Recently I was listening to a classical music station and heard a beautiful piece of music. The announcer said when it ended that Mozart composed it at the age of 9. I couldn’t help thinking, “but what were his test scores?” When I watched the chorus of the Celia Cruz High School sing the National Anthem at Mayor de Blasio’s inauguration, I had the same thought. It is becoming a habit. When I see a child or youth do something joyfully, I can’t help but think that question, knowing that the scores reflect the ability to answer test questions and don’t address the inner core of the human being.
Yet our current obsession with data has led us to crush the spirits of our children, to make sure that budding Mozarts and Einsteins and those who dream instead of conforming are pressed into the same narrow mold.
Here is a good article that appeared in the Albany Times-Union that raises these issues. I hope Governor Cuomo reads it.
Kristen Cristman writes:
“How many can relate? My experience is just one facet of the truth that conveys this message: There is something very cruel and demeaning about treating the child’s brain like an inanimate machine that must ingest what it’s given and spit out what it’s told. The brain has been colonized; it’s become property of the school, of the state.
“It is horrible for many to wake up exhausted, leave bed, home, pets, and hobbies, travel on an unfriendly bus, and proceed to sit for six hours in an overheated, stuffy building within a cold, confusing, and crowded culture where you have to think certain thoughts at certain times, speak when told to, and remain quiet otherwise. On top of that, when you get home, it’s hours of homework broken only by dinnertime until late at night. When you finally crawl into bed, all you have to look forward to is another numbing day. My parents did not push this behavior; it was simple obedience to school instructions.
“It’s also what you’re no longer able to do that is so depressing. For some, it is balance in life itself that is desecrated and destroyed when high levels of homework are given, formerly in fifth grade, but nowadays earlier. My sister used to play the role of teacher, Miss Mouse, and she’d stand at a chalkboard in the basement and teach me — even give me little homework sheets if I asked. I would love it. The things we could do on our own. But no more time for that come fifth grade. Eager days of playing at liberty outside, climbing trees, constructing snow tunnels, lingering with cheerful breezes, sunshine, and beckoning paths in the woods are over. Zestful days of happily reading books of one’s own choosing, energetically drawing, writing animal reports, identifying rocks and feathers, pursuing the passion of learning on one’s own, and concocting spooky skits in the basement are over.
“How could anyone consider such a life for children, a life without freedom and passion, to be an indicator of a society that is highly developed and free?”
I have a school full of students who love school and are filled with the joy of learning. I read your blog daily and share it frequently. I saw my students in your first paragraph in this blog.
If you have time to visit us when you are in Indianapolis I would love to have you come to our school. We share a relationship with Butler University (where you will be speaking) with student teachers and a University class taught at our school.
We have a 54% free/reduced lunch status, 24% Special Education, 14% ELL, and a very diverse population. We have a Blue Ribbon Award, 2 National Magnet School of Excellence Awards, and have been an “A” school for the past three years.
Thanks for considering this if you have time in your schedule to visit!
Margaret E. Higgs Principal IPS Rousseau McClellan School 91 Montessori Magnet School 317-226-4291 317-506-2765
Margaret: I am a Montessori teacher from a private, non-profit school in Kenosha, Wisconsin. We do not do any type of standardized testing or follow Common Core. My students love every day of school because they are free to be themselves, to create, and to discover without fear. My concern is that many Montessori teachers in the public schools are spending weeks on test prep and standardized tests. Their jobs depend on good scores. There are also so many mandates that they must follow that Montessori instruction and practices are greatly compromised. I am also a Montessori instructor so this concerns me deeply, especially since I know what is going on with these “reforms” that public Montessori school teachers must follow. What do you do at your school to keep Montessori intact and protect the students and teachers from the effects of high-stakes testing? What advice would you give to new Montessori teachers entering the public schools?
They want to socialize the vast majority of children to be ready for a life of numbness, compliance and drudgery. That’s reform in a nutshell.
While I sympathize with the author, please change the title of the post. I handle cases concerning children who are beaten, burned, raped, starved, imprisoned in sheds, bound… using the term “child abuse” to refer to inept pedagogy is simply wrong.
