I feel dirty.

No, I haven’t been working in a sewer --- though I may as well have been. Neither have I been part of a kiddy-porn ring; however, I have been a party to child abuse. What terrible thing did I do? I just got finished proctoring the new Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT). A five hour behemoth of an exam, the test is designed to figure out whether students are ready to enter American colleges. The quality of the exam is questionable. Its effects on children are overbearing and abusive.

The SAT is the grandchild of the intelligence tests developed during WW1. It attempts to measure high school students’ brains much like the Stanford-Binet attempted to measure the intelligence of the soldiers that were about to be sent to their deaths in the trenches. The test is quite the fad these days. The myth states that mental measurement is, “the only way” for colleges to tell if students are ready to do well in the hallowed halls of academia. That, any well-read teacher will tell you, is bunk. THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NO CORRELATION BETWEEN SUCCESS ON SAT AND PERFORMANCE IN COLLEGE. PERIOD! As person with two degrees and many additional credits, I know this. Yet, for five hours this morning, I cooperated with this travesty by putting students from schools around my area to the test. They wiggled, they squiggled, and, by the end of the exam, they looked like the machine-fodder that passes for educated people today.

But, you say, you forced them to think! Poppycock! (I am told that is a nice word for the explicative that means male bovine manure.) The newly designed written part asked students to write about the significance of a job that they might have. At seventeen, most of these children are a step away from playing kickball in the streets. If they have been schooled in America, they should have been encouraged to think about issues of government and citizenship. Yet, what do the “powers that measure” choose to test --- job awareness. Talk about figuring for the lowest common denominator.

My own son took the test. Over lunch, I asked him what he wrote. He told me that he tried to discuss how FDR did his job. Why? Because the in the test preparation class he took the teacher instructed him to talk about something from his schooling. This is such a shallow game. We teach students to please the test creator. I guess that is like pleasing the boss at work. In capitalist America, we are all being trained to someday work for Disney or Bill Gates.

Education is supposed to be about drawing knowledge out of students. It is supposed to be about students learning to apply knowledge and become lovers of wisdom. It has developed into a game of chance. Can you outwit the nitwits who constructed the tests? Do you have the stamina to answer silly, abstract reading and math questions? Can you persevere for five hours on truly mindless topics? Can you be still while this proctor earns his thirty pieces of silver?

I have had enough! I promise to take the monetary hit and not proctor this nonsense any longer. However, before I further diminish my already meager salary, I ask all students, parents, teachers, and others interested in education to do something as well. BOYCOTT the SAT. Write to your representatives. Tell them that you will no longer allow your children or yourselves to be intellectually brutalized by tests that are not valid indicators of future success. Tell them that a college education is your right. Your taxes pay for the state-run schools in your area. You have a RIGHT to admission. Once admitted, if you fail, you will take it on yourselves to remediate the problem.

Teachers, these are your students. You know they are better than the scores they earn on these tests. You see it daily in your classrooms. You could separate the wheat from the chaff yourselves if you wanted. Why are you letting colleges, through their minions at the College Board, do that to you? More importantly, why are you doing it at all? Do you really believe that education is a scarce resource that should only be obtained by the few who master SAT skills? Don’t you think that every student should have the RIGHT to try college? Open doors lead to open minds. Why do we continue to close the doors on our own students?

College admission officers take heed. Refuse to be a party to the SAT abuse of children. Learn to adapt to people; don’t force people to adapt to your institutions. You already know that teacher grades combined with college interviews are far better predictors of student success than the SAT (and its evil twin the ACT). TALK WITH YOUR REAL CONSTITUENCY – THE STUDENTS. Despite what the media say, they are intelligent people. On the whole, they are the most knowledgeable group of high school graduates in the history of the world. Treat them that way. You will find that they will live up to those expectations, and, in most cases exceed them.

Stop this mass-produced remnant of a defunct corporate capitalist system. Stop the child abuse. Work to end the SAT and all tests like it immediately. They are all, well … Poppycock!