Dump The Test is a companion website for the novel, Bubble Sheet Blues, published by William Durbin.
Though Durbin typically writes action-adventure historical fiction, this contemporary story represents a major departure for him. The introduction below, taken from opening pages of his book, explains what led him to write Bubble Sheet Blues.

Why I Wrote This Novel

The incident that inspired this novel occurred nearly twenty years ago at an elementary school in Bradenton, Florida. That spring I spent three weeks in South Florida, appearing at a dozen schools in the Tampa-St. Petersburg area as part of a promotional tour for my latest novel, El Lector. Though I was scheduled to speak with fifth graders in Bradenton that day, as my host teacher and I were walking down the hallway, we passed a class of third graders. Half of the students were bawling.

The teacher whispered, “Those kids are crying in advance of a standardized test they’re taking next week, which they know they’re going to fail.”

I asked, “What’s going on in there?

I later discovered that the third graders, many of whom were immigrants just learning to speak English, were scheduled to take a test called the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test or FCAT. According to state law, any third-grade student who failed the test, no matter how good their classroom grades were, would have to repeat the entire grade.

In addition to the challenging content of the test, the method of administration further stressed the students. Prior to computerized standardized testing, students had to use pencils to shade in little circles in answer booklets called bubble sheets. It was easy to fill in an answer on the wrong line. And sweaty palms, fingerprints, and smudge marks from erasing often made a mess of the answer sheets. 

To make matters worse, every school in Florida was given a letter grade from A to F based on how their students scored on the FCAT. Schools with high grades, which tended to be in more affluent communities, were given cash bonuses. The  lower-performing schools—which often had large immigrant and minority populations and were in desperate need of additional funding—lost out.

When I returned to Minnesota and told my wife, Barbara, about the bawling kids and the FCAT, she immediately said that I needed to write a novel about it. As a third-grade teacher, she’d had similar experiences with standardized tests that discouraged her students and diminished their self-worth. She went so far as to equate high-stakes testing with child abuse. But I put her off, explaining that I couldn’t write a novel against something—I had to have a storyline and characters. I also assured her that excessive testing was just a phase, and schools would soon refocus on the joy of reading, thinking, and learning.

Boy, was I wrong.

The image of those crying third graders in that Bradenton Elementary hallway has stuck with me for the past fifteen years. After many false starts and lots of tinkering since that day, I believe I’ve finally come up with a fitting voice to tell the story of those kids, and more importantly, what they represent.

Willam Durbin

Lake Vermilion, Minnesota

2025