Do you consider emotional degradation to be abuse? Psychologically (and even physically) speaking, it has much the same effect as physical abuse.
Lex,
Verbal, psychological and other non physical types of abuse are abuse.
I, too work with many victims of abuse. Those who are psychologically abused do have many of the same symptoms and issues as those physically abused.
Let’s just agree that all child abuse is wrong and hurtful to the individual and the society.
No, it doesn’t. Use the same term when the number of child deaths from excessive homework equals the number of deaths from beatings. If you work with abuse victims, you know there is a huge difference between abuse and bad policy. It’s like calling Republicans “Nazis” or comparing Occupy to Kristallnacht.
While I’m sure there probably aren’t many deaths as a direct result of “too much homework”, I’d be willing to wager that there are a number of suicides related to the stress and loss of self-esteem associated with the constant feeling of failure inherent in education “reform”. Also, research shows that students who experience failure at school are more likely to become violent and anti-social as well as to have a criminal record, so there’s probably a fair number of homicides indirectly associated with “reform” too.
Bottom line is that intentionally making someone, especially a child, feel like a failure is a form of abuse widely recognized by medical, mental health and educational professionals. We’re not terribly well wired to distinguish different kinds of threats, whether physical or psychological, real or perceived. The body reacts the same to all of them. Chronic emotional abuse causes the same physical stress reactions and implications as chronic physical abuse.
Not to minimize the sufferings of children living with all kinds of abuse, but relegating an entire generation (or multiple generations) of children to the stifling lot of an ever increasingly stressful and competitive environment that lacks purposefulness or attention to individual gifts is, in my opinion, child abuse on a national scale.
True..You have so eloquently defined education (or lack of it) in 2014…”Balance in Life”
“It’s also what you’re no longer able to do that is so depressing. For some, it is balance in life itself that is desecrated and destroyed when high levels of homework are given, formerly in fifth grade, but nowadays earlier
I agree completely, Diane. And I wish it was JUST the testing!
Along with this horrific “Testing To Beat The Band”—for no apparent purpose except to produce “proof” that our schools, teachers and students are “failing” and should be replaced by private entities, many of whom hide their greed and their owner’s avarice by claiming “non profit” status, although their management and/or owners will make $400,000 and upwards for running a “school”—I’m fed up with the mindset indoctrinating our children with the Big Lie that only “STEM” courses “really count” and that virtually everything else is a waste of time and money.
I tell these folks that I’m extremely glad that John Lennon wasn’t forced into a STEM mentality and that he rejected any attempts to force him into being a future accountant, salesman, lab technician or some other serious, “respectable and stable” profession. I’m glad he followed his passion and never gave up on his music.
Had he done so, the world would be a much poorer place indeed—in every sense of that word. The same is true for Mozart, DaVinci, Michaelangelo, Tolstoy, Dylan, and so many others. I’m glad they all rejected the economic safety and security—which is actually an illusion for anyone, in any profession—and cultivated the gifts they were born with instead.
It’s easy to make disparaging comments about “theatre, music and art majors” or courses in “creative writing or poetry”. I know a handful of people who actually believe that if a person goes to college and doesn’t major in business administration and/or a “STEM” area, “they might as well have just stayed with a high school diploma.”
I’m always tempted to say to people something like, “Well hey, next time you and your friends want to watch a really good film, or read a great novel, or listen to some beautiful music, imagine what your choices would be if every person did as you advised?
Did you ever really swoon over song written by a CPA or an electrical engineer?
Neither did they.
Agree!
From Albert Einstein, a man whose photograph should be placed next to the word mensch in the dictionary.
“If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music. I get most joy in life out of my violin.”
Albert Einstein on happiness:
“A table, a chair, a bowl of fruit and a violin; what else does a man need to be happy?”
This is what it means to be educated.
oh, yes
Reading this makes my “heart bleed” for today’s children. I remember a childhood of play after school. I lived near a pond and we made forts with sticks, found frogs and tadpoles, picked flowers making bouquets, made mud pies. Sometimes friends came over and we baked or did an art project or created a theatrical skit etc… I used to do homework while dinner was being made (upper grades mind you). Kids need free time and this time is all about learning. Is this not tragic and ironic. How has it come to a point where the likes of Bill Gates dictates the end of childhood for 99 percent of children in this nation? How???And in the guise of “learning”???
