Snookie culture + high stakes testing = bad citizens?
11/13/2014

 

You may have seen it in your Facebook or Twitter feed. It’s another video of an interviewer asking people on the street questions that most of us would consider easy or basic—questions about current events or common US history facts.  As these “interviews” go, the subjects fail miserably.  What made this particular video go viral was that the people failing to get the correct answers were college students at a pretty well-known university. The video was part of a non-partisan project created by Texas Tech students.

 

The coverage and reaction of the video has caused critics to ask a broader question of today’s college students:  “Are these students really the best and the brightest?”

 

We say, “it depends” and then pose some deeper questions of our own.

 

Could the depiction in this video be yet another example of the consequences we are creating when we foist on students and communities this “all or nothing” emphasis on standardized testing? 

 

Some claim that with our over-reliance on high stakes testing (btw, we rate students, we rate schools, we rate whole school districts, we rate teachers—all using this single point of data) that we are creating a generation of test-takers, rather than a generation of learners.  And along that path, we have certainly lost the importance of educating the whole child and on creating a future engaged Hoosier citizen.

 

To cut to the chase—through these narrow policies that cling to a single standardized test score, do we now care too much about “how students perform (on a given day on a given test) and too little on how students learn?

 

Sadly, these “man on the street” videos tell us more about our own policies and wrong-headed agendas than they do about the people who are featured on them.