Daniel Pinkwater Responds to the Kerfuffle Over His Story

Here in New York, as in many other states around the country, students are regularly given standardized tests to evaluate their English language skills. Many times, those tests are also used to evaluate their teachers, schools, and districts as well. To say that these tests are considered important – by school administrators, if not by students and families themselves, is an understatement.

But it was students who brought this absurd situation to the attention of the world. One question that appeared on the recent NYS test for eighth graders included a question based on an excerpt from a wonderful book by children's author Daniel Pinkwater called Borgel. It was a fable told by the title character, a 111-year-old guy (with a heavy Jewish accent like my grandfather, in Pinkwater's abridged audio version), called "The Story of the Rabbit and the Eggplant." Like many of Pinkwater's stories, this one was a silly tale whose deeper meaning could probably be boiled down to "Don't look for deeper meanings where there are none."

The educational publisher Pearson, which was recently awarded $32 million by New York to revamp the state's tests, which were considered too easy, then changed Pinkwater's original story to "The Pineapple and the Hare" and made it even more nonsensical (not necessarily in a good way, that is). And they added questions – "Which animal spoke the wisest words?" – that really had no answer.

As I wrote on GeekDad yesterday, a few students decided to go right to the source for the answers. They contacted the author his website’s P-Zone “Talk to DP Forum,” and got a response explaining how authors sell the rights to their work to testing companies without really giving much thought to how they will be used.

I don't know how the test publishing company changed the story. I gather they decided to call the rabbit a hare, and made the eggplant into a pineapple. Also there appears to be something about sleeves. And they made up questions for the students to answer. I would not have done any of these things. But it has nothing to do with me. I cashed the check they sent me after about 8 months, and took my wife out to lunch at a cheap restaurant. I believe, she ordered eggplant.

Since then, the story has been picked up by online, print and broadcast media in New York City. NPR has a blog post with links to most of the stories, which mainly focus on the point of giving students a test with un-answerable questions. They're less concerned with the fact that Pinkwater's story was changed than that kids are been given such hogwash in the name of educational rigor. The Daily News asked Jeopardy champ Ken Jennings for his response, and got this comment from a school official:

Scarsdale Middle School Principal Michael McDermott said the question has been used before and “confused students in six or seven different states.”

And he had a quick answer to the question of who is the wisest: “Pearson for getting paid $32 million for recycling this crap.”

On Saturday night, Pinkwater himself emailed the following statement to some of his contacts:

A test, in a learning situation, should be a means of finding out if the students have learned the material in order for the teachers to make up deficiencies...by teaching. It's not outside the realm of possibility that a test might be devised which could be used to evaluate how a teacher, or school, or school system is functioning–but really that would be a pretty tall order. The idea of buying such tests ready-made for a whole lot of public money from specialist companies which are known to have produced all kinds of "educational materials" that many good teachers consider useless or next to useless ought to raise some pretty big red flags.

I, and a lot of other writers, have routinely agreed to let excerpts from their work be used in anthologies, readers, "programmed reading materials," and tests. This has been going on for 40 years that I'm aware of. It's routine. Very often whoever is asking for permission to use the excerpts first tries to get them for nothing, and once an author gets wise and demands payment, they pay. Personally, I never gave any thought to a change in the implications which makes some tests, in the opinion of many informed people, pernicious. I'd venture a guess that many of my fellow authors never considered it either.

It looks to me like one publisher of tests made a mistake that was bound to happen, and included a passage and questions so completely inappropriate and ridiculous that it couldn't be ignored, and happened to speak to the suspicions of many that the whole business is a shabby scam. And it was funny–so it went all around the internet and the media, as funny things do, so a lot of people are thinking about it, and maybe rethinking. I have to say, I'm not unhappy that the passage, (of which, as edited, not a single word was written by me, by the way), was printed under my name. I didn't actually do anything, other than, asking no questions, accept money from a corporation to do something or other with a few paragraphs from a book of mine, but I'm glad to have been included in the conversation.

What do you think about standardized tests and how they are used in schools, about how test publishers use authors' work, and about the strange questions on this test in particular?