My sons lost the chance to play outside by about third grade. And they didn’t get a lot of chances in first or second grade. The level of homework is that high. Even though our district has a policy of 10 minutes of homework per grade per night, no one really seems to follow that, or if they do, they calculate the amount of homework a very bright child can get done in that time and forget kids like my son with a learning disability, for whom the homework takes three or four times a long. My son was routinely in tears in first grade because of the homework. We began timing how long it took, drawing a line at a certain time (usually two or three times how long he was supposed to have) and then writing a note to the teacher that this much took this amount of time and that was all he was allowed to do. It did help.
This is ideal. I regularly give my students 2-3 nights to do longer homework assignments, and I remind them to never spend more than 20 min per night on my class MAXIMUM. I teach language arts, and mostly the homework is just to read something that they enjoy. Unfortunately it is schoolwide policy that I give homework every night and grade at least one homework assignment per night. Do I occasionally forget to hand out the assignment…. you betcha 😉
My guess is this madness will ebb after Obama’s tenure. He seems committed to it despite any lack of evidence. I found it interesting that Mayor DeBlasio wanted (according to news accounts) Joshua Starr to be deputy Chancellor for 3 years and then become the Chancellor which coincides with the end of Obama’s term.
I am amazed when anyone pulls out any public official’s name and claims they are the one that holds all the blame for all bad education reform. The reason all of this is going on is because of the non-elected influences, you know – Bill, Michelle, Jeb. There are so many more not mentioned but all of these people use their money to force their phony policies on all of us and yes they use politicians to impose their will, but it its the people with money that we have to fight, they are the ones behind this.
At the very least the one thing parents can do is refuse the homework. No kid younger than fourth grade should be doing homework, and I question homework in general even for older kids (with the exception of papers and presentations when kids are old enough to do the work mostly on their own, with maybe a bit of proofreading by the parents). I know parents are a child’s first teacher, but homework is not what that saying is about. Academic work should be done in school. It shouldn’t be my responsibility as a parent.
Someone would have tried to medicate Mozart. Hopefully Leopold would have protected his child from such recommendations and said no.
It is interesting how someone on the reformer trajectory will say in a way I find somewhat cavalier, “I am changing outcomes for children.”
I assume they mean test scores, which they assume leads to college and a better life. But you have to consider what outcomes suffer along the way (if any). I think the problem is we don’t have anywhere to point creativity or how to apply it while learning the basics. (Perhaps). Accounting for creativity—allowing for creativity, recognizing it, honoring it, fostering it helps kids who are blessed with it and/or who are developing it.
We need to help reformers grow beyond their current trajectory so they don’t take us all down with them.
It is actually reformers who need help with a new trajectory! How ironic.
Rigor is playing a musical instrument. Rigor is an art critique. Rigor is finding the right chemical balance to make a paint that dries without curling the paper. Rigor is knowing how to figure up how much money was taken away from your public school to fund a charter up the street that would not accept you. Rigor is looking back one day at a massive reading trap aimed at your grade level and made law by the legislators your parents’ peers elected.
Childhood is short. And they will be adults one day deciding how to treat their elders, and what trajectory their elders should occupy.
“It is becoming a habit.”
What a sad habit, eh!!
Now we’re talking about the real issue.
So Mozart was able to be Mozart because of the incredibly progressive, non-test score culture of 18th century education? And we have no musicians today that are doing anything valuable?
Mozart had a unique education in keeping with his unique talents. It was, unfortunately, extremely repressive in its own way, but it was, at least, responsive to his particular gifts, something that the invariant, totalitarian, top-down standards-and-testing regime is not.
Kids differ. Standards lists and the tests based on them do not.
How would national standards directly force local districts to impact individualization with music?
Have you been away from Diane’s blog for a while, eded? The answer to that question has been addressed in post after post. There was one just this week about a school district gathering up musical instruments and ending its musical program with absolutely no notice to teachers, parents or students. The answer is, music isn’t covered by the standards, nor is it tested, so who has time for it?
“How would national standards directly force local districts to impact individualization with music?”
