New York City parent activist Natalie Green Giles saw an uncanny resemblance between the Hunger Games and the city’s education policies.
She writes:
The Hunger Games in the NYC Public Schools
June 2013
By Natalie Green Giles
We have just finished the annual rite of our Hunger Games here in our New York City public schools. Our games go on for six days, not counting the weeks (in some cases months) of prep to get ready for them. The reaping, as always, selected all of our third through eighth grade public school students, from our 32 districts, some as young as seven years old. We parents hope it doesn’t get younger, but the ominous signs are starting to point that way.
Families know the drill at this point, but it has been getting worse. The Capitol–City Hall and the DOE in coercion with the Albany education leaders and lawmakers–must have felt rumbles of rebellion and decided that it wasn’t enough to just use our children as pawns in the political game of legacy-making and privatization: this year they went and up’ed the challenge and made the games harder, knowing that the tributes and their coaches (teachers) wouldn’t have enough time or the right tools to train, and that some kids would have a much harder time surviving in this arena. They, of course, had to make sure that the whole world could see the Capitol’s power, authority, and ability to control and humiliate, so they still made sure they could fire the teachers based on the scores of the tributes (even though by now we all know the metrics are based on a terribly flawed methodology). They try to make these scores public so that we can cheer for the top performers and deride the low scorers. The Capitol also makes sure we know that they will come and shut down a schools if not enough of its kids survive the arena with a passing score. It’s a way of keeping us standardized and conformist. It’s an easy way for them to keep track of us, just giving everyone a number. We wouldn’t want society to start nurturing creative and independent thinkers who might cause a rebellion in the future.
Once again, the careers from District 2 showed off their lifelong training; we heard recently how the majority of rising kindergartners getting the gifted and talented seats came from that esteemed district. We already knew that the fourth graders and seventh graders from the wealthier district often had a lot of private coaching, but many families now spoke of hiring tutors and sending their four-year-olds to test prep programs, just to be sure their kids were armed as best as they could be. You can’t blame them. The competition is fierce in the arena, and we know not everyone can win. There are just so many seats available in the good schools, especially in the good middle and high schools.
Then there are the gamesmakers. They go by the name of Pearson. Beware of them. They are being paid tens of millions of dollars alone this year from the testing contracts they have signed with the Capitol, and they are ready to put in whatever obstacles are necessary if it looks like the children are getting too comfortable. Starting fires, creating fierce mutant animals, or turning down the temperature to freezing in the arena? That’s nothing. Now they have ramped up what was a 180-minute test to 270 minutes—three straight days of 90 concentrated minutes (bathroom breaks are discouraged), reading passage after passage after passage, sometimes throwing in crazy stories about pineapples and hares. It could drive a tribute to the point of madness. Or worse—it could make them hate reading and writing with all those boring passages that don’t reflect life in their own district and with everything out of context. And to really trip us up, they make mistakes in their scoring. They sometimes tell kids who performed well that they didn’t make the cut. Who knows what last minute perils those gamesmakers at Pearson will throw in for the upcoming tests? Who knows what dangers await our children? Not even the Capitol, it seems.
And yes, all of Panem watches and reads about the games, but we are not actually allowed to ever see the tests or know what the correct answers are (or know what our children got wrong). But the games nonetheless are a political spectator sport, and media companies benefit mightily, as newspapers and other media outlets cover the drama of the arena and everything leading up to it. And when the final scores come out? That’s the real feeding frenzy. But no one media company benefits as much as Rupert Murdoch’s. He has a subsidiary called Wireless Generation. Check them out.
We parents want to rebel but we don’t know how. We suffer every year along with our chosen children, but go along with it because we are forced into believing that the Capitol knows what’s best—more so than even parents and educators. So we acquiesce and let our children go without real learning for weeks and months while they get prepped for battle. We let our children endure the days of testing, with all the stress and pressure and anxiety it causes. And then we watch as our children lose even more instructional time after it’s all over, because their teachers are then taken away to grade the tests for days at a time. (Oh—and by the way– the schools now have to pay the bill for the coverage while their teachers are away.) A few families were brave enough to “opt out” of testing this year—keeping their kids out of the arena or telling them not to fight when they got there (i.e., leave the test blank)—but we’ve heard that there will be severe consequences for those kids and their schools. But maybe it’s time for us to be brave. Maybe it’s time to fight against what we know is just plain wrong. Before it gets even worse. Before the games are scheduled for more than six days a year.
