Screen Test

While documenting exam prep at two Harlem schools, filmmaker Ondine Rarey was given a lesson in standardization.

By Samantha Stainburn

Testing doesn’t sound like the most cinematic of subjects, but the images that independent filmmaker Ondine Rarey captures in her two companion documentaries about high-stakes assessments in New York City schools are provocative enough to give pause to activists on both sides of the testing debate. In the first film, Testing Mrs. Grube , Rarey zooms in on 5th grade teacher Marie Grube, who was required to spend three hours a day on scripted test prep to ready her Harlem students for the next citywide exam. Each time her classroom’s buzzer goes off,

signaling that it’s time for test drills, we see a scene rarely credited to “failing” schools: kids begging to continue with the reading or science activities that had enthralled them moments before.

In the second documentary, A Different Standard , Rarey shows how teachers at the progressive Central Park East elementary school—also in Harlem, but exempt from test prep requirements—help 5th graders blossom. Yet even its students’ achievements and its national reputation for excellence can’t prevent the school community from getting demoralized by the city’s threat-saturated testing regimen.