Is this a real question?
If so, please read this blog … For, oh say the last year or so.
WE don’t have national “standards” (it sickens me to use that term to describe the crap that has been foisted on us all) in music yet. But, of course, they are coming. What we do have is test prep in ELA and Math pushing out EVERYTHING ELSE in our schools.
Folks, my experience has been that loss of music varies by locale. Also, the data I’ve seen haven’t indicated a loss of music & related arts in recent years, though that report was a year or so old, and CCSS may well have changed that. Does anyone have data from the past year (2013)? Across several states I’ve worked recently (and continue to stay in touch with educators), music & arts continue to occur.
Also, while national standards may be coming for related arts at some point, they are not in existence at the present time. Decisions about curricula, from what I’ve seen, are made at the district, building, or classroom level.
So, in sum, my experience has not been that CCSS or state testing have caused children to become less musical.
Time to stop coddling these people!
Either their kids can pass our tests and show themselves worthy of joining the ranks of the masters of the universe, or they don’t matter anyway. The new standards-and-testing regime is punitive BY DESIGN. It trains the children of the proles to be obedient and to accept their designated places in the hierarchy, for the data do not lie.
By the gods of Efficiency and Mammon, the data are infallible.
Of course, the children of the privileged will not take them. This is a test for the children of the proles. As Bill Gates said in a talk recently, “If you don’t like the new tests, wait until you have a boss.”
Exactly. These new tests will show everyone who is boss. We’ve gone far, far past quaint notions that we used to have about living in a “democratic” state.
The oligarchs got together in a room and decided that we will have new national standards and national tests to create national markets for their national products, and they appointed David Coleman, by divine right, absolute monarch of education in the English language arts in the United States.
And they do not give a *$@$$&!! what you think.
The new tests are punitive and abusive BY DESIGN. They are based on this theory of education:
a. Education is obedience training.
b. Learning is mastery of a bullet list of skills.
c. Teaching is punishment and reward.
d. Kids are parts to be milled for insertion into the economic machine.
e. Schools are sorting machines for determining the position that they will occupy on that machine.
Robert – I agree with what you write here… and I would go further:
I am frustrated by what seems to me (my filters) to be a naivety about what is really going on in this society, this global world, and has been going on for thousands of years…
Nothing has changed in ‘civilisation’ since the dawning of tribalism and congregation in settlements, along with the consequent creation of power structures, that have been held tight within a very small circle of people…
There’s a rigid, narrow, straight line of continuity from then to now, with NO REAL CHANGE, GROWTH, DEVELOPMENT…. it just APPEARS as though we’ve made progress, are more sophisticated. The reality is hidden under a veneer of elaborate costuming and charades.
Most of us are still (Middle Ages) serfs though some of us have moved up into the mercantile class and others have found a slight improvement in our lives by becoming the ‘go-betweens’, the jesters and troubadors, the knights, liege men and squires, the scribes, the town-criers, the counting house clerks, the estate and plantation managers, the private armies, the lackeys of the lords… Some of us serfs have it harder than others because of other factors such as gender, skin colour and are reduced to becoming the town beggars and outcasts, scrabbling for scraps like dogs under the masters’ dining tables…
My frustration comes from knowing this to be true and seeing people (who MUST know better) refusing to acknowledge it.
I see this refusal to acknowledge the truth of social, economic and political life as cowardice, rooted in fear, coming from a need to protect one’s own place on the ladder.
But that denial enables the continuance of the monstrosity that is human ‘civilisation’…. And when we are stuck in denial, we can’t solve these issues; denial fills all of our time and space so there is no room for GRACE to shift things…
And then to argue TODAY about how to help the (most) poor and (most) disadvantaged in education, our children, without addressing the problems in the system, is just cruel…
If we’re not willing to talk about and solve the real problems, we would be/do better to be silent, because when we talk but refuse to act, we are only offering false hope…
And, of course, the new national standards-and-testing regime is a fulfilment of the vision for education possessed by the true founders of the United States, the Puritan elders, who wrote in the first textbook ever published on these shores, the New England Primer, the following, which could be taken as the motto of the education deform movement:
Tell B for the beast at the end of the wood.
He ate all the children when they wouldn’t be good.
