I'm writing about proficiency tests this week, I say to my 10-year-old daughter. What do you think I should say about them?

        A veteran of the tests, she thinks for a moment. That they're the biggest thing in the universe, she tells me.

        There are a million differences between my daughter's school experience and my own, thirty-odd years earlier, but surely one of the greatest has been the rise of the statewide proficiency test. It has been the drop of red dye plunked into the glass of academic water, permeating every part of the whole.

        It was meant to shake things up and, like a baking soda-and-vinegar experiment, it surely did. But the problem with home chemistry is that sometimes you hardly know what reaction you're setting off. Clearly, Ohio did not know.
       

Phasing out test
        A statewide task force, studying the proficiency test at the request of Gov. Bob Taft, Thursday recommended phasing out the test, replacing it with achievement tests that follow new state standards, and reducing testing on the whole.

        Although the proficiency test clearly has not yet died, if it does we should insist on an autopsy. We've measured and re-measured what our children have learned from the testing, but what have we learned?

        One of the great dangers of the proficiency test is that it has gone from being one of a number of measures of school performance to the primary, and oftentimes only, one. It's quick, handy and extremely available — the state has relied on it heavily in its annual “report card” to parents. It has lured us into believing that mastering information so we can pass a test is the epitome of a quality education.

        To some of us, that is a shallow goal indeed, one that not only overshadows the deep, rich community of learning we envision when we say “school,” but impedes its very construction. The way people really learn — learn in such a way that they understand something deeply and incorporate it into their lives — is more about exploration, conversation, coaching than it is about everybody in the class mastering the same body of information.

Child an afterthought
        Sadly, sometimes the individual child has seemed like a postscript to proficiency testing. The test was designed to move systems, not lives and imaginations. For most children — the highly able as well as the struggling — it has been a gantlet to move through. Pass and you are told very little (and sometimes information that is inconsistent with other indicators of achievement). Fail and the tension mounts quickly.

        Perhaps Ohio schoolchildren will have a better time of it under these new recommendations. Perhaps there will be more and earlier help for those who struggle, more graduated subjects for young children to master, less test-taking for all.

        Still, for all their trying to reupholster statewide, standardized testing, legislators and education officials seem to have missed basic lessons. The most truly useful discussions about learning revolve around creating, expressing, questioning, experimenting. They have more to do with individual children than with collective numbers, more with personal relationships than state mandates. And these, it seems, are the lessons we're still left to master.

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