Fear Based Education as the Testing Season Starts

[Free2teach1@aol.com]

Published on Sunday, March 16, 2008  by _the Santa  Cruz Sentinel 
(California)_ (http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/ci_8593594)   
Fear-Based Education as the Testing Season Starts
by Claudia Ayers

 
Next September, teachers like me will face hours of meetings considering  
mountains of data, derived from rounds of testing that our students — and we —  
must now endure. In the fall, we will no longer have the students whose scores 
 we will analyze, but what else are you going to do with the data, besides  
publish it in the local papers and wonder why the mathematically challenged  
gloat with the up-ticks, and feel shamed by the downturns? 
The confused and erratic sophomores we now attempt to teach have had scripted 
 education since first grade, when whole language reading programs and “fuzzy 
 math” were rejected and all too often replaced with worksheets that were 
guided  by scripts that teachers simply read. Additionally, since the 2001 No 
Child Left  Behind Act, these students have had endless practice rounds for 
standardized  tests. They know how to bubble in answers, but have limited ability 
to ask  questions, and seem so much less interested in understanding their 
world than  the students who preceded them. 
All school children and youth now carry many burdens: content standards,  
measurable objectives, rigor, accountability, school-wide pacing, subject  
breadth [mile wide, inch deep], proficiencies in bunches-of-facts, homework in  the 
primary grades, skills drills and practice tests, fewer high school  electives 
but more math support classes, heavy backpacks and exit exams. These  are the 
fruits of fear. 
Gone are the days of true engagement and authenticity, when emerging goals  
included such things as integrated- and systems-learning, concept development  
and global citizenship. Other things being left behind: field trips, democracy 
 in action, age-appropriate curriculum [everything is hurried], project 
choices,  recess, problem solving, team building, discussion, teachable moments,  
student-taught lessons, inquiry, discovery, inductive thought, art, music,  
teachers teaching to their strengths, freedom, or even … joy. 
No wonder kids are dropping out in record numbers. The kinds of things that  
lead to wisdom and ideals are steadily being eradicated, and if the people who 
 should know better don’t start standing up, valued public education will,  
simply, be irrevocably lost. Private school enrollments steadily increase. 
Kids were prompted to think in the “fuzzy math” days; the math skills were  
embedded in rich problems [not on drills and work sheets]. Whole language 
sought  to offer children the rewards of rich literature — public confusion about  
imaginary battles between phonics and sight-word advocates aside. There is a  
difference between authentic reform efforts and the so-called reforms that 
NCLB  has wrought [or is it rot?]. 
Should every high school student really be required to take three years of  
college preparatory high-school courses in order to graduate [as is required in 
 many local schools]? Or is this just another way to force kids with lower  
testing abilities to drop out so those who remain will produce higher Academic  
Performance Indices? 
When your school administrators and board members keep telling you their main 
 goal is “improving student achievement,” that is the first clue they have  
uncritically accepted fear-based education. The joy of learning and creativity 
 are not measurable. 
Granted, true graduation rates and satisfaction surveys could give some  
useful data. But basing “achievement” almost exclusively on standardized test  
scores is astonishingly nearsighted. 
Honestly, I have seen hundreds of standardized test questions, and educated  
people would be appalled by their quality. That the testing companies 
regularly  rack up errors in scoring is also a little known facet of the industry that 
is  taking hundreds of millions of dollars away from U.S. classrooms. 
The High School Exit Exam [HSEE] has just been given to all of California’s  
10th-graders [March 11 and 12]. Most of our students will “pass.” The ones 
who  do not pass are likely to have a different first language, have testing 
anxiety,  or have a learning disability. Sure, they have more chances to pass, 
but anxiety  cranks up with each “try.” Each year there will still be thousands 
of great kids  in California who will not receive a diploma and will not walk 
at graduation.  Sadly, these are the students who will be most devastated by 
the missed  opportunity. 
Then in April, all students from second through 11th grades take another  
enormous battery of California Standards Tests [CSTs]. The dollars and hours  
thrown at this enterprise is insane, especially given that 20 percent of the  
school year remains, yet students are evaluated on how they did for yearlong  
course standards. 
My college-age daughters were not subject to the HSEE and I opted them out of 
 the CSTs. They tell me that were they still in high school they would not 
take  the HSEE as a form of civil disobedience, even if it meant they could not 
walk  at graduation. They say they wouldn’t want to shake the hands of adults 
with  hardened hearts who did nothing to prevent this test from devastating 
the lives  of our most vulnerable students. 
While I love the idea that students would seek justice by protesting the  
HSEE, it is the appropriate role of adults to protect children from poor policy  
decisions by standing up and unconditionally loving children, not only their  
own, but all children. Tax dollars are precious; they should not be used to 
make  profits for test companies. Nor can we afford the countless hours and 
dollars  devoted to prepare for and administer these pathetic tests. 
Claudia Ayers is a teacher at Aptos High School. 
C

 
Judy  Rabin

Given the existence of an idealized vision of the community,  movements of 
protest are likely to occur within the political nation when the  discrepancy 
between the image and the reality comes to seem intolerably  wide.

--   J.H. Elliott



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