When the fox guards the hen house, contradictions explode. Until the contradictions
are brought to a head, so that all can see “What” the real problem is, we will reap the
intentional harvest.
“Between 1906 and 1920, a handful of world famous industrialists and financiers, together with their private foundations, hand picked University administrators and house politicians, and spent more attention and more money toward forced schooling than the national government did. Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller alone spent more money than the government did between 1900 and 1920. In this fashion, the system of modern schooling was constructed outside the public eye and outside the public’s representatives.
From the very first report issued by John D. Rockefeller’s General Education Board
“In our dreams, people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present education conventions of intellectual and character education fade from their minds and unhampered by tradition we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into men of learning or philosophers, or men of science. We have not to raise up from them authors, educators, poets or men of letters, great artists, painters, musicians, nor lawyers, doctors,
statesmen, politicians, creatures of whom we have ample supply.The task is simple. We will organize children and teach them in an perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way”.
The real purpose of modern schooling was announced by the legendary sociologist Edward Roth in his manifesto of 1906 called SOCIAL CONTROL.
“plans are underway to replace family, community and church with propaganda, mass-media and education (of course he meant schooling)…people are only little plastic lumps of dough”. Another insider, H. H. Cadard, chairman for the Psychology Department at Princeton, called government schooling approvingly — “the perfect organization of the hive with the anthill”. Cadard wrote further, “standardized testing would cause the lower classes to confront their biological inferiority, sort of like wearing a dunce cap. In time that would discourage reproduction of the ants on the anthill”.
The first curriculum was dumbed down, then national testing was inserted, next morality was weakened and finally between 1970 and 1974, teacher training in the U.S. was comprehensively and covertly revamped. In 1971, the U.S. Office of Education, now committed to gaining access to your private lives and thoughts, granted contracts for seven volumes of change agent studies to the Rand Corporation. Change agent training was launched with Federal funding under the EDUCATION PROFESSIONS DEVELOPMENT ACT. Soon afterward, a book appeared called THE CHANGE AGENT’S GUIDE TO INNOVATION IN EDUCATION. Grants were awarded to colleges for the training of change agents while further Rand documents like FACTORS AFFECTING CHANGE AGENTS PROJECTS continued to pour forth for implementation of teacher training courses. Machievelli had been modernized.”
John Taylor Gatto, Shocking Orgins of Public Education
Does the 21st Century Child Abuse contradict the initial “Purpose” of Public Education?
Is there a contradiction in “Thinking” your function is to educate? If your function
was to educate, WHY are you met, at most every turn, with dictates that DO NOT
educate?
What part of this observation, by Duane Swacker can’t you see?
“And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.”
exactly…. I have been trying to tell people for years that public education HAS NEVER BEEN ABOUT MAKING LIFE BETTER FOR OUR CHILDREN, about giving them the resources to fully participate as equals in society, about giving them the resources to explore themselves in, and grow into, their unlimited potential….
“And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.” – actually, critical free thinkers have ALWAYS been a threat to the socio-economic structure of society … this is nothing new, and the attempts to suppress the same are nothing new…
Has it ever occurred to people that the creation via the latest version of the standards-and-testing regime of alienation in kids might be by design? that the purpose might be to alienate kids from one another (via rigorous competition) and from their own wants and needs and from the purposes that they might have for themselves (via external punishment and reward based on an invariant bullet list)? For by this means, of course, one creates obedient workers who will not challenge their masters.
“Will you be taking that latte on the verandah, Mr. Gates?”
Robert D. Shepherd: you must have read Ionesco—
“It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question.”
😃
Years go I first began going to the websites of the fine institutions where the leading charterites/privatizers send their own children. I was struck by the rich variety of activities—from academics and clubs to sports and fine/performing arts and even education abroad programs—that developed so many traits that, well, are supposedly useless. As Michelle Rhee put it in 2008 in her own inimitably clichéd way—
“cooperation, collaboration and consensus-building are way overrated.”
