The Bridge on the River Why
Standardized Testing as Building Railroads for the Billionaire Class
“We bet big on a set of standards called the Common Core. Nearly every state adopted them within two years of their release. But it quickly became clear that adoption alone wasn’t enough — something we should’ve anticipated.” — Bill Gates (7th wealthiest billionaire)
"Don't let anyone tell you that standardized tests are not accurate measures. They offer a remarkably precise method for gauging the size of the houses near the school where the test was administered." — Alfie Kohn, educator and author of The Case Against Standardized Testing: Raising the Scores, Ruining the Schools (2000)
Major Clipton: The fact is, what we're doing could be construed as - forgive me, sir - collaboration with the enemy. Perhaps even as treasonable activity.
Colonel Nicholson: Are you alright, Clipton? We're prisoners of war, we haven't the right to refuse work.
Major Clipton: I understand that, sir. But... must we work so well? Must we build them a better bridge than they could have built for themselves?
David Lean’s 1957 epic The Bridge on the River Kwai earned numerous awards, most notably seven Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Screenplay (ghostwritten, perhaps unsurprisingly, by two blacklisted screenwriters).1 As a classic British adventure yarn, it operates thrillingly within both the war movie and prison film genres.
Interestingly, except for a couple of prisoners who do escape, survival does not center on breaking out of the Japanese POW camp but rather in completing construction (and later blowing-up) a well-engineered railroad bridge for Japan’s advancing Second World War empire in Southeast Asia.
The span can only be built on slave labor, co-supervised by captured British officers (chiefly the self-conceited Colonel Nicholson). Although the Pierre Boulle novel and the screenplay gloss over much of the more brutal source material (the 1942-43 Thai-Burma Railway, known as the Death Railway by inmates), the somewhat complex plot does present some fascinating conflicts.
The struggle can also inadvertently serve as a metaphor for modern-day teachers vs. the high-stakes Standardized Testing Industry.2
Colonel Nicholson (Alec Guinness) pridefully doing the bidding for Colonel Saito (Sessue Hayakawa), his ruling commander.
Colonel Saito (Japanese commander of Camp 16): Be happy in your work.
In Michigan, this year’s Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) Administration Window begins April 8 for compliant schools across the State, often in conjunction with other feeder exams pitifully starting as young as the third grade.
Educational institutions have until April 26 to track down — and quietly coerce — absent students to take the high-pressure tests. Never mind if any student suffers from test anxiety, or worse, if they share valid concerns with educators how these hard-lined, strictly-timed and recorded exercises wrongly emphasize a convenient regimentation of knowledge.
After 25 years of full-time teaching, I still haven’t experienced a senior or former student thanking me for raising their test scores. Nor have I run across a colleague who claimed standardized assessments as an inspiration for becoming an educator.
Like Major Clipton, most of us begrudgingly comply to this exam authority (Colonel Saito?), to this annual major intrusion into everything from structured units to unstructured teachable moments — and incidentally, any social-emotional learning.
Pre-test duties include requiring proctor-teachers to sign oaths under the threat of criminal prosecution to never release the content of any exam question, as if such revelations would be a threat to national security or our very existence.
A few teachers may boast how their test-taking strategies and “teaching to the tests” are benefiting students allegedly by increasing their post-secondary education entrance opportunities, despite over 1,900 colleges and universities no longer requiring such a blunt instrument for admissions.3
Colonel Nicholson: We can teach these barbarians a lesson in Western methods and efficiency that will put them to shame.
Some more administrative-minded converts may insist resistance is futile, that since this generation no longer reads anything beyond texts and social media posts, we should just adapt to the test’s common format of multiple choice responses around shortened excerpted passages.
In other words, never mind how this type of intelligence bludgeoning does not explore, say, critical and creative thinking. In this reductivist top-down world, functionality thrives upon what is easier to measure, marginalizing those who dare to think and act differently.
Meanwhile, it’s no coincidence why the billionaire class generally enrolls their progeny in expensive private institutions far removed from these imposed testing requirements of public schools.
