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How New York Exams Rewrite Literature (A Sequel)
By MICHAEL WINERIP THEY promised they'd stop it, but they did it again. Last June, after a parent caught them red-handed, New York State education officials promised to stop sanitizing literary excerpts on the state high school Regents exams. But a review of the most recent state exam, given in August, reveals that they did it again, this time altering Franz Kafka and sanitizing Aldous Huxley. Worse yet, a historian quoted on the exam believes that a test question based on his work has more than one correct answer. If he is right, it may mean that some high school students who failed the August test actually passed and could be eligible for a diploma. You may remember the front-page account last June. Jeanne Heifetz, the parent of a New York City senior, discovered that state education officials had been doctoring the literary reading samples on state tests to make sure nothing offensive was included. It didn't matter if it was Anton Chekhov or Isaac Bashevis Singer, state bureaucrats removed references to race, religion, ethnicity, sex, nudity and even alcohol. "Jews" and "gentiles" were excised from Singer. An Annie Dillard excerpt about growing up white in a black area was purged of racial references. In exposing this tomfoolery, Ms. Heifetz, who has an English degree from Harvard, wanted people to see what she believes: that the standardized tests so many politicians now worship are hardly rigorous and actually undermine academic excellence. There was an outcry from writers, academics and groups like the National Coalition Against Censorship, and state officials promised to end such practices. Not quite. Ms. Heifetz, bless her, recently got a look at August's English exam. In new guidelines, the state promised complete paragraphs with no deletions, but an excerpt from Kafka (on the importance of literature) changes his words and removes the middle of a paragraph without using ellipses, in the process deleting mentions of God and suicide. The new state guidelines promised not to sanitize, but a passage on people's conception of time from Aldous Huxley (a product of England's colonial era) deletes the paragraphs on how unpunctual "the Oriental" is. But the saddest example of how standardized testing is lowering academic standards (as a recent national study by Arizona State University reports) can be seen in the way New York officials butchered an excerpt from a PBS documentary on the influenza epidemic of 1918. Like any good historical work, the documentary on this epidemic, which killed half a million Americans, included numerous interviews with historians, novelists, medical experts and survivors, and quoted primary sources of the era. But the three-page passage read out loud to students on the state exam is edited to make it appear that there is only one speaker. Though the new guidelines promised to identify the authors of any excerpts, the state does not identify the documentary's author, Ken Chowder. It does identify the narrator, although - oops! - incorrectly: the narrator was Linda Hunt, not David McCullough. As Ms. Heifetz says, any student who melded the words of a dozen people into one and then misidentified the narrator would surely be flunked. The state version cuts out the passages with the most harrowing and moving accounts of the epidemic, as when children played on piles of coffins stacked outside an undertaker's home. It removes virtually all references to government officials' mishandling the epidemic. It deletes the references to religious leaders like Billy Sunday, who promised that God would protect the virtuous, even as worshipers dropped dead at his services. It's worse. Ms. Heifetz believes that one test question based on the influenza reading has three correct answers, not the single answer the state scoring sheet indicates. Question 2 says, "The speaker implies that the war effort affected the epidemic by: 1) increasing the chance of exposure." This is the answer the state wants, and it is correct, since the war forced soldiers into cramped troop ships, helping spread the disease. But Answer 2, "decreasing health care funds," also appears to be implied, since, as the excerpt points out, "practically every available doctor and nurse had been sent to Europe," leaving Americans at home badly underserved. And Answer 3, "restricting the flow of information," also seems plausible. As the excerpt indicates, President Woodrow Wilson had to make a very tough - and secret - decision to send reinforcements overseas on those troop ships, even though he knew many would be exposed to influenza and die. In the world of make-or-break exams, one question scored incorrectly can make all the difference in a student's future. In Massachusetts last month, after a student discovered there was a second correct answer to a math question on the state test, 449 students who had flunked were suddenly eligible for high school diplomas. In an interview, James A. Kadamus, deputy New York education commissioner, disagreed with almost all these criticisms. He acknowledged that there should have been ellipses in the shortened Kafka quotation, but said it was O.K. to change Kafka's words inside the quotation marks since the exam noted that it was an "adapted quote." The Huxley and influenza passages were shortened for length, he said, not sensitivity. And because the influenza passage was read out loud to students, Mr. Kadamus said, it would have been too confusing to attribute the quotations to people who actually spoke them; the passage worked more smoothly, he said, as a single-person narration. As for Question 2, he said that if someone like Ms. Heifetz repeatedly read the excerpt and thought about every little nuance, she might decide there was more than one correct answer, but that for students listening to the "overall flow" of the passage, No. 1 was clearly the best answer. To get a second opinion on Question 2, I tracked down Dr. Alfred Crosby, a retired University of Texas professor who was featured in the PBS documentary and has written the book "America's Forgotten Pandemic." I sent him a copy of the state's sanitized excerpt and the multiple-choice questions. Dr. Crosby loves history's complexity and was offended by the state's single-speaker vision of the past. He believes all three answers to Question 2 were implied in the state excerpt and said that if he were marked wrong for responding with Answers 2 or 3, he'd be angry. "That's the problem," he said, "with a multiple-choice test." |
