlation. And I always tell my kids this, if it's a perfect correlation and this on the X axis is a test score, what do you think's on the Y axis? And the kids are so sweet they are always like, effort, grit, determination. I'm like, Oh, I got bad news for you Bippy. And that's ETS's own research. Um, and you know, they're the college board people. So that's the sat. That's the SAT that's the PSAT, not not to say that some low income people don't bust through that, but in general, this is measuring your access to the dominant culture. this is a money game. And the people who insist on these tests know where that money's going and they know it's not going to children. It's not going to facilities. It's not going to teachers. It's not coming back into the community. That money is going off to shareholders. 

What value can I see in a standardized test or sweating some kid over standardized test that I don't see the results of until they're basically out of my door. Like what, as an educator, that's not valuable to me. I can't call you as the mom and say, Hey, Sarah, I just want to tell you how your kid's doing in biology this week. You know, this is going well. Or, Hey, I don't think we quite, this is abstract. I don't think she quite gets it. Let her stay on Wednesday with me. Well, no, by the time we see those standardized tests, the kid's gone. This commodification of education has to stop