This Spring Lightly Turn to Testing

A poet once wrote, "In the spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love." But I would suggest that this spring the very young men of Orange County - and the very young women, too - forget about love and lightly turn their fancies to such things as molecules and moles.

What brings this up is the barrage of tests being given to kids in public schools throughout Orange County and across the state. Over the next few weeks hundreds of thousands of 2nd- through 11th-grade students in the county will hunch over their desks with damp palms and knitted brows, struggling with their Standardized Testing and Reporting tests. It's all part of an often-maligned effort to determine whether the little scholars are actually learning anything - and whether we taxpayers are getting a positive return on the $39 billion we shell out every year for K-12 public education in this state.

The answers are mixed. Last year only half or fewer of Orange County students got passing scores on the various California Standards Tests - and the results were even worse statewide.

On the other hand, after reviewing some of the high school-level test questions used in previous years - you can find them on-line at star.cde.ca.gov - I have to admit that any kid who can pass all those tests is a lot smarter than I am.

Oh sure, I did okay on the 11th grade "English-Language Arts" test. I could read, comprehend and answer multiple choice questions about a rental car agreement, or a story by Nathaniel Hawthorne. If it had been on the test, I might even have been able to identify the above-mentioned poet as Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

And 11th grade history was also a snap. The Missouri Compromise? The Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine? Who doesn't know that stuff - or at least couldn't make a good stab at it on an "A, B, C or D" multiple choice test? And since you only need 58 percent correct answers to score a "proficient" or passing grade, even guessing on all the questions should put you almost halfway there.

But once you get into the high school-level math and sciences, the easy pickings are harder to find.

Here's a question from the "Earth Science" test: "Which planet was formed from the light gases of the outer solar nebula? A) Mars B) Mercury C) Venus D) Uranus."

The correct answer is "D) Uranus." (You! In the back of the class! Stop that giggling!) And yes, maybe the process of elimination would have helped you figure that one out.

But how about this, from the "Physics" test: "What is the kinetic energy of an object with a mass of 10 kilograms traveling at a speed of 10 meters per second? A) 100 joules B) 500 joules C) 1,000 joules D) 50,000 joules."

I don't have a clue. And I suspect that most of you don't either.

Meanwhile, how much do you really know about "conservation of linear momentum"? Or "Ohm's law"? Are you familiar with "ribosomes," "prokaryotic cells" and "meiosis"? Have you kept up with the literature on "DNA base pair sequences"? Are you aware that in the "Chemistry" test context, a "mole" is not a skin blemish or a small burrowing mammal or a stone breakwater, but is instead "the amount of a substance that contains as many atoms, molecules, ions, or other elementary units as the number of atoms in 0.012 kilogram of carbon 12"?

Again, the answer for most of us ordinary mopes is, probably not.

Now, I'm not suggesting that the California Standards Tests are too difficult. If we're going to compete in an increasingly technological world, young people need to know this technical stuff when they hit college. We certainly wouldn't want to place our national destiny solely in the hands of journalism and English lit. majors.

And in fact, while old coots like me often complain about the many, many failings of the younger generation, I have to admire the kids who can pass the tests. Good work! Nice job! Well done!

But I'll leave it to you to decide what the overall results of the California Standards Tests have been telling us - and I'll put it in the form of a test question:

If half of the public school kids in Orange County can demonstrate through testing that they're learning what they need to learn, does that represent:

A) A glass half full?

Or B) A glass half empty?


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