This post is part of a two-part, non-consecutive series on education.

The majority of my education thus far has taken place in public school. The eight years of my life from Kindergarten to eighth grade marks a big chunk of time I will never get back. Some of those years were good (I don’t think finger painting or whatever people do in Kindergarten is objectionable) and some of those years were bad. I left for a whole bunch of reasons, but one of the biggest was standardized testing.

The No Child Left Behind Act was signed in 2002, but I don’t think the effects were really felt until a few years later. I was in the second grade at the time, so I remember very little of the debate that took place at the time, but I realized very quickly that tests were becoming a bigger part of school. In 4th grade, in just the course of a year, my grade took the New York State English Language Arts Exam, the New York State Math Exam, and the New York State Science Exam. And the school felt that the information that they received from those tests was not valuable (when the scores come, they provide very little information), so they made us take the CTP IVs as well. This trend continued on until I finally decided to leave.

There are a lot of arguments for and against NCLB. Proponents will say that it’s increased math and reading scores, critcs will tell you that trend had been going on before NCLB was even signed. Proponents will show more evidence of improved scores and critics will show you evidence that those improved scores are the result of lowered standards. You can read about the statistics in another place, this is about what I saw happening.

The idea that tests are the way to teach kids is not only insulting, it’s wrong. Standardized tests are misinterpreted over and over again. Experts will say over and over again that you can’t use one test to measure a student. But it’s too tempting. It’s so easy for school districts and even our own government to look at a score and decide based on a simple number. It’s cheap, it’s quick, but it’s immoral, damaging, and destructive.

But even that’s not the part that annoys me the most. The worst part is that standardized testing encourages thinking about averages. It encourages teachers to not care about bringing an A student up to an A+. Bringing a C student up to a B looks better on the test. It encourages teaching to the lowest common denominator. School should be about raising the lowest common denominator in whatever way possible, not meeting it. (Stole that from the West Wing). As a pretty gifted student, I was always found myself being parts of classes that seemed like they were put together so that the class average would be palatable when viewed mathematically. Put a few good students in a class with bad students and some average students and it looks decent on paper. Gifted students were left out and talent went to waste.

And it took a toll on the teacher too. Teachers were being reduced to baby sitters and they were slaves to the “curriculum.” They weren’t free to have class discussions because everything centered around the “test.” In making these new guidelines, the Bush Administration seems to have forgotten that teachers are professionals and can create classes that will prepare students well.

There are ways to make standardized testing better. The only way to do it is to make sure that standardized tests are a very small part of testing. These tests are sources of stress for teachers and students. They don’t help. They don’t measure standards effectively. The standards are low. Teachers are forced to teach to a test. Gifted students are left out. Teachers can’t come up with creative ways to engage a class.

It’s a sad state of affairs, but standardized tests are the worst thing that has happened to education from a student’s perspective. Public school students learn less at a higher stress level. They’re taught to memorize, not to think.

NCLB is up for re-authorization this year. When considering the new options, I hope Congress realizes that the purpose of school is to prepare students for life. They need to create an education plan that works. Maybe instead of spending $341.4 million a day in Iraq, we could spend $341.4 million building the best schools in the world. Congress needs to realize that they are dealing with real students and real teachers.

So for various reasons, including standardized testing and my school’s desire to do things that are cheap and not necessarily good, I left. I am now a happy private school student, free from standardized tests (except once a year).

Let me know what you think.

After a long interval between episodes, I’m back with VFAF 5. Mark Temple joins me on this episode on a trial basis because podcasts with one person just seem awkward to me. We did this episode Diggnation style, but it’s audio, we’re drinking Diet Coke instead of beer, and we cut down on the profanity. I should also mention that if you ever need someone to bake cookies, don’t ask Mark or me. We burned cookies out of a package. Twice. I claim partial responsibility, but since I’m the one writing this post, I will say that it was mostly Mark’s fault.

