Professor Mark NAISON reports on the conclusions of a social worker who is getting large numbers of referrals of students who are sick with test-anxiety and teachers who,now find they work in a hostile environment due to the stress of high-stakes testing.
Here is an excerpt:
“In the fall of 2012, I started to receive an inordinate number of student referrals from several different school districts. I was being referred a large number of honors students—mostly 8th graders.The kids were self-mutilating—cutting themselves with sharp objects and burning themselves with cigarettes. My phone never stopped ringing.
What was prompting this increase in self-mutilating behavior? Why now?
The answer I received from every single teenager was the same. “I can’t handle the pressure. It’s too much work.”
I also started to receive more calls referring elementary school students who were refusing to go to school. They said they felt “stupid” and school was “too hard.” They were throwing tantrums, begging to stay home, and upset even to the point of vomiting.
I was also hearing from parents about kids bringing home homework that the parents didn’t understand and they couldn’t help their children to complete. I was alarmed to hear that in some cases there were no textbooks for the parents to peruse and they had no idea what their children were learning.
My teachers were reporting a startling level of anxiety and depression. For the first time, I heard the term “Common Core” and I became awakened to a new set of standards that all schools were to adhere to—standards that we now say “set the bar so high, anyone can walk right under them.”
Everyone was talking about “The Tests.” As the school year progressed and “The Tests” loomed, my patients began to report increased self-mutilating behaviors, insomnia, panic attacks, loss of appetite, depressed mood, and in one case, suicidal thoughts that resulted in a 2-week hospital stay for an adolescent.
I do not know of any formal studies that connect these symptoms directly to the Common Core, but I do not think we need to sacrifice an entire generation of children just so we can find a correlation.
The Common Core and high stakes testing create a hostile working environment for teachers, thus becoming a hostile learning environment for students. The level of anxiety I am seeing in teachers can only trickle down to the students. Everyone I see is describing a palpable level of tension in the schools.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Can I call you? KC
Sent from my iPhone
>
This type of rises in anxiety and depression as well as aggressive behaviors are exactly what we are seeing in the psychiatric hosptial where I teach in Chicago. In addition to the pressures from high-stakes testing, I would add to the list the number of students being referrred from strict, no-excuses charter schools where students are experiencing extreme anxiety, depression, hopelessness, and even suicide attempts due the unwavering, inappropriate, and completely unnecessary “high expectiations” these schools rigidly enforce. These schools, often staffed with large numbers of undertrained and inexperienced staff, coupled with the pervasive “no excuses” ideology mean they are forcing students with trauma, anxiety, and depression to “conform” no matter what, even when kids are displaying clear signs of mental health problems as a result. Just to be clear, in many cases it appears these schools are causing mental health problems in students that were happy, healthy children before attending these schools.
Katie Osgood: after five years on ed blogs, I have come to the conclusion that much of “education reform” is literally—not figuratively—child abuse.
Thank you for all you do.
🙂
This definitely needs more rapid research as this is technically “Child Abuse” as that is defined by psychological, physical and sexual. Looks like psychological. Didn’t these people even consider this as a possible reaction? And if not, what are they doing and why should we trust them with a dull pencil?
The sadness and pain I feel in reading this is beyond words.
President Obama, Arne Duncan, John King, and every other “reformer” involved in this abuse….how do you justify, let alone sleep, knowing your policies are increasing depression, anxiety, aggression and hopelessness in so many? What has happened to your compassion, your understanding, your humanity? How many tragedies do educators, social workers, doctors have to witness before you wake up? I truly weep.
“They said they felt “stupid”. . . ”
Prime example of subjectivization wherein the person internalizes what the authorities have proclaimed (through standardized test scores, the “educational standards” (sick), and the grading of the students) about the individual. It is very difficult for young people, those least inexperienced in the ways of the world, to fight against the false labels that the educational authorities (teachers, schools, dept of eds, etc. . .) and to deny that labeling (grading, whether through letter grades or categories such as proficient, basic, below basic and advanced or whatever else they might be called).
This nefarious educational malpractice is so embedded in our schools, culture and individual’s mind that to question it is to question sanity itself. Time to question that sanity, then.
Up until there is a national educator and parental uprising against these insanely pernicious malpractices much harm will continue to be brought down upon the most innocent’s heads, the children.
JUST SAY NO! JSN!!! Refuse to participate.
Parents opt your children out and if there are no opt out provision withdraw your students from the school to homeschool them and then re-enroll them after the testing window is closed.