Ever since the legislated rhetoric of No Child Left Behind (2001) and the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA, 2010), State and local school boards have often developed ways to use the condensed data not only to evaluate students, but the school’s teachers and administrations as well. After all, the property values around the school are sadly conflated to the posted test scores and related bureaucratic tidiness.
Most administrations and school boards dismissively ignore the inherent advantages of the upper and upper-middle class in always scoring significantly higher on assessments ultimately determined to define winners and losers. Property wealth, more stable incomes, home tutoring options, with higher educated parents and guardians are a demographic no lower-middle-class school can overcome with free lunches and after-school or pull-out programs.
In short, the biased tests reinforce what they measure.
Colonel Nicholson: I realize how difficult it's going to be in this god-forsaken place where you can't find what you need, but there's the challenge.
Major Evans: I beg your pardon, sir. You mean you really want them to build a bridge?
Colonel Nicholson: You're not usually so slow on the uptake, Evans. I know our men. You've got to keep them occupied. The fact is, if there weren't any work for them to do, we'd invent some, eh, Reeves?
Major Reeves: That we would, sir.
The analogy of educators as a bridge for student achievement is as old as Plato and Aristotle. We are often caught up in the tension between two sometimes opposing pedagogical philosophies:
Focus mainly on preparing student-citizens for success in college and the “real world” of gainful employment (sometimes called “realism”), or
Develop student-citizens who become capable of making much-needed changes and reforms in their worlds — and ours — for the better (termed by some as “pragmatism”).
Yet when obligations shift to high-stakes standardized testing, both ideologies are crushed by an authoritarian railroad. We are told to lay tracks which define student progress as both a multi-million dollar business4 and a reinforcement of ever intensifying wealth inequality.5
Colonel Nicholson’s assertiveness in the prison camp is initially greeted with desperate enthusiasm, until he becomes a contradictory tool for the oppressors.
Using the familiar bridge metaphor, corporate capitalism requires a few engineers, many more bridge-builders — and also bride-dwellers, those statistical dropouts no longer counted when no longer looking for work, who essentially end up in jail, the ER or homeless shelters at the bottom of the economic pyramid, by design.
As teachers and parents, should we just pretend this skewed system based on inherited privilege and compensation disproportionately channeled upward is fine the way it is?
As usual, should we just be thankful we have a job with health care?
Yet why continue the double-speak of diversity, equity or even social-emotional learning when we inadvertently make it easier to reproduce such massive inequality?
Are we really still wondering how such irrelevant, corporatized educational demands are connected to increasing student truancy statistics, now at an all-time post-Covid-19 high?6
So, when we quietly gather up the used, confidential test booklets and put away the school laptops, with lifeless test-takers staring blankly out the window, with at least another week of falling behind in more meaningful educational ambitions, shall we now mimic the belated realization of a fatally wounded Colonel Nicholson, as he staggers towards the detonator?
Colonel Nicholson: What have I done.
Incidentally, one of my 366 all-time films in my ongoing cinema chronicle, Leap Year at the Movies.
STI also a fitting symbolic abbreviation for such a mass pedagogical infection.
20 States currently have their contracts with the SAT (the lower bidder) while 15 are married to the rival ACT.
I was thinking of the movie, Captain Fantastic, while reading your article. In that movie, a father raises his kids off the land, but educates them through books and real life, promotes physical strength and endurance, teaches them self-sufficiency and critical thinking/how to think for themselves.
They learn with an excitement and ability to understand, even debate all sides of an issue. They are more learned than their suburban counterparts. Yet, this is all seen as a threat with a move to take the kids away from the father.
There is a line where the grandparents say they want the kids to live with THEM to prepare them for the future. The father says that's exactly what HE'S been doing.
The movie deals with the crux of modern ideas and standards for education. We are not preparing students for the world. We are preparing them to be slaves for the rest of their lives.
No individual thoughts are allowed or encouraged. You either know the material they want you to know - as it is handed down to them - or you fail.
It is well know that the standardized tests are a hindrance and self defeating in their attempt to define a student's abilities. They are expensive and biased and useless - except to further the intentions of those in control.
I'm so glad to see schools drifting away from this requirement! It's no doubt, a fight against the established businesses that have a firm economic grasp in this charade but such a worthy cause...