Springtime in America brings with it signs and sounds of hope — lengthening daylight, songbirds returning to trees and flowers peeking out from green grass. For K-12 students in America, springtime signals a different season, one filled with nervous clicks on keyboards, the darkening of circles with pencils and anxiety over test scores.
Just as I have done for the last 20 years of my career as a high school educator, I recently had a front row seat as a proctor for the SAT at East Leyden High School in Franklin Park, a Chicago suburb near O’Hare International Airport. I saw the nervous faces when students walked in; one of my bright, usually bubbly students even told me, “Mrs. Caneva, I’m cooked” — slang for “I’m not going to do well.”
Knowing how test anxiety and self-efficacy can lower scores, I reassured her that she was not cooked, and I told everyone that I believed in them, they were wonderful human beings and they were going to kill it on this test. All of these statements were true — I did truly believe in my students. I wish I could say the same for the test.
I have written several diatribes against the battery of standardized, multiple-choice exams our students take from elementary through high school. As a former English teacher on the South Side of Chicago in two under-resourced, understaffed and underfunded neighborhood schools that primarily served Black students, I saw firsthand how low test scores did not capture my students’ brilliance. In graduate school, I read research about how racial bias and stereotype threat can lead to lower test scores for some students of color. As a mom of two elementary school-aged kids, I am dismayed every year by the amount of instructional time lost on the slew of exams our young students must take.
But there is another reason as to why standardized exams are problematic; they operate as English-only when they could be easily translated into the many languages students across the U.S. speak. This year marked the first time the SAT went fully digital as our juniors took it on their school-issued Chromebooks. Our student population is highly diverse racially, ethnically and linguistically — our student body represents 33 languages. This year, we have an influx of students who have emigrated from South America and Ukraine fleeing from poverty and war in the hopes of a better, more peaceful life.
As school librarian, I respond to the needs of our student body, and I have bought many of our high-flying titles in Spanish, Polish, Ukrainian and Russian (because of the lack of Ukrainian titles offered, Russian is the closest language we could purchase). Our school has a robust multilingual learner program in which students can use their home language and learn the English language while taking high school level classes across the curriculum. Our district is even paying tuition for a large number of our teachers to become English Language Learner (ELL) certified. But an English-only digital test that allows only for translated directions and a pop-up dictionary does not reflect what’s happening in classrooms across this country.
Being that more and more standardized exams are becoming digital, testing companies have the technology to easily provide full translations for students. Currently, on the SAT, directions can be fully translated into 10 languages, and students classified as ELL can have access to the online dictionary, which can translate up to 100 languages. Why not just offer the exam in other languages?
By providing standardized tests in English-only formats, testing companies are supporting an English-only philosophy that projects college-readiness as English-only. What if a student has just arrived and knows some English but has trouble reading it? Yet in their home language, they are highly proficient and eager to go to college? Standardized English-only exams have no place for such students, even though the most recent U.S. Census Bureau logged 350 languages spoken in the U.S.
In the past, I was hopeful as the pandemic delayed or, in some cases, called off testing entirely, and President Joe Biden’s campaign promised to curb testing. But four years later, testing is back to normal this spring. It’s time for policymakers and our nation’s leaders to push testing companies, such as the College Board, to make changes to their exams to meet the needs of our multilingual student body.
Gina Caneva is the library media specialist for East Leyden High School. She taught in Chicago Public Schools for 15 years and is nationally board certified.
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