Teachers refuse to give the tests, call in sick on those days and if you feel that you have to for fear of your job then do everything that you can to make sure that the students know just how much bullshit standardized testing is and that they have the right to fill out the answer sheet any way they choose. Tell them to fill it in, then erase, then fill in again, erase again, fill in again. Tell your students that they are the pawns being used in a high stakes game and that they really can help prevent that game from being played.
This is literally a fight for health and sanity of the most vulnerable in society, the kids.
“Teachers refuse to give the tests, call in sick on those days and if you feel that you have to for fear of your job then do everything that you can to make sure that the students know just how much bullshit standardized testing is and that they have the right to fill out the answer sheet any way they choose. Tell them to fill it in, then erase, then fill in again, erase again, fill in again. Tell your students that they are the pawns being used in a high stakes game and that they really can help prevent that game from being played.”
In my school, calling in sick just puts the burden on those colleagues who are not teaching in tested areas–they are often on-call to replace those who are monitoring the tests if the originally-scheduled test facilitators are out. The other tacks can (and most likely will) get you fired, and when your family relies on you, that is a tough pill to swallow, especially in this economic and political climate.
Instead, I think the onus should be on the parent to protest–parents cannot be fired from their jobs for refusing to subject their children to these tests. The hard part is getting that message out there without committing an act of insubordination. Most courts of law I know will not give you the time of day if you are fired for being insubordinate.
“. . . without committing an act of insubordination.”
I’ve often wondered about that term “insubordination”. I’ve always associated it with the military. When did I sign the dotted line and give away my rights, a la a military recruit.
That word is why there is no “tenure” for public education teachers. I know I’ve got that word on many a letter in my file. When they pull out the “I” word you know you’re in trouble because there’s not a damn thing you can do about as it becomes a “he said, she said” moment.
Sadly, what you say is true. Apparently, it’s a “sacrilege” to go against the man in public. The only time we’re counseled to do so is if someone is in immediate harm’s way, as in, seconds will count in order to prevent death or injury. All other actions must go through the proper channels to cover our butts, as it were.
I have been using my training in linguistics to teach some of the second graders from another teacher’s class to read after school. I teach phonics and use decodable books in my room. I am, of course, in trouble for not using the district’s approved rigorous (I think rigor mortis) program that have sunk our reading scores and demoralized our students for years. My greatest joy is hearing these children when they have learned to read and understand words because they know the phonemes that make the words, they recognize the words they know when they see them on paper. Two of them told me with a smile “I’m not stupid.” They have begun to think of themselves as a test score. I may yet win the argument with my administration, but I fear I will have to use our next internal test scores to show my class progress. I would definitely quit if I could afford to. I will finish my M.A. in special education and perhaps help parents by starting my own clinic for educational needs. I can’t fight much longer, and I will not be complicit with this abuse.
“linguistics, phonics, phonemes”
Wash your mouth out with soap!!
I’d better not hear any talk of grammar or memorization, either!!
Awesome. Kids have internal mechanisms for intuiting syntactic and semantic structures from their linguistic environments, but there are no such dedicated mechanisms for decoding sound-grapheme correspondences. These have to be taught. A little training in linguistics would have disabused people of the silly notion that mastery of phonics will happen, for most people, without explicit instruction. An entire generation of English teacher was misled about this matter by education pundits who were woefully misinformed. We are still recovering from that previous, misbegotten education “reform.”
And with regard to “teaching grammar,” Dwayne, it all depends on what you mean by that. If you systematically introduce increasingly sophisticated syntactic forms into a student’s linguistic environment (what he or she hears and reads, what he or she memorizes for recitation, etc), then that is “teaching grammar.” One doesn’t have to be told that a particular construction is a nominative absolute or a correlative conjunction or an infinitival small clause in order to be “taught” to understand and use the construction. Ideally, teachers would know what these things are, and diagnostics would be used to determine a student’s level of syntactic fluency (what constructions he or she can understand, can use, typically does use, etc). But teaching these explicitly is crazy. That’s not how people acquire their working “grammars.”
And yes, I did mean “memorizes for recitation.” This old nineteenth-century technique has a very sound contemporary justification. When kids memorize a passage, from a poem or play, for example, that contains a syntactic construction that they have not incorporated into their internal grammars, that construction becomes incorporated. It becomes available for the child’s use. And, kids are rightly proud of their accomplishment when they do such memorization. At 93, my grandmother would proudly recite the opening of Longfellow’s “Hiawatha,” which she learned in 3rd grade. Knee-jerk reactions against “rote memorization” are silly. What matters are the underlying principles of how language acquisition works and how the natural process of acquisition can be given a nudge.
Of course, the authors of the CCSS in ELA understood NONE of this. Freaking amateurs.
