Having faith in standardized tests

I KNOW that people are always searching for truth and often try to find it in a trendy, cool, new religion. The central tenet of this hot new religion in Pennsylvania appears to be that the PSSA and other standardized tests are the Devil's work.

Does this bold new claim come from Pope Francis, seeking a return to Catholic orthodoxy? Does it come from any of the Protestant sects that broke with the Catholic Church during the Protestant Reformation? Maybe Jews or Muslims have discovered this in a sacred text?

No, the followers of this faith don't seem to cite any Biblical passage or long-buried inspiration from the Quran or Torah. They oppose their kids taking standardized tests on "religious" grounds solely to comply with Pennsylvania law that allows them that option.

In my view, they are misguided at best and a group that has to be directly challenged. In fact, after interviewing some of these parents, I believe that they have the ACLU on speed dial and would call immediately if any public school remotely discussed God or religion.

I interviewed Kathy M. Newman, associate professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University, on my radio show after her column on not allowing her son to take the PSSAs generated 40,000 page views on the Pittsburg Post-Gazette's website. Newman, like other members of this new religion, engaged in rhetoric that is almost cartoonish. She wrote: "During the tests, students are treated like prisoners, with limited bathroom breaks and constant monitoring." Gee, sorry we did not schedule any nap time for the poor kids.

Newman wraps herself in the mantle of those who commit acts of civil disobedience to help others. She writes: "With this act of civil disobedience, our family will contribute to the revolt against the standardized testing that is hurting students, schools and the quality of education."

So, are people like Newman and others across Pennsylvania, including growing numbers in the Philadelphia public schools, truly following religious tenets in pulling their kids? Or are they cynically cherry picking a grab bag of things like the Golden Rule to game the system? Didn't one of the Ten Commandments look down upon something called lying?

I believe that the Pennsylvania Department of Education thinks that these parents are trying to hide behind religion. As Will Bunch recently reported in these pages, the Education Department will enact a rule change that will still allow parents to remove their kids from testing for religious reasons, but will now require them to state their objections in writing.

This might chill some of the activists, but already these "revolutionaries" are submitting form letters for every faith and even individual letters from various faiths.

I'm a Catholic, and I particularly laughed out loud at the letter from the Catholic parent who wrote, "My Catholic faith teaches me that it is a sin to participate in an action I know to be a fraud and to be harmful to my children and to my community. Ten years of analysis by academic experts at universities from Penn State to Harvard (as opposed to politicians like Michelle Rhee or college dropouts like Bill Gates) conclusively prove that high stakes like the PSSA testing harms children, undermines and restricts curriculums, and punishes schools."

I guess references like college-dropout are OK in the name of the greater religious good.

So, if we see growing numbers of parents and other critics determined to shut down this evil empire of testing, what would they replace it with to restore America's public schools? The answer, from my interviews and readings, is that they want to spend more money in the public schools, rid society of income inequality and tell us that true learning can't be measured by tests.

Need I remind everyone that Teddy Kennedy joined President George W. Bush in crafting No Child Left Behind, the federal law that helped to fuel the tests that try to measure what kids have learned in school? A quick review tells us that former Gov. Ed Rendell fought very hard to insure that Pennsylvania would join many other states in "exit" skill tests for kids graduating from high school.

As the Daily Caller reports, an interesting side note to this opting out of testing is that religious objections to the math and reading tests run stronger to objections to the science test - more parents pulled their kids from taking the math and reading tests than the science tests in most Pennsylvania school districts.

In my last column, I talked about teachers across the country who have been indicted or are being investigated for changing wrong answers on standardized tests. Of course, critics said that these tests drove them to cheat. The solution there was to have outside parties mark the tests.

The solutions with these "religious" parents are to make sure that schools be monitored to not devote excessive time to test preparation. In addition, I would remove the religious exemption to avoid taking the tests.

So, now the anti-testing movement is resorting to using religion to stop kids from taking standardized tests. My response, to take a page from the Quaker religion, is that I am a conscientious objector to their nonsense.