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Professional football has had its Super Bowl, and national political finalists their Super Tuesday. For the nation's public school children, another championship is about to unfold: Standardized Testing '08.

Unlike football and the race for the White House, however, there will be no real winners in the testing. Oh, there will be scores all right, and those scores will appear many months from now, anointing some schools as making "adequate yearly progress" and shaming others as needing "school improvement" or "corrective action."

But for the academic gladiators in the testing game — the students — Standardized Testing Õ08 will mean nothing. For as they say, "The scores don't follow the kid, they follow the school." The focus is not on how a particular student does over time but on how a particular school does each year. Many students and parents don't even know how their kid did on the test, only how the school performed overall.

And in the context of such winner-centered battles as the Super Bowl and Super Tuesday, it doesn't seem right that something as high-stakes as standardized testing should actively discourage the actual players from caring about the score.

I have somewhat jokingly suggested paying students to do well on tests — like professional football players — but I'm completely serious in my desire to see students receive some sort of incentive to persevere over the grueling, boring hours of testing.

That all students get is the notorious free orange juice and cookie during test breaks is laughable. Yet this lack of any real student incentive just scratches the surrealistic surface of standardized testing.

The No Child Left Behind Act is a national mandate, but every state designs its own test. So the tests themselves aren't standardized.

Right now, the only scores that really matter are those in reading and math. Science scores will start to matter soon, I hear, but those of my discipline, social studies, aren't really ever going to matter. Kids still take a test in social studies, but I've asked and can't even find out how my students did on the social studies section.

A great deal of time, money and effort goes into identifying and helping students labeled "special education." These students receive additional services, individualized instruction and modifications to their academic plans. But not when it comes to standardized testing. All but a few special-ed kids take the same test as everyone else. Some get questions read to them, but it's the same test. This, despite all the effort that went into noting how difficult regular education was for them.

I often hear from saintly souls teaching special education that their students despise standardized testing. And rightly so, for these kids are paying the price for the surrealistic arrogance contained in the phrase, "No Child Left Behind."

We live in a country where a football championship is treated as a national holiday, and striving to be No. 1 is the dominant ethos. Yet with our public school kids, we pretend we can all be the same: Individual performance doesn't matter, and compensating for excellence is somehow unethical. Quite the super-contradiction.