Re: Worth Reading -- New Book on NCLB and State Tests

[aburke5054@aol.com]

If they're testing and drilling reading and math and ignoring other 
subjects, they're ignoring some kids, and teachers and kids are 
bitching at each other, they need better people running the school.  
What is so complicated about that?

Art

-----Original Message-----
From: Bob Schaeffer <bobschaeffer@earthlink.net>
To: ARN Main List <arn-l@interversity.org>; arn2-strategy 
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Sent: Mon, 30 Jul 2007 4:40 pm
Subject: [arn-l] Worth Reading -- New Book on NCLB and State Tests


I just finished reading FairTest's advance copy of this just-published
book and found the following review from Sunday's LATimes a good 
summary.


TESTED: ONE AMERICAN SCHOOL STRUGGLES TO MAKE THE GRADE

"NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND" SHOULD REALLY BE CALLED "NO TEST LEFT BEHIND:

Los Angeles Times Book Review -- July 29, 2007

by Edward Humes


Pop quiz: You are the principal of an elementary school best known for
its poor kids and poorer grades when, unexpectedly, your students'
annual state assessment scores shoot through the roof, making you the
newest darling of the No Child Left Behind era. Do you:


a) launch a school-wide celebration featuring a stirring rendition of
"Ain't No Stoppin' Us Now"?


b) immediately start drilling students for next year's tests?


c) panic at the likelihood that the next round of scores will plummet,
turning you into a No Child Left Behind pariah?


If you're stumped, don't worry. I left out d) all of the above, which 
is
the real answer at the real school chosen by journalist Linda Perlstein
as the setting for her new book, "Tested: One American School Struggles
to Make the Grade." Her observations only confirm many of our worst
fears about the direction U.S. education has taken under a federal 
edict
that would have been more aptly named "No Test Left Behind."


The conceit of Perlstein's book is simple: to reveal up close the
effects on one elementary school, and, by extension, all public 
schools,
of the testing and accountability culture mandated by the 2001 No Child
Left Behind Act, President Bush's signature education initiative.


Statistical studies of this law abound, but an examination of its human
effects is long overdue. "Tested" succeeds in filling this void on
several levels, providing descriptions that, for many readers, will 
seem
a stunning indictment of No Child Left Behind and the state and local
policies it has engendered. The endless regimen of testing, drilling,
report filing, student bribing and student berating that Perlstein
describes could only have been conceived by politicians and ideologues
who rarely set foot in actual public schools (and would never subject
their own children to the Frankenstein classrooms their policies have
created).


Perlstein chose Tyler Heights Elementary School in suburban Annapolis,
Md., a campus of mostly poor and minority students surrounded by 
schools
with far more affluent and academically prepared student bodies. But
unlike troubled inner-city schools, suburban Tyler has considerable
financial resources at its disposal with which to close the 
"achievement
gap."


She begins with the announcement in May 2005 that, after years of poor
scoring, Tyler Heights has dramatically improved its performance on the
Maryland School Assessment, the annual testing mandated by No Child 
Left
Behind. These questions set up the drama of the following school year
depicted in "Tested": Was this a fluke, and Tyler a one-hit wonder? Or
did the scripted lessons and ruthless teaching-to-the-test payoff, a
worthy model for other schools? Or had the state lowered the bar so far
on its tests that even failing students appeared to shine? Finally,
there is the question that most haunts Tyler's principal and teachers
throughout the book: Can we do it again?


In charting the answers to those questions, Perlstein depicts a school
obsessed not so much with educating as with measuring education, and
with doling out a kind of pallid simulation of knowledge. Stories, for
example, are always analyzed for their structure, almost never for 
their
actual content. Creative writing is discouraged in favor of repetitive
paragraphs called "Brief Constructed Responses," or BCRs -- an acronym
Tyler kids hear endlessly.


"They're learning to do the formula," one teacher laments midway 
through
the school year, "and forgetting how to think."


