By Anna Quindlen
Newsweek
June 17, 2002

You can imagine how honored I was to learn that my work was going to be mangled for the sake of standardized testing.

I got the word just after a vigilant parent had discovered that statewide English tests in New York had included excerpts from literary writers edited so nonsensically that the work had essentially lost all meaning. Isaac Bashevis Singer, Annie Dillard, even Chekhov--the pool of those singled out for red-penciling by bureaucrats was a distinguished one, and I found myself a little disappointed that I had not been turned into reading-comp pabulum.

But the state of Georgia was more accommodating. The folks at the Educational Testing Service, one of America's most powerful monopolies, were preparing something called the Georgia End-of-Course Tests and wanted to use an excerpt from a book I'd written called "How Reading Changed My Life."

In the sentence that read "The Sumerians first used the written word to make laundry lists, to keep track of cows and slaves and household goods," the words "and slaves" had been deleted.

And in the sentence "And soon publishers had the means, and the will, to publish anything--cookbooks, broadsides, newspapers, novels, poetry, pornography, picture books for children," someone had drawn a black line through the word "pornography" and written EDIT!

I got off easy. In the Singer excerpt on New York's Regents exam, which was about growing up a Jew in prewar Poland, all references to Jews and Poles were excised. Dillard's essay about being the only white child in a library in the black section of town became almost unintelligible after all references to race were obliterated.

The New York State Education Department's overheated guidelines are written so broadly that only the words "the" and "but" seem safe. "Does the material require the parent, teacher or examinee to support a position that is contrary to their religious beliefs or teaching?" the guidelines ask. "Does the material assume that the examinee has experience with a certain type of family structure?" As Jeanne Heifetz, an opponent of the required Regents exams who uncovered the editing, wrote, "Almost no piece of writing emerges from this process unscathed." Nor could any except the most homogenized piece of pap about Cape Cod tide pools.

"The words 'slave' and 'pornography' deal with controversial issues that could cause an emotional reaction in some students that could distract them from the test and affect their performance," wrote the ETS supernumerary snipping at my sentences.

This was in a week when students likely heard of another suicide bomber in Israel, the gunpoint abduction of a teen-ager in Utah and the arrest of an R&B star for appearing on videotape having sex with an underage girl. And they're going to be distracted by the words "slaves" and "pornography"?

That's the saddest thing here: not the betrayal of writers by bureaucrats, but the betrayal of kids by educators. Everyone complains that teenagers don't read enough good stuff; the lists of banned books in school libraries are thick with quality, with Steinbeck and Margaret Atwood. Everyone complains that students are not intellectually engaged; controversial issues are excised from those staggeringly boring textbooks. Everyone complains that kids are not excited about school; the point of school increasingly seems to be incessant testing that doesn't even have the grace to be mildly interesting. By the standards of the Regents tests, "The Catcher in the Rye" is unacceptable. ("Does the material require a student to take a position that challenges parental authority?") So are "To Kill a Mockingbird" and "The Merchant of Venice."

Here is the most shocking question among the New York state guidelines: "Does the material assume values not shared by all test takers?" There is no book worth reading, no poem worth writing, no essay worth analyzing, that assumes the same values for all. That sentence is the death of intellectual engagement.

The education officials in New York have now backed down from their cut-and-paste-without-permission position, faced with an angry mob of distinguished writers. But what do the kids learn from this? That the written word doesn't really matter much, that it can be weakened at will. That no one trusts a student to understand that variations in opinion and background are both objectively interesting and intellectually challenging. That some of the most powerful people involved in their education have reduced them to the lowest common denominator.

I like kids, have a brace of them around here, and I'm damned (EDIT!) if I'm going to abet some skewed adult vision of their febrile emotional state. Unlike those in New York, the people preparing tests for the state of Georgia at least had the common courtesy to ask permission to mess with my stuff. I declined. It's not that one or two words are particularly precious; I have hacked away at my own sentences to get them to fit tidily in this space. But not to make pabulum for students who deserve something tastier.

(C) 2002 Newsweek, Inc.

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