I received this email from an eighth-grader: "Listen, I love your work, but seriously? Selling out to the state test?
"Also, before my class goes crazy, which was the wisest animal in 'The Hare and the Pineapple'?"
You bet I sold out, I replied. Not to the Department of Education, but to the publisher of tests, useless programmed reading materials, and similar junk. All authors who are not Stephen King will sell permission to allow excerpts from their books to have all the pleasure edited out of them and used this way. You'd do the same thing if you were a writer, and didn't know where your next pineapple was coming from.
I've done it for years. Sometimes I get paid a hundred or two, and sometimes I've been able to jack them up to a couple thousand. It's dirty money, but I didn't see that any real harm was done, other than boring students. But that was before these tests became more than a way to try to find out what the kids were learning so they could be taught better.
Now, there are repercussions to these tests. A kid might not be advanced to the next grade, a teacher might not get a new contract, a school could lose funding, get shut down. There are things riding on these tests, and the money is dirtier. I hadn't given this any thought . . . until now.
I was caught up in the brouhaha that arose from an excerpt from a book of mine, edited out of any resemblance to what I wrote, and included in what was described to me as a "high stakes" test administered to all the eighth-graders in New York. It's a nonsense story, funny, that one character tells to another in my novel, "Borgel."
On the test, the story makes even less sense, (less sense than nonsense? Yes! I wouldn't have thought it was possible), and then . . . get ready . . . there are multiple choice questions the kids are supposed to answer.
Well, if a thing is absolutely illogical and meaningless, it's not possible to ask questions like, "Which animal in the story was the most wise? Choose (a), (b), (c), (d), etc." And, "Why did the animals eat the pineapple?"
I forgot to mention, my name was on the story — edited to where not a single word of it was mine, just the name.
So there was a flood of emails, and one phone call, from eighth-graders.
The communications from kids broke down into three categories: "What? Were you high when you wrote that? Are you an idiot?" or "None of the multiple choice answers made sense. What is the right one? I am upset and confused," and my favorite category, "Wow, New York State puts out some stupid tests, doesn't it?"
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Yes, it does, kid, yes it does.
But it did not stop with emails. I was directed to a Facebook page in which the kids griped and groaned and made some pretty funny jokes about the dumb test. And then, after 40 years of authoring, and more than 100 books, I got interviewed by all the major newspapers in New York City. About a story under my name, of which not a line was written by me, which was like a paragraph from a novel I wrote in 1998, and which had appeared on a test with unanswerable questions following.
Everybody knows what Andy Warhol said about everybody getting his 15 minutes of fame. Is this mine? Do I need to ask that? Obviously it is. I think I'm happy about it. I feel like a real celebrity — real in the sense that I got a whole bunch of media attention, and I didn't actually do anything.
Well, I accepted money from sleazy people for what turns out to be a sleazy thing. But that is good too! That's what a lot of celebrities do. Do I want another 15 minutes? Nah. One is plenty.
Daniel Pinkwater is the author of more than 80 works for children and young adults, and one badly tortured state test essay.