By Jaime Vergara
For Variety

LAST week, PSS administered the Stanford Achievement Test to selected grade levels within the public school system. For the 6th grade one, students were tested on their reading vocabulary, comprehension, language, and spelling. There was a section on science and social science. Math included problem-solving and procedures. The last was on listening. Listening registered the lowest scores across the country, including the CNMI. That is hardly a surprise. In a culture focused on “my satisfaction and entertainment,” giving attention to the presence of others take a back seat to “my immediate gratification.”
Standardized tests became the preferred tool of assessment since the T-Ford model introduced the factory line method of production. Students enter the educational system in the same fashion as raw materials are gathered in the manufacture of vehicles, and every stage of the process, a grade level is attained in the production of parts that are welded or bolted together to produce a whole. At the end of a factory line, and stamp of approval is made, and the product moves on to the next production stage. K to 12th grade is the school system’s production line.
With the test centric bias of the No Child Left Behind Act of the Bush administration, every school system has been pushed to go on testing binges. What used to be a holistic attempt at educating students to seek relevant knowledge, form wholesome attitudes, and develop effective skills, has given way to the sole criteria of showing that a student knows how to manipulate words and numbers. Memory recall has given way to understanding. Standardized tests work for 60 percent of students. Twenty percent of both ends of a curve are quality control casualties.
The SAT test for students, like the Praxis test for teachers, does not measure a person’s state of mind, the quality of pedagogy received or the depth of a learner’s receptivity. It does not measure the exquisite joys and delicate struggles of the community called school. It does not show the beauty of teachers’ command of instructional language, or the strength of students’ resolve to face formidable challenges of cognition, the intelligence of public discourses, or the integrity of group and individual commitments. It measures neither wit nor courage, neither wisdom nor learning, neither compassion nor devotion to the educational task of the public school system. But for our school administrators and our funding lords, it measures everything, except that which makes teaching and learning worthwhile. And the tests reveal everything about the teaching profession and the learning community except why we are proud to be teachers and students.
Why we continue to treat education as a mere tool to making a living rather than the art and discipline of living a life is reflective of the tyranny of the economic. We train our children to be peons in the workforce requirements of the marketplace. But then, since marriages has now become economic liaisons, and joining a religious body a function of economic class formation, why should not schooling be subservient to the requirements of social status and corporate needs?
The silence of the governor’s State of the Commonwealth Address on the direction of education in the CNMI reflects a felt burden and preoccupation with funding a system. Is it not more fundamental to raise the relevant question of what and how our children are to learn? Education happens at the encounter point between a student and a teacher. Perhaps, it is time to focus the system’s attention on what transpires in the classroom, and how a system can support the critical teaching-learning process that occurs at that end.