…it isn’t his real name…and some of the details are changed to protect his identity – his choice of football and basketball teams for instance. Everything else is spot on.
I need to write about him. He is a kid I mentor in DC. He is short and thin and will be in 12th grade next year. He likes football – particularly the Chiefs and the 76ers. I’m not holding it against him. He wants to be an engineer and he wants to own his own business. He is black and his dad has been in and out of prison. He can’t actually read very well. His writing isn’t so great either. But he is the kind of kid you would pick first if you wanted to pick someone you could absolutely trust. He is the kind of kid anyone would be proud to have as a son.
That is what was heartbreaking about last night.
When we got together he started talking about his upcoming mid-terms. He was appropriately nervous – there were a lot of them. A course in French, one in English literature, another in European history and another in geometry. I asked to see what he was studying for his first test in English. He gave me a single sheet of paper with what looked like answers on it – 50 of them.
I looked at him with a bit of suspicion and a lot of shock and asked him what this was.
“It is the answer sheet.”
“For????”
“For my test tomorrow.”
There wasn’t a hint of discomfort in his voice. This wasn’t someone worried about being caught with the answers. I asked him how he got them…
“Oh, the teacher gave them to us. She put them on the board and told us to memorize them.”
It was surreal. It was every kid’s dream. The answer to a mid-term test? No reason to fear being caught? I couldn’t really process it.
The person who runs the program was walking by and I asked him about this. I told him what had happened and he smiled and looked at me and at Cory and said, “Oh, yeah, ‘teaching to the test.’”
“What?” I asked.
“Oh yeah, teachers do it all the time – they want their kids testscores to look good so they look good, so their school looks good…it is all part of the No Child Left Behind thing about testing.”
I do not know when stuff like this started and find it hard to believe it was just as recently as No Child Left Behind. Nevertheless, it was crushing. Crushing. Teachers giving kids answers? That wasn’t ‘teaching to a test’, that was a horror.
It tells kids that they aren’t smart enough to learn the answers. It tells kids that getting a test score is more important than learning. It tells kids they aren’t good enough and the teachers aren’t even going to bother to try.
Cory was pretty happy though – “I’m going to get all A’s,” he said, “I’ve just got to keep studying the answers.”
Why aren’t we marching in the streets to protest this kind of moral betrayal of our kids? Unbelievable.
posted January 24, 2007 at 10:14 pm
The “no child left behind” is a horror for schools. I can’t begin to tell you what teachers and principals have said about it.
posted January 25, 2007 at 4:43 am
Sadly, this is nothing new and has been going on for years. By the time No Child Left Behind came around, many schools across the country were already teaching to their own state tests. NCLB just added another layer of testing to the mix. Personally, I lay the blame on whatever idiotic bureaucrats decided that standardized tests should not only be the benchmark of a child’s education, but that they should also be used to determine school funding. That second part is what is destroying our educational system, and is what is hurting kids. If a child has to pass a standardized test in order to advance to the next grade or graduate from high school, and the school’s funding is based on how the kids do on those tests, then the logical conclusion is that schools will rework their curriculum strictly to cover the material that will be on those tests. This way, the kids will be more likely to pass the tests, and the schools will get their money. In the end, kids end up being completely unprepared for college, so the universities have to pick up the slack by offering remedial courses to bring students up to speed on what they should already know, but which they didn’t learn, because it wasn’t on the test.It’s a massive injustice for kids, and hurts us as a country in the long run. We’re dumbing ourselves down just for the sake of securing school funding.
posted January 25, 2007 at 2:36 pm
David, Welcome to “progressive” education.
posted January 25, 2007 at 3:18 pm
Look into homeschooling or private schools. Now that you have an inkling (and it is just an inkling) of what is going on in the public schools, you might want to read some books about it: The Harsh Truth about Public Schools by Bruce N. Shortt Public Schools, Public Menace: How Public Schools Lie to Parents and Betray Our Children by Joel Turtel Public Education Against America: The Hidden Agenda by Marlin Maddoux None Dare Call It Education by John A. Stormer There are other books out there, too. John Taylor Gatto wrote a really good one called The Underground History of American Education, and Dumbing Us Down: the Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling. It is not a pretty picture. The No Child Left Behind mess, which was intended to fix the problem has only exacerbated it. I talked with some public school employees a month or so ago, and they feel like they are in a vortex. They don’t believe the public schools can be reformed because of the political and ideological stranglehold on it. Believe it or not, the Look Say method of teaching reading still holds sway. That’s why we have about a 75% literacy rate today instead of a 95% in past generations. I taught my kids to read using a simple phonics program. It is not rocket science, but still the schools cling to bankrupt teaching methodologies, often based on strange psychological theories. You’ll want to be fully informed, if only to make sure your children have options available to them.
posted January 25, 2007 at 9:30 pm
I tried marching against this, and was labeled a heathen. Welcome to the new age of enlightenment, folks! Come on in, the water’s great!
posted January 27, 2007 at 11:06 pm
This is not uncommon. As a Sophmore in High School, this kind of thing is rampant. Last year a teacher did this, then after we were done with the test he gave us the answer key to ‘grade ourselves’. The attitude of ‘do the minimum to get by’ abounds greatly in our school. It needs to stop, but what can you do?