The goal, Perlstein shows, is to limit teaching to ideas, skills and
knowledge that can fit inside the confines of a multiple choice test.
Teachers must follow a strictly paced and worded script that even
mandates what classroom posters can be hung. Students are similarly
regimented: Creativity and spontaneity only get in the way of data
collection. And so the author treats us to the awful moment when bright
kindergartners identifying long vowel sounds are told to stop -- 
because
rigid lesson plans say they are supposed to know only short vowel 
sounds.


Reading and math are paramount in Maryland's annual exams, so the
constant test prep for those two subjects makes science, social studies
and art vanish, leaving third-graders unable to identify the president
or say whether Annapolis is a city or state. The school lavishes
attention on troubled and unruly children, while the most gifted and
cooperative are ignored, one of No Child Left Behind's most destructive
unintended consequences. "Tested" depicts a system of constant rewards
for poorly behaved students whose scores might be raised, but nothing
for the kids already doing the work and passing or those who are so far
behind they are deemed unlikely to pass no matter what.


Perlstein shows the human effect of these priorities. Kids who once
devoured chapter books write BCRs about hating reading (and 
themselves).
Tempers flare, teachers accuse kids of not wanting to be smart. The
principal constantly doles out prizes -- candy, ice cream, field trips,
massage sessions -- to students just for showing up and doing what is
required. The result of this bribery is predictable: A third-grader
balking at a lesson about using the dictionary asks, "But what do we 
win?"


Perlstein contrasts Tyler with a nearby school that has a mostly white
and affluent student population. Tyler gets more financial resources,
but the other school has advantages Tyler lacks: parental involvement,
stability at home and kids who've been read to since infancy. At the
neighboring school, the annual tests cause far less consternation;
science and social studies are still taught; teachers are given more
leeway to construct lessons suited to individual classes (and to
decorate their classrooms as they see fit); and reading is perceived as
an enjoyable activity rather than the annoying precursor to a BCR.


Thus the No Child Left Behind law, billed as a boon to underperforming
poor and minority students, is revealed as yet another vehicle for
disparate treatment -- and a way of blaming public schools and teachers
for factors often outside their control.


Yet, despite it all, Tyler did pull off those amazing test scores, 
which
these days are the only measure of success that really counts.


All of this and more is illustrated by Perlstein's trenchant
observations in "Tested." Unfortunately, this otherwise commendable 
book
fails to connect the dots, to make a case either for or against the No
Child Left Behind approach. Even the fundamental question at the book's
beginning -- whether the great tests scores were a fluke, proof of
educator excellence or evidence of a broken testing regime -- is never
answered.


Perlstein, a former Washington Post education reporter and author of an
earlier book about middle school, "Not Much Just Chillin'," cannot 
bring
herself to pass judgment on much of what she observes. Instead, 
"Tested"
strikes a false journalistic balance between unequal positions.


A good example is her treatment of the No Child Left Behind law's
requirement that all U.S. students pass the annual tests by 2014, a 
goal
always regarded, even by supporters, as impossible to achieve. No Child
Left Behind, in effect, is designed to brand large numbers of public
schools as failures, opening them up to takeover, closure or
privatization. Yet Perlstein introduces this deadline without comment,
then praises President Bush's championing of it as an attempt to "force
real reform in every state" -- a statement belied by almost everything
she goes on to report from the classrooms at Tyler.


A second shortcoming of the book is Perlstein's inattention to
storytelling and character development, making "Tested" much slower and
drier reading than it ought to be. The students at Tyler mostly come
across as interchangeable stick figures, their teachers not much better
drawn. Even the main character, Tyler's principal, seems a cipher.


That said, "Tested" is on balance a worthwhile read for anyone
interested in the state of American public schools. Perlstein's 
portrait
is alternately heartbreaking and enraging as it offers up important
observations about the unintended and undesirable consequences of our
current testing obsession.


Edward Humes is the author of nine nonfiction books, including "Monkey
Girl: Evolution, Education, Religion and the Battle for America's Soul"
and "School of Dreams: Making the Grade at a Top American High School."



http://www.latimes.com/features/printedition/books/la-bk-humes29jul29115721,1,3264275.story 


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