Think about it–when the stakes are so high and so misguided that our children’s educational reality begins to mirror a dystopian fantasy, what do we really have to lose?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This is excellent and right on target. The sort and select policies driven by testing are horrifying. I put Catching Fire on my reading list this summer–now it goes to the top. This post is a gem and should appear in many places. Thank you Natalie and thank you Diane! Carol
Loved it and chillingly on target.
Chilling is right. Wow.
Fabulous.
It’s the perfect metaphor. In March the Philadelphia Inquirer published my letter describing a Philadelphia School Reform Commission meeting dealing with school closings.
“In The Hunger Games, children from a dozen poor regions of a fictional, postapocalyptic nation participate in a televised competition for survival in an arena controlled by a totalitarian government whose leaders change the rules as they go. As I sat at the March 7 School Reform Commission meeting on school closings, I couldn’t help noticing the parallels as representatives from 29 Philadelphia schools in predominately poor neighborhoods pleaded for the survival of their schools in a contest with arbitrary rules. Life does imitate art.”
The metaphor continues to apply in Philly. Now parent groups are raising money to supplement their neighborhood school budgets which means some “districts” will be able to better prepare their “tributes” for the ensuing games. Life continues to imitate art.
http://www.philly.com/philly/home/20130705_Changing_Skyline__Bolstering_school_for_the_neighborhood.html
http://www.philly.com/philly/education/20130711_Improving_schools_for__their_own__future_kids.html
It was frighteningly easy to make connections between Hunger Games and the standardized testing plaguing our nation.
Take it to the next (prior?) level, Sarah.
Educational standards, standardized testing and the “grading” of students are so fraught with logical mistakes and errors that the concepts are rendered completely invalid. See Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at:
http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700 .
(For all you regular readers, I had to get this in as my Quixotic Quest was slowing down. You may resume your regularly scheduled reading now.)
Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine. (updated 6/24/13 per Wilson email)
1. A quality cannot be quantified. Quantity is a sub-category of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category by only a part (sub-category) of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as one dimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). The teaching and learning process falls in the logical realm of aesthetics/qualities of human interactions. In attempting to quantify educational standards and standardized testing we are lacking much information about said interactions.
2. A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction. And this error is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).
3. Wilson identifies four “frames of reference” each with distinct assumptions (epistemological basis) about the assessment process from which the “assessor” views the interactions of the teaching and learning process: the Judge (think college professor who “knows” the students capabilities and grades them accordingly), the General Frame-think standardized testing that claims to have a “scientific” basis, the Specific Frame-think of learning by objective like computer based learning, getting a correct answer before moving on to the next screen, and the Responsive Frame-think of an apprenticeship in a trade or a medical residency program where the learner interacts with the “teacher” with constant feedback. Each category has its own sources of error and more error in the process is caused when the assessor confuses and conflates the categories.
4. Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.”
In other word all the errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.
5. The test makers/psychometricians, through all sorts of mathematical machinations attempt to “prove” that these tests (based on standards) are valid-errorless or supposedly at least with minimal error [they aren’t]. Wilson turns the concept of validity on its head and focuses on just how invalid the machinations and the test and results are. He is an advocate for the test taker not the test maker. In doing so he identifies thirteen sources of “error”, any one of which renders the test making/giving/disseminating of results invalid. As a basic logical premise is that once something is shown to be invalid it is just that, invalid, and no amount of “fudging” by the psychometricians/test makers can alleviate that invalidity.
6. Having shown the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, of the whole process Wilson concludes, rightly so, that any result/information gleaned from the process is “vain and illusory”. In other words start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity (except by sheer chance every once in a while, like a blind and anosmic squirrel who finds the occasional acorn, a result may be “true”) or to put in more mundane terms shit in-crap out.
7. And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”
In other words it measures “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?
My answer is NO!!!!!
One final note with Wilson channeling Foucault and his concept of subjectivization:
“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.