There is also nothing like memorization for developing in kids a feel for the sounds of language–for elements like rhythm and phrasal pacing and techniques of sound like assonance, consonance, alliteration, and the many, many variants of these (see Kenneth Burke’s The Philosophy of Literary Form for a superb discussion of how woefully inadequate our language for discussion techniques of sound in poetry is).
Poetry is the oldest literary art. It is, in its essence, a performance art–it is meant to be SPOKEN and HEARD. A LOT of our early instruction in English should resemble instruction in music. I have had people with PhDs in English working for me how could not compose a metrical line because they had no feeling, at all, for the sounds of language. They were tone deaf. Well, our instruction in English is often tone deaf.
The est training in the world for a future writer is jump-rope rhymes. I am QUITE SERIOUS about that.
I meant “best” training, not “est” training, of course! 🙂
I used to love listening to the kids’ rap sessions in the hall outside my classroom. I can still close my eyes and imagine myself standing in the doorway feeling the beat. Someone would drum a rhythm on a locker and they would take off, seamlessly sliding from one POET to the next. I felt very honored when one of my former students stopped in a few times to work on his raps. Old white ladies are not exactly the “go to” people for rap composition.
Teaching kids a bunch of definitions of literary terms with corresponding examples is a TERRIBLE way to approach this stuff. The learning has to be active. It has to be in a meaningful context and occur because a class is interested in prying open something inherently interesting to see how it works.
2old2tch, I recently went to a poetry slam–a long string of kids performing their work. I go to these every chance I get. Blew me away. Always does. Poetry is very much alive, still, in our culture–in places like that coffeehouse, in the work of those kids.
Robert, just wanted to say that I always enjoy reading your comments. Just realized you are also in Tampa.
Awesome, Cynewulf. Come out to our Tampa Bay Veg Fest on Oct 19th. Check it out at tampabayvegfest.org. I will be running the world music show from the music stage all day. Would be great to meet you.
Robert,
What I mean by “teaching grammar” is more like using grammatical terms to interrelate the various structures of Spanish and English. I use grammar as a bridge and do not teach grammar in the sense of learning the grammar for grammar’s sake (although I’m not against that as an academic exercise).
Of course, Duane! : )
Correction, programs, not program, I have fat finger typist syndrome.
Ask your local psychologists, social workers, and psychiatrists how many teachers and administrators they are seeing due to the abuse, stress, and anxiety they are under. Do a study to see how many teachers and administrators are taking anti anxiety and depression medications. It would astound the general public!
This has been an issue in Japan for years as their children are under so much pressure. “School refusal syndrome” is a real thing there, as is a high rate of teen suicide. The bright spot is that there are a lot of good things that happen there to offset the pressure, none of which exists here in the US. Let’s make the madness stop!
” for the first time, I heard the term Common Core”
That’s pretty much the story nationwide. People haven’t even heard of them, much less debated them.
These amateurish “standards” were foisted on the country with NO PUBLIC DEBATE and NO PUBLIC, PROFESSIONAL VETTING. Same with the tests based on them.
That’s just crazy. No one died and made David Coleman and Susan Pimentel king and queen, giving them power to make unilateral decisions about what are to be the measured outcomes in ELA in every school system in the nation. No public decision-making process gave them the power to overrule every teacher, curriculum coordinator, and curriculum developer in the country.
A small group of self-appointed politicians and plutocrats made these decisions for everyone else. That’s not how things work in a democracy. But evidently, we are no longer a democracy.
Yes, the politicians were elected, but they appointed themselves to this role as decision makers regarding what were to be our nation’s standards and assessments.
It’s time to take back our schools and to tell these fascists that they have stepped WAY over their bounds.
Common Core is completely developmentally inappropriate for the early childhood grades! It’s not any better for the older grades either, apparently. The testing methods have got to go.
As the population of ELLs rise in our country, how blatantly inappropriate to present high stakes test before them. With the rise of students with autism, how inhumane to force them to take the test when anxiety is part of their disability, Students in special education have a disability in reading, writing, and/or math for a reason as they are 2, 3, 4 years behind their peers. No accommodation is enough on a test. Where is the logic in testing all of these students let alone the rest of the population who are not test takers.
Why is teacher evaluation being conducted before the test results if its results are based on a percentage of the evaluation? Does that mean if students do poorly on the test the year before that the teacher’s evaluation will be in the red the next school year? What if a teacher receives a poor evaluation, but her students do well on the test? When do test scores work to anyone’s advantage or make any sense. This new evaluation was made to fire teachers to the whim of principals. It was developed to scare the hell out of teachers and undermine their craft.
Our school had the highest suspension rate in the district. We are managing behavior and instruction is haphazard. Who has time to develop skills on the evaluation? There is no comparison to an effective teacher in a high SES school as compared to teachers who are busting their chops to give a decent lesson in a low SES school. If the roles were reversed, we would have…how many effective teachers left???
