Little Girl Learning

Greetings from Poosey.

It was one of the freakiest things that ever happened in our neck of the woods and only many years later were we able to piece the catastrophe together. I’m still not sure I have the whole story, but here it is as best I can relate it:

Her name was Emily, a cute little rascal with a bright smile that even in babyhood spoke intelligence and curiosity. Emily was blessed with two of the most wonderful parents a child could ask for and the whole family eagerly waited the day she’d enter preschool. Emily used to “practice” school at home with her mama, reading before she was five, putting her books and pencils in order each morning, and learning how to pay attention in class.

Her school required standardized testing before the children entered preschool, looking for any learning disabilities or emotional problems. One week before the test Emily took sick and somehow the required paperwork didn’t reach her parents. This is where the tragedy began to unfold. It was a double snafu as the school also misplaced Emily’s testing schedule and as a result Emily walked into the first day of preschool untested. No one noticed. Her parents weren’t aware that she’d missed the test. And by some miracle Emily made it through the rigors of crayons, milk breaks, and the alphabet without anyone knowing if she tested high enough to learn. Actually, she was a bit deficient in math but since no one told her she learned to add and subtract like the rest of the kids.

Our public school system must handle thousands of children and truckloads of paperwork and they can perhaps be excused for adding to the dilemma, for when it came time for Emily to take her state-wide standardized tests in fifth grade the family was on vacation and since the school had no record of her preschool testing, she was somehow omitted from the list in fifth grade. The poor child had somehow struggled through six years of public education without having taken a single standardized test and since her records were lost in the bowels of the bureaucracy, no one noticed. The helpless child was passed on to sixth grade as the top student but with no record of testing.

The rest of Emily’s story seems almost beyond belief, for when she entered eighth grade and her teachers cancelled half the year’s instruction to prepare kids for the tests, something even stranger happened. The school was snowed out on the assigned test day, the tests were rescheduled on a day when Emily’s older sister was getting married in St. Louis, and when she returned to take her test she found that the exams couldn’t be made up without special permission. When the principal wrote the state on her behalf the state office was short-handed due to cutbacks in education funding and her papers once again got lost. Middle school principals are busy people and Mr. Burgess can be excused for letting it slip his mind. Miraculously Emily entered high school without having taken a standardized test.

By now Emily was three academic years ahead of the rest of her class so her mother decided to home school for a year to see just where this remarkable child was headed. The homeschooling rules in Emily’s state were fuzzy and when the poor child came back to school in her junior year there was no record of any home testing. Since she knew as much math and science as most of her teachers no one seemed to notice this terrible lack in the child’s education. She applied to university that accepted only the best and the brightest and did not require either the SAT or ACT test, simply an entrance exam and a portfolio of the student’s work. By now Emily had accumulated a portfolio of artwork, writing, science experiments and social dissertations that might have gotten her admitted to graduate school so she stepped easily into college on a full ride scholarship.

The kid had somehow missed being given a single standardized test in her entire public school career. She graduated college with high honors, became one of area’s most respected accountants, married and raised three bright children but somewhere in the innards of the official records she didn’t really exist because she hadn’t been tested. All the poor lady had to show for a lifetime of achievement was a lifetime of achievement. If a tree falls in the forest and it’s not tested, did it ever exist?

You ever in Poosey, stop by. We may not answer the door but you’ll enjoy the trip.