Why Literature Matters: Part 1, or What Trollope Says About Assessment

I'm not sure I want to know anyone in this industry who hasn't at some time or another experienced a crisis of conscience. Humans seek meaning in our work, and unless we are psychopaths, we generally prefer doing good rather than evil. When we have a choice that doesn't much inconvenience us.

Why do our consciences rail at us during the dark nights of our souls? You know the answer. You've thought the answer yourself, or you've even asked me the question to elicit the answer, whether you be a friend, family member, or complete stranger sitting next to me on Southwest flight 1207 out of LAX.

If you are a parent or a teacher or a friend of a parent or of a teacher, or if you know and care about a child or if you ever think about what you read in the newspaper and magazines or consider what you see on the news, you know something about K-12 assessment and you probably have opinions about it, opinions that--please forgive the plain speaking, and this is through no fault of your own--are most likely ill-informed. Being as that there are few industries so shrouded in mystery and that excite so little enthusiasm and generate so little va va voom, so little sparkle as that of educational assessment publishing.

However, you probably understand that any conscious (let alone conscientious) person who creates tests for a living has concerns about the quality of the tests, the purposes for which they are used, and the consequences when they are put to use.

A potential salve to our consciences lies in 10 Reasons Why Assessments Make the World a Better Place (compiled by John Kleeman at Questionmark and sent to me by my colleague Frank Brockmann of CenterPoint--you see, we all three of us are soldiers in the same militia).

And so I, dutiful foot soldier that I am, armed with the twin purposes of promoting greater understanding of assessment and its implementation and consequences, and of reminding all of us why the study of literature is crucial to developing higher level thinking skills (and character!), will, with the aid of my betters, review these 10 Reasons Why Assessments Make the World a Better Place.

Today, let's tackle Reason #1: Assessments give equality of opportunity.

The idea that assessment ensures equality of opportunity is one that Victorian writer (and career civil servant) Anthony Trollope treats humorously in The Three Clerks (Chapter 3: The Internal Navigation) and seriously in his autobiography:

But in regard to the absolute fitness of the young men selected for the public service [which selection was made based on examination results--ed.], I doubt whether more harm has not been done than good. And I think that good might have been done without the harm. The rule of the present day is, that every place shall be open to public competition, and that it shall be given to the best among the comers. I object to this, that at present there exists no known mode of learning who is best, and that the method employed has no tendency to elicit the best. That method pretends only to decide who among a certain number of lads will best answer a string of questions, for the answering of which they are prepared by tutors, who have sprung up for the purpose since this fashion of election has been adopted.

Italics mine.

SAT tutoring, anyone? How much does that cost these days, anyway? Who is most able to afford SAT tutoring? How does that disparity affect this playing field that the test is supposed to be leveling?

And here is what Trollope has to say about similar kinds of narrowly targeted test preparation:

When it is decided in a family that a boy shall "try the Civil Service," he is made to undergo a certain amount of cramming. But such treatment has, I maintain, no connection whatever with education. The lad is no better fitted after it than he was before for the future work of his life. But his very success fills him with false ideas of his own educational standing, and so far unfits him. And, by the plan now in vogue, it has come to pass that no one is in truth responsible either for the conduct, the manners, or even for the character of the youth. The responsibility was perhaps slight before; but existed, and was on the increase.

Italics mine, yet again.

What Trollope says about himself is that he would certainly have performed poorly on any such public examination, but if he had been rejected based on his poor performance, the government would have just as certainly lost "a valuable public servant." That he was valuable is incontestable; every biographical (and autobiographical) account I've read indicates that Trollope applied himself to his career as devotedly, industriously, and with as much competence as he did to his writing. (You may not know that Trollope wrote a gazillion books, and that he rose every morning at 5 dark-thirty to write for two hours before he began his work day at his day job.)

Which ultimately means that Reason #1 doesn't really reassure me that I am making the world a better place, one test question at a time.

(In addition, a highly inconvenient truth of this industry is that the soundness of the test cannot always be taken for granted, and an unsound test, a test that is constructed in absence of best practices, should not be relied upon to produce data that is itself reliable. I predict this truth will apply to all ten reasons.)

Bittersweet

The discovery of a new joy is sometimes accompanied by a sense of regret for what I've lost by not having discovered it sooner. When I began studying with Mr. Mudrick, I knew that I had missed a lot of what had come before.

As little as I knew of anything -- my ignorance was spectacular even for a college sophomore -- even I could see his greatness, his remarkable brilliance, his sheer goodness, his wit (he was such an entertainer!). His genius wasn't just literary; he understood being human more than anyone I've ever known. To see what I mean, read Mudrick Transcribed: Classes and Talks, a book of his lectures carefully recorded by fellow student Lance Kaplan, or Well, Mr. Mudrick Said, a memoir by friend and fellow student Bob Blaisdell.

I knew that I would be the fool of all fools if I didn't take every class he taught until I graduated. But there was always that regret that I missed a year and a half, that five university quarters had passed during which I could have been listened to Mr. Mudrick. It was time I had lost and would never get back.

My first memory of this kind of regret is when I read David Copperfield. I was eight. Seeking refuge from the din and chaos of what passed for daycare in those days, I'd wandered into the den and shut the door behind me. The den was furnished with black vinyl recliners and dark bookcases twice my height. The bookcases were filled with Reader's Digest editions and Book-of-the-Month hardbacks still in glossy book jackets. All were pristine. I doubt whether any of the books had ever been opened.

I liked the name David Copperfield and I liked how it looked in the gold lettering on the spine. I read all day, sitting on the shiny blue shag carpet. When I began reading, I was sitting in a square of bright sunlight. When the babysitter (herself a Dickensian character, being as wide as she was tall, with her topping of curly orange hair, her pale freckled skin, her face slightly smashed in, as if it had been formed of clay and then the top and bottom ends squished together to push the center inward, and her relentless grimness) opened to door to call me, she scolded me for reading in the dark. 

That night, lying in bed, David Copperfield was all I could think about. Both how much I loved it, and how angry I was that this amazing and wonderful world had existed all this time without my knowledge. Why didn't anyone ever tell me?

This must be the greatest aspiration for a writer: to inspire this feeling in a reader.

(I'd been planning to write about craftsmanship. I'm reading another writing manual, Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer by Roy Peter Clark, which had come recommended and is well worth the read, and which in its devotion to and insistence upon writerly craftsmanship made me think of that master craftsman, Anthony Trollope, who began writing every morning at 5:30 at a pace of 250 words per quarter hour. I was introduced to Trollope's novels in college, and it was love at the first turn of the page. And yes, that turn of the page was accompanied by a twinge of regret that I hadn't known of and read Trollope sooner. I made up for it as best I could -- and keep making up for it. He wrote a lot.)


UPDATE: More on regret from the NYT here.