I was inspired to do an episode this way by the Neal Show. Neal says he was inspired by me, but then I’m inspired by him, so we’re in an endless loop of inspiration now. So I didn’t cut out awkward pauses or mistakes; everything’s in there. Let me know what you think.

This episode is about sports in schools. I’ve noticed that my school spends a ton on sports. We have a huge athletic center, a large sports staff, most of whom do very little at all, and there’s a ton of waste. My position is that it’s important to make sure that students are physically as well as mentally fit, but sports should take a back seat. Mark isn’t so sure. He cites this study as a reason for keeping sports as a large part of school life.

Ultimately, we should be spending more money on academics than on sports. If sports enhances academics, then we should be supporting sports to the extent that it is assisting academics, but in an academic environment, sports should not be a focal point. I doubt my idea is going to be wildly popular, but I think that my school should cut the athletics budget in half and use it for academic purposes.

Thanks to Neal Campbell and Cali Lewis for providing a Snowflake USB microphone. The audio quality in this episode is certainly improved and I’m still experimenting with it to make the quality even better.

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The worst part about writing a research paper for me is not the finding, it’s not the writing, and it’s not the revising.  It’s the citations.  Over the course of my school career, I’ve written maybe 5 papers that have required full, properly formated bibliographies and I’ve been asked to cite things about 25 different ways.  It makes sense that there’s no “gold standard” for citations.  Lawyers use Bluebook. Other people use Chicago or APA, all of which are good depending on your topic and the types of sources you have.  My school uses MLA.

MLA is a relatively easy format that’s well suited for most research papers my classmates are working on.  There are plenty of ways to cite web pages, encyclopedia articles, books of every type, but those are all secondary sources.  We had to find some primary sources, but most people found letters or journals in book form somewhere.  MLA is just a bad format for what I’m trying to do for two reasons.

1. I am using all primary sources.  I consulted some secondary sources for ideas as to where to look, but I didn’t include any secondary sources in my paper.
2. My paper uses legal sources.  All of my citations sources fall into these categories: Court decisions, legal memos about signing statements, active legislation, statutes, and signing statements themselves.  Signing statements appear in the Federal Register, but MLA offers no guidance on how to cite government publications or memos.

MLA says that their format is most used for “writing on language and literature.”  I wish they had stayed to that statement.

For one of my sources, I used a Supreme Court case.  The information that’s helpful for finding a case is the court it was decided in, the volume where the decision can be found, and the page the decision starts on.  I can then go into any library and find it.  MLA’s method of citation for court cases was created by people who are brain dead.  Here’s an example  (I apologize that this doesn’t have a hanging indent):

United States of America v. George Story and Curtis Jones. No. 89-1239. United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. 8 December 1989.

The only problem is that you can’t find a court case with just a number.  The number is only helpful if you have a tool like Lexis Nexis (or maybe Google in some cases) to find the case.  No lawyer would ever cite something like that because no library has their cases arranged by number.  That is why lawyers use Bluebook.  Here’s an example:

USA v. Story and Jones, 891 F.2d 988 (2nd Circ. Dec. 8, 1989).

Much simpler.

So unless somebody wants to come up with a super citation format that unifies everybody under one big happy citation format, people should be allowed to use the citation that works best for the type of writing that they’re doing.

I have to constantly remind myself that the point of a citation is to help somebody find one of my sources.  MLA seems to think that the point is to drive people crazy with commas and periods and citations that aren’t the least bit useful.

My wisdom of the day is this: There is no reason why each individual writing a paper shouldn’t choose a different citation format.  There are different formats for a reason!  Different formats for different things.  My other piece of wisdom is that MLA is awful for legal citations.  Really awful.  It doesn’t offer guidance for a lot of important things, so I had to creatively make up new citations that roughly follow MLA along with my teacher.

If any of you are interested in reading my paper, I will post it once it’s graded and I make corrections based on the grade.