April 14, 2005 | By Rebecca Coleman | DALLAS MORNING NEWS

Mia Kang, a ninth-grader at MacArthur Middle School in San Antonio, is my hero.

During the TAKS field test given to students across the state in February, Mia refused to sit through the monotony of bubbling in her answer document in order to make the powers-that-be happy. Instead, she used her answer sheet to write an essay about how high-stakes testing is ruining public education.

The straight-A student says she'll also refuse to take the state-mandated TAKS tests next week because she feels that the tests hurt students and schools.

I admire Mia Kang for doing what I as a teacher cannot do. I, too, feel strongly that our increasing reliance on the results of standardized tests to gauge public schools is killing public education.

Each year, I've noticed the emphasis in curriculum moving farther and farther away from a liberal arts education, which emphasizes knowledge across a broad spectrum of subjects, to a "skills-based curriculum," which emphasizes the ability to pass a standardized test.

Test preparation dominates almost every aspect of the school day. Tutorials after school are devoted to TAKS prep; lessons must include some form of TAKS-style testing and assessment; teachers spend countless hours before school, after school and during professional development days poring over TAKS statistics and trying to come up with a way to squeeze those last remaining percentage points out of an increasingly bored and apathetic student body.

And why are they bored and apathetic? Because they know that nothing matters but that test. To earn a diploma, Texas high school students must pass all four sections of the TAKS test - English, math, science and social studies - regardless of what their report card says.

What their English teacher tries to instill in them about Hamlet or To Kill a Mockingbird or The Grapes of Wrath is irrelevant. It's not on the test because what literature teaches a student is not measurable.

Standardized tests don't measure what students need to know in order to become good people who contribute meaningfully to society. They measure what is easily measured.

Read this really boring passage. Answer these seemingly unrelated questions. Learn how to separate the two completely ridiculous answers from the two could-be-right answers. Use the test-taking strategies you learned in class to figure out which answer is the one the state wants you to bubble in.

Public schools were created in response to the belief that education is vital to the development and maintenance of a democracy. Democracy doesn't come in the form of multiple-choice tests. Democracy requires that we know how to think critically, that we question everything, that we are able to see issues from all sides, not just our side, and that we understand the depths of human existence, from tragedy to ecstasy, from pathos to comedy.

"Drill and kill" tests, like the TAKS, create students who are easily manipulated, easily controlled and increasingly incurious. We begin with fresh, eager minds in elementary school, and through years of focusing only on meeting those state standards, we choke the fun out of learning and thinking, creating students who hate school and everything associated with learning.

We create graduates who think that being knowledgeable means being able to regurgitate information. We create citizens who don't know how to research all sides of an issue in order to come to a conclusion. They rely on sound bites (multiple-choice items) and short, quick answers.

As a teacher, I understand the need for accountability. But we cannot afford to further alienate our best students, like Mia Kang, by insisting that only TAKS and nothing but the TAKS can measure whether they've learned anything or not.

We cannot continue to drive our best teachers out of the profession because of our dogged adherence to testing, testing and more testing as a means of gauging their effectiveness.

Teaching is more than turning out good test takers. We're creating minds, nourishing souls and contributing to the betterment of our society. Let's not cheapen the importance of education by measuring it based on the results of one bubble-filling day.

Rebecca Coleman is an eighth-grade English teacher for a local school district. Her e-mail address is beccadt@hotmail.com.