By Robert Oliphant
In “Why We Need a National School Test” (Washington Post 9/21/06), William Bennett and Rod Paige seem to be working both sides of the educational street. Their demand for a national school test is clearly long overdue in a nation that year by year spends more and more on education and gets less and less for its money. But it’s bound to come across as sociobabble in a nation that has grown to distrust educators even more than it distrusts lawyers.
As luck would have it, though, Bennett and Paige are right on the mark this time. Practically considered, we already HAVE a publicly accessible national school test whose results command respect from students, parents, educators, and our market economy. It’s a test (GLES) whose four sections can be taken separately at many different locations again and again. Any K-12 student, as we’ll see, can study for this test; anyone who passes it will be a demonstrably attractive candidate for both college work and professional school later on. Best of all it’s a test many of us are already familiar with, and whose four sections are available for preliminary scrutiny at any public library or book store or online at www.LearningEspressLibrary.com.
To start with some figures: As presently constituted, the general knowledge section of our GLES test covers verbal skills (30 minutes), quantitative skills (45”), verbal analogies and double-blank sentences (30”), main-point reading comprehension (30”), and a writing sample (75”). The logical thinking section covers logic skills (35”), reading comprehension (35”), argumentation-1 (35”), argumentation 2 (36”), and a writing sample (35”). The economics section covers a writing sample (30”), then a second writing sample (30”), mathematics (75”), and verbal skills (75”). The science section covers physics and chemistry (100”), verbal skills (85”), a writing sample (60”), and biology (75”).
To many college students these four section-profiles will be immediately recognizable as summary descriptions of America’s four major pre-professional ordeals: the Graduate Record Examination (GRE), the Law School Admissions Test (LSAT), the Graduate Management Admissions Test (GMAT), and the Medical College Admission Test (GMAT). But their coverage taken as a whole will come across to most high school students as strikingly familiar. Physics, chemistry, biology, math, and English, English, English — no matter how you slice it up, that’s what measurable educational achievement boils down to these days. And that’s exactly what any national school test should cover, and no more.
Right now any serious-minded high school freshman should spend a solid week in the library looking at our GLES test sections and the myriad study aids that are available (Kaplan, Princeton Review, Barron’s, etc.). Starting with the first day, after all, high school COUNTS! Our four-year academic record will be a tangible fact, and so will be the knowledge and skills we acquire, enough so to take our outside reading (ideally 1,000 hours or more) more seriously that many of the actual courses we’re required to suffer through.
Just as California college students now take the CBEST test several years before they need to, so high school students today should start their first year with a bang-up personal-best reality check on how schools, qualifying examinations, and a market economy actually work together as an opportunity team in their individual futures.
Bennett and Paige should explore the GLES alternative. As a first step, they can simply test its “high school level hypothesis” by assembling a corpus of practice tests and trying it out on randomly selected high school students (money prizes will help here). After that, they and their supporters (lots, I hope) can decide whether or not to take their Big Educational Brother fantasy seriously.
Either way, I feel the two of them have done their nation proud. They’ve come up with a clearly stated idea that makes sense, is testable, and can work at any level. As I’ve tried to show, all a national school test needs is plenty of young people who take their personal growth seriously, school or no school. That’s what Benjamin Franklin did, after all; Abraham Lincoln, too. That’s also what inner city kids do when they take a correspondence course (Concord), study for the California bar exam, and achieve a higher first-time pass rate (50%) on the July 2005 exam than law school graduates from UCLA and UC Berkeley.
To me, Bennett and Paige are clearly concerned with learning, not just commodity education. In my book that puts them on the side of the angels. Here’s hoping they keep singing their songs.