😏
Link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/31/AR2009103102357.html
Overrated, certainly, if you are one of the vast majority called OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN and need only learn the unthinking obedience, docility and low-level skills necessary in carrying out the orders of the children of the leading charterites/privatizers. For the leaders of the “new civil rights movement,” THEIR OWN CHILDREN will learn all the “hard” and “soft” skills, behaviors and attitudes necessary to assume the leadership positions for which they are being assiduously groomed.
Never forget: when it comes to children, they are “our most valuable assets.” [Michelle Rhee]
Link: http://raginghorse.wordpress.com/2012/12/16/michelle-rhee-uses-sandy-hook-slaughter-to-plug-studentsfirst-organization/
And how do you measure assets? $tudent $ucce$$.
Makes ₵ent¢, yes?
😎
It’s been a LONG time since I read, Ionesco, Krazy. I vaguely remember a play in which a man and a woman are talking and find that they have all these similarities and then, finally, that they are husband and wife. Hilarious, that. And all too true all too often. 🙂
Ah, just looked it up. The Bald Soprano.
And yet, so many wonder why people make the “radical” decision homeschool.
I still manage to do fun things with my students on a regular basis, but teaching and learning was so much more fun before NCLB and RTT. Kids got to be kids and real learning took place.
Stop the abusers.
Opt out.
I appreciate the comment about rigor, but “rigorous,” like “academic,” has become an all-purpose way to express a set of related ideas–that students and teachers are lazy, undisciplined, fail to demand much of themselves or each other, and are too engaged in “soft” feel-good activities that have no clear outcome or use.
“Rigor” and “rigorous” have become obligatory terms to signal that schools teachers and students need to be prepared for a hostile world by “tough love” with schools organized to provide boot-camp training, or preparation for a “Race to the Top” of (whatever).
The term “academic ” functions in the same way, to suppress attention to the social and civic purposes of education, and to assert that the individual affinities of students, their interests, hopes, concerns are not relevant to the fundamental purpose of education. That purpose is the transmission of “academic” knowledge–construed as authoritative, rule-governed, impersonal, book-based scholarship–stripped free of ambiguity, imaginative playfulness, immediate sensuous appeal, and unknowns.
Of course, this narrow view of academic knowledge–as if it is written in stone and not to be questioned–is actually a caricature of the work of scholars. And not many of the reformers who pay homage to the transmission of “academic” knowledge, really view the main outcome of education as training future scholars for jobs in academe.
Rather than engaging in nuanced though about education, reformers just throw around the obligatory adjectives of the day as if “rigorous academic” coursework together with “career (job) and college” prep are the hallmarks of world-class education. Not so, If there is an international standard for excellence in education, it is a balanced program of studies in the arts, sciences, and humanities (including at least one foreign language).
Athough some aspects of study in the arts may be regarded as academic, the outcome of these studies is rarely intended to be merely academic. Indeed, if you want to offer a prejorative judgment of almost any form of art, one way to do that is call it “merely academic.”
Laura H. Chapman: well put.
If I may, I would add that “rigor” is often used as if it meant “few winners/many losers.” So from the POV of true believers in the positive value of test scores and VAM and the like for public schools, the increasingly punitive hazing ritual known as high-stakes standardized testing is good precisely because it toughens people up, let’s them know there is no free lunch, inures them to hardship, separates the wheat from the chaff, makes a man/woman out of them, when the going gets fought the tough get going on high test scores, blahblahblah.
Strangely [?], though, if you go to the websites of Harpeth Hall and Cranbrook and Sidwell Friends and Delbarton School and Lakeside School and the like—where the leading charterites/privatizers send THEIR OWN CHILDREN—the sort of education offered is startlingly different from that they are mandating for the vast majority, i.e., OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN. Such “rigor” as test prep drill-and-kill seems to, er, recede far far into the background.
Just a single example among many hundreds, from the Cranbrook website:
“The Summer Theatre School, our oldest summer program, presents classic theater skills like character acting, lighting, dance, voice, costuming, set design and other stage crafts. The Theatre School operates from Cranbrook’s beautiful Greek Theater grove, an outstanding full sized stone replica of a classic outdoor Greek theater setting nestled in a mature pine forest. Evening outdoor theater productions attract ample crowds from neighboring communities.”
