Just a Moment, Please, While I Step Up on this Soapbox
Not that it’s easy to fight City Hall. It isn’t. It’s just, how else do “thoughtful, committed citizens” save the world? Isn’t the world worth a bit of a fight?
I look at my colleagues, and I am deeply chagrined to see how easily we have capitulated to the not-so-hidden agendas of petty politicians. And what about parents? Everyone I know will acknowledge privately that many provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act have been patently bad for children in this country, and yet I have watched school after school forget children and make test scores their number one priority. The test is, of course, a moving target. We never know from one year to the next what will be on it, but the NCLBA requires us to squeeze better and better scores from kids anyway.
So we’ve been reduced to the “Whack a Mole” method of education. Anybody ever played that game, where little moles stick their heads out of holes for an instant, and you try to hit them with a mallet? Teachers no longer ask, “What kinds of skills will these young people need to succeed in life?” and then focus their efforts on providing these skills. Now we ask, “What might be on THIS year’s test?” Curriculum is fragmented. “Maybe it will be this..no that! Ooh! It could be that thing over there!” We jerk the kids around so hard it’s a wonder the little lambs don’t have whiplash.
They do, actually. Mental whiplash. But teachers are so busy looking for the next test question mole popping its head up for a moment, they’ve forgotten completely what it is they went into education to do. “Kids? What kids? Where? Hey, there’s a mole that might be on the test!”
And the teachers who dare to suggest that we have moral obligations to our students that supercede any perceived obligation to politics are told to sit down and shut up. People will gather in little groups to whisper in heated tones about the travesty we are being “forced” to perpetuate, but few refuse to participate.
You can’t fight city hall, you know.
Well, here are the facts:
If schools must raise their test scores every year, then sooner or later, every school will get sucked into the “Whack a Mole” method of education. If your child’s school is already providing a high quality education, it won’t continue to. Sooner or later, it must stop doing the good things it is doing in order to focus on the test. Your child will cease to matter.
If schools are going to meet the required goal of a 100% graduation rate, they are going to have to engage in a mad game of hot potato as they whack those standardized test rodents. If your child can’t or won’t whack along with his or her teachers, he or she is going to get shoved from one school to the next. No one will want to take responsibility for him or her. There are some excellent alternative programs, but they will disappear, because their test scores are usually fairly low. Those of you whose children aren’t incredibly motivated to take tests will understand what I’m talking about.
No standardized tests given by any state evaluate in-depth critical thinking. They evaluate how well children can read a short poem or excerpt from a novel and then write a short response. Unfortunately, this is not a particularly useful life skill. Those of you who are looking for future employees who are problem solvers, who are creative and can “think outside of the box,” as we are so fond of saying, are screwed. Sorry. You can’t fight City Hall, you know.
And here’s the kicker. All of this is perfectly plain to anyone who has given it a moment’s thought. Not to beat a dead horse, but… Last year people wanted to believe that Georgie boy was going to make the world safe for democracy. It was perfectly obvious to a large number of people that he wasn’t the man for the job. I’m not sure Kerry was either, but heck, a trained monkey was better than the guy we picked. We all know that now, but it’s too late. Between Katrina and Iraq, how many innocents have died?
Well, we’re in the same boat with education. While parents and teachers cower in the shadow of City Hall, students are being denied a quality education. Rather than enacting education reform that evens the playing field by bringing up poor performing schools, we have everybody chasing an impossible goal. In the end, there will be very little left of public schools that will be worth saving, and many Americans will find their own children left out in the cold while the very wealthy merely turn to private schools, which have been exempted from the “Whack a Mole” game. By then, everyone will be up in arms, ready to storm City Hall.
It’ll just be too late. Again.