So, there I was, a happy little corporate speechwriter for a major financial services outfit, when the call came from a fancy headhunter in New York City.
A giant diversified corporate creature just down the street from where I worked was interested in a chat about becoming its executive speechwriter.
The only concern, the recruiter explained, was that the “national search” for the best speechwriter in the whole world wasn’t likely to select someone who worked five minutes away.
The money was terrific, and since I wasn’t some kind of banker or tradesman or newspaper publisher or anything like that, I needed more money.
After several rounds of interviews, I had the important chat, with the vice president of the department in which I would be housed. He invited me into his office – and we proceeded to smoke cigars and talk about the good-old-days when we were both young newspaper reporters, prowling the mean streets for news and free liquor. Speechwriting? It never came up.
I knew I had the job. The “national search” was over. There wouldn’t be a spelling test or an essay exam about the income effect of a proportional tax rate on private goods.
The strange brew of talent and education and appearance and personality and good luck are all part of the package that we all bring to the table in the game called life.
To complicate matters further, we don’t necessarily need all of life’s attributes to succeed. For instance, I’ve coasted along on my good looks for decades. It’s worked out just fine.
For all the chaos of how the real world works, nothing is more peculiar than the process of evaluating graduates of our public schools – a Martian world unlike anywhere else.
Even as we speak, Massachusetts is mulling the notion of dumping the venerable MCAS tests in math and English, in favor of a multi-state creature that would probably never ask questions about Boston baked beans or how to spell “Yastrzemski.”
Playing Low Ball
The instinct to become entangled with other jurisdiction is a reflection in part of one of the strangest aspects of the public-school testing enterprise. Each state designs its own tests; each state chooses its own magic to evaluate academic achievement, and, in recent years, year-to-year improvement tied to the “No Child Left Behind” mandate.
The suspicion, of course, is that some states set their bar sufficiently low to ensure that most kids are at least proficient enough to be newspaper columnists – and that year-to-year improvement can be achieved by continuing to breathe.
The Massachusetts-Connecticut-New Jersey axis of evil has long suspected that while its tests require fifth graders to be able to build nuclear power plants and read Jane Austen without gagging, some other states might be getting way with educational fraud.
President Obama keeps mumbling about “national standards” for education, in his continuing effort to rename the United States “ObamaLand,” but the states reflexively resist a federal takeover of “local” education.
There was a certain charm to the old-world notion that if you were born in, say, South Dakota, you would spend the rest of your days in South Dakota. Your state testing could focus on whether you know enough math to do crop-yields-per-pound-of-fertilizer.
In a modern world in which financial and human capital are wandering the Earth, looking for love, there is a certain appeal to applying a standard test to every man, woman and child – to determine whether our schools are producing bankers, tradesmen, or pole dancers at strip clubs.
One complication for Massachusetts is that some of its testing is tied to graduation requirements – suggesting that a certain slice of the testing pie will remain uniquely Massachusetts-like, so that colleges and employees know what they’re getting when someone staggers out of a Massachusetts high school, diploma in hand.
In the context of the strange, mysterious American testing environment, the one-size-fits-all notion might not be particularly helpful or harmful.
As Glenn Koocher, executive director of the Massachusetts Association of School Committees, told the Boston Globe: “I don’t see it as something better or worse, but as something different.”
