Standardized testing serves a purpose

In his post yesterday, Peter Greene writes about his desire to have clarity when dealing with a challenging medical care situation. It's a thoughtful piece. I encourage you to read it.

Peter starts with a meditation on how we search for answers during a healthcare situation, but he builds on that to discuss teaching and testing. His point is that the complexity of health and education can't be reduced to cold, hard, scientific procedures when patients and students have a million variables going on.

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I'm afraid I have to disagree with him. Even more, I think the implications of his argument - one made often by the teaching establishment to fend off ill reports about the outcomes of their trade - endangers lives because it rebuffs the precision and accuracy needed to right the wrongs for students neglected forever due to race and resources.

Before I say more, let's allow him to speak for himself. This passage is the heart of his piece:

We talk about it [medical care] in the abstract as if it's all a science, as if we can just give people a test, then just read the cut-and-dried results and then go to a book where we just cross-check those results on some chart that tells us that if the doctors do X then that will totally fix Y.

But care of actual humans in the actual world doesn't look much like that. There are assorted tests to try and they give results which suggest a variety of possible issues that in turn suggest some possible responses. Add to those the moving target that is your own observation. Anyone who has had a loved one go through serious health issues knows the drill-- one minute you're thinking, "You know, this doesn't seem so bad. I bet we could go on down this road for a long time" and then ten minutes later it's "Oh, hell--I don't know if we can manage this for the rest of today." And on top of that, you add the fact that this is a loved one, a person you care about, and so all of what appears to be true bumps up against what you want to be true.

Lord knows you want it to be easy, or at least clear, but you are dealing with the care of humans, and so you get occasional glimpses of clarity and certainty, just before the fog rolls in again.

Everyone is interested in reducing the care of humans to simple, scientific, evidence-based, rock-certain clarity. The humans there on the ground want it because God damn it this is hard to sort out when you're talking about the life and health and comfort of someone you love. The policy clowns in the clouds want it because they want to set their policies in stone, their procedures in concrete, because complexity and nuance is just tiresome and hard to sell. The bureaucrats in charge want it because it's just easier to run a business with fewer messy human variables in play.

The thrust of his argument is that we are wrong to think it possible that we can test a child, discover what ails them, consult with some knowledge base to prescribe a remedy, apply the said remedy, and cure the problem.

In his view, the results we get raise many issues that point to various possible interventions, and the observant teacher's judgment adds an additional layer of messiness to the process.

In short, he's saying it's complicated.

I want to uncomplicate it with a health story of my own.

At least four times in my life, I've been awakened in the early morning hours by a small but persistent pain in my side. The pain sharpens and stabs me, so I quickly go from groggy to panic. I try to walk it off, but the pain escalates; I get cold sweats, nausea, and become faint. Foolishly, I've let my wife sleep each time this has happened and driven myself to the emergency room. Each bump in the room escalates my pain. I can barely sit in the car seat to drive upright. When I get to the hospital, it seems to take forever for them to check me in. They take my blood pressure. Give me an MRI.

My friends, I'm not sure if you've ever felt whiteout pain before, the kind that tests your ability to live, but I'm here to tell you it sets you apart from all of humanity. You are isolated and alone in an inescapable way.

I had kidney stones. Big ones. Doctors have told me it rivals childbirth without meds.

The first time I had them, I felt like I could have died from not knowing what was happening in my body. Each time I had them after that, it was still painful but less scary because I had some idea of what was happening.

I now know to demand they test me quickly and get to the part where they intervene in the pain with medication. I understand that the non-narcotic remedies are a joke that prolongs your pain and that the narcotic interventions given in an IV take you from the highest pain threshold you can stand to zero pain in about 15 seconds.

Yes, health is complicated. How kidney stones form is mysterious. Too much calcium in the diet could be a problem. Salt and fat too. Lifestyle. Lots of contributors.

But, when I am in acute pain and science has an answer that requires testing, diagnosis, and intervention, I don't need nurses who want to talk to me about holistic medicine.

Test my ass, get a picture of the rock that will pass through my urethra if not broken up, drug me, and use radiation to zap that rock if possible.

Speaking of illiteracy.

There is nothing so painful as being unable to read well in a country where education is a currency that determines who gets what. Prisons are full of people who can't read, not because they lack the native talent to do so but because the education establishment prefers holistic medicine over science.

Marginalized people have big, historic, life-stopping, and unnecessary academic kidney stones that cause needless suffering and social strife. When educators admit that they don't have the knowledge and instruments to diagnose and intervene in what ails our children, we should thank them for their service and move on to education scientists capable of caring for us.

No, tests and testing don't tell us everything we need to know about young people's lives, desires, and talents. They don't need to do all that to be valuable. Blood pressure tests and MRI scans don't give us a complete picture of a person's life either, but they serve a purpose - they lead to advised paths toward improved health.

When I read Peter's piece, I see how it makes sense for people who haven't been marginalized throughout history. There's a particular luxury to the wandering intellectualism that discounts the purpose of testing, data, interventions, and so on. If the system has worked for you, what would make you want changes and more informed practices? Only those with serious left-behindness need something more than "it's complicated" as an answer to pain.

We have a lot of scientific evidence of how to teach, assess, and intervene with young people who are currently on their way to a lot of pain in life if we ignore science. Many of our educators dislike the methods of teaching, intervening, and assessing that science calls for, and thus, they use their political power to keep those things at bay. I can support educators in many ways, but I can't help the ones who ignore our acute pain.

Genuine care for humans requires us to know who they are, how they suffer, and what will ease their pain. Either that or step out of the way of people who can do it better than us.