I laugh at the fact that our district decided to hire lots of folks from the “outside” this year. As if they came from a magical place called “the highly effective teacher factory.” Our district is no different from your alls’ district, since we were all brainwashed from the same regime.
The day will come when the pushers of these one-size-fits-all standards and tests will be universally recognized for what they are–child abusers not unlike the “Poor Sisters of Nazareth” who infamously abused orphans in Britain for over a hundred years.
It seems that there is always a struggle between those who embrace a humane approach to teaching and those who embrace an authoritarian one. Here’s why the authoritarians are WRONG:
What we are teaching, always, is either the love or the hatred of learning. This is ALWAYS the main lesson of the lesson, whatever the lesson is.
What teachers can MOST BE for their students are models of people who love learning. Kids need to look at their teachers and say, “I want some of that. I want what he or she has”:that joy that comes from knowing, from understanding, from discovering, from uncovering, from plumbing the mysteries, from overlooking the new world, from poking up against the limits of what is known. Here’s how Robert Louis Stevenson put that: “The world is so full of a number of things,/I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.”
You want rigor? You get that from the dedication to learning that students show when they are pushed down the rabbit hole, through the looking glass, into marvelous new worlds of thought and experience that they had never even imagined existed. You don’t get that through drill on standard CCSS.ELA.RI.7.2b in preparation for the test.
Every real teacher knows that. And real teachers need to start telling the deformers, in no uncertain terms, to get their insane, counterproductive approaches the hell out of their classrooms. Teachers have serious work to do. They don’t need amateurs getting in the way. The job is demanding enough as it is.
Oddly enough, the authoritarian approach sometimes actually works. It occasionally produces someone like Jean-Paul Sartre or Albert Einstein who rebels against the garbage being taught and escapes into a world of his or her own intellectual experience cobbled together as an alternative to the horror of his or her schooling. These are the ones who are laughing behind the back of the Ichabod Crane at the front of the class, scribbling in their journals when they are spozed to be completing the worksheet.
I want to share this video with every middle schooler bf they check out, to open their minds to the possibilities.
Thanks Robert. As always you keep us thinking…
Our politicians are a bunch of criminal red queens, incredibly out of touch, sycophantic toadies of our plutocrats, and they are almost to a person knee-jerk authoritarians.
They LOVE being tough. Giving speeches about getting tough. “We need tough laws. We need tough new tests,” they say. “It’s time we stopped coddling people.”
And so we find that the United States, the land of the free, imprisons more people than another other country on the planet–that we imprison a greater percentage of our population than does the most authoritarian regime run by most despotic military junta or warlord on the Earth.
And we get the deform movement. ALL TEST PREP ALL THE TIME. “We need to get tough with these kids, these teachers. Off with their heads!!! Test them till they bleed! Tests for tots!” And. they think, “If we do that, if we are just tough enough, maybe these lazy good for nothings will turn out to be awesome just like me. Well, not like me, of course. I’m a master of the universe. I am among the select group of masters of the universe. But if we are tough enough, they will make obedient do-bees for the 21st century workforce. Maybe they will do as I say. After all, I don’t give a #@&@#&$*(@$#*@ what they think or feel. But I care a lot that they follow my orders.”
Hi George,
This is what we were told grades are equivalent to:
Advanced – 85% – 100%
Proficient – 84% – 69%
Basic – 68% – 50%
Below Basic – 49% – down
Not Taught
I was asked to ask all of you across the country what you think of this grading system in a school district in L.A. County.
Also,when you have not a few but many starting to injure themselves in one way or another when this crazy testing starts we have to ask “What is going on that is wrong?” This should be the first natural question if it is your program and you care.
I spent the day yesterday, Friday, with a friend I have known since kindergarten and we talked about how things happened and how early we could identify what effected us and some common things were exposure to great music, parents helping us to try out different things and realizing what hit home. Music in kindergarten, lots of play, painting with your hands and all kinds of fun things. Why not? Aren’t you supposed to have fun as a little kid to learn? We were lucky, we know it, they deserve a break also.
Any grading system is inherently flawed and definitely causes harm to many children. That breakdown is no better than any other grading scheme-which means garbage in-garbage out.
At least it doesn’t use the “F” word!
The categories could be:
Hot Damn – 85% – 100%
Whoop De Do – 84% – 69%
So So – 68% – 50%
Inferior – 49% – down
Not Tested
and it wouldn’t make any difference as to the unethicalness of “labeling” students.
Poem: We learned it all in kindergarten by Robert Fulghum. Google it. It’s priceless.