Link: http://schools.cranbrook.edu/programs/theatre
“‘Curiouser and curiouser,’ cried Alice.” [from ALICE’S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND by Lewis Carroll]
😎
I think “rigor” is also a defensive term uses by reformers to imply “get out of my way, I am important and busy changing kids’ outcomes.”
It has no meaning to me anymore. It is a buzz word that encapsulates a gestalt of thinking, self-entitlement and self-aggrandizing just like “failing schools” does. I will still talk to people who use the terms, but right out of the gate they have told me a lot about themselves by using them.
Oh and “Gates money” as a point of pride is a close cousin. It just tells me where a person is.
It is a form of child abuse. We have lost a lot of ground since the “reform” tsunami hit. Read a description by Carl Rogers of a fifth grade class that I taught in ’81 at denverfreeschool.com
Wonderful piece, Diane. We’ve lost all sense of what “achievement”, or “success”, or a good life or a good education mean!!! it’s painful.
For more information see website: http://www.deborahmeier.com
I’m all for bringing an end to the standardized testing mania. But I wonder if that comes to pass, what remains? Would we rethink our schools and classrooms to honor the passion every child has to learn, or would we continue to spend 12 years telling children what to learn, when to learn it, how to learn it, and how they’ll be assessed on it? Would we still be about delivering a common curriculum to each child under the mistaken assumption that if they don’t learn it from us they can’t learn it anywhere else when they have an authentic reason to learn it? Would we really change?
I’ve been to a large number of schools that aren’t under the pressures of standardized tests. Very few of them operate much differently from those that are. Tests are a big part of the problem, but the bigger issue is our unwillingness to talk about a fundamental revision of the role of school, classrooms, and teachers in the modern, abundant, connected world in which we and our students now live.
Tests don’t bother me, assessments can be useful. However, high stakes testing and the pressure of “teaching to the test” takes away a lot of the joy of teaching. In turn the students feel this pressure too. Even with almost 30 students In each block my students are above our state average. However, if I had 15-20 students and REAL classroom resources, I could very well hit those stars I aim for every year and my students might very well process more fully, synthesize more deeply, assimilate continuously, and enjoy their learning. Not respecting the student’s time, not being an encourager, not being compassionate, not keeping humanity in teaching. These are all the pitfalls of teaching to high stakes testing. 😟 Setting teachers up for failure is bad, but setting the students up for failure is the worst!
“All work and no play make Jack a very dull boy.”
Thank you! I left public education.. to which I devoted every ounce of my energy… after 16 years because, as a teacher, I was feeling as deprived of creative expression as my students. I started a program for homeschool students (www.onesparkacademy.org) since so many had left traditional education, but still wanted to learn with a teacher and with peers. It’s been brutal financially, but I’ve never been happier.
I recently was watching a documentary on torture at Guantanamo Bay, what disturbed me is how some of the psychological tortures are used against school children. Sleep deprivation is a big one. When I went to high school I had to be up at 6 am, I and many other students were dead tired yet we were supposed to learn or face punishment. I have Asperger’s Syndrome and a sensory aversion to sudden loud sounds. So teachers yelling at me, or one teacher who hit my desk with a ruler for not paying attention terrified me. Using sudden loud sounds is considered another form of psychological torture.
We expect children to cope with experiences which would be seen as cruel to inflict on adults. What you said about missing time to develop or enjoy your own interests is very true. I ended up with chronic depression from having no time to myself between passing out from exhaustion (not literally), and school work. I learned how to dissociate skillfully while in school, it may have been the only way I could have stayed sain. I self harmed to stay awake from fear of detention, which I see as holding students hostage after school. I lost a great deal of empathy, seeing other students as competition for resources rather than people, like The Hunger Games.
I don’t think many people consider how we’re traumatizing children at epidemic levels with the way our pubkic schools are run. Everyone is so shocked by the school shootings, when we do not give students a way out from being under constant stress. I would never shoot or harm someone, but I can understand the learned helplessness one adapts in school over time and how that makes students feel they have no way out.
I had a nervous breakdown one morning screaming I wasn’t going back to school. I dropped out but was homeschooled by a teacher. This was after I was denied psychological help because I got good grades in Special Ed. Imagine, a student doing everything right only to be punished for it. That’s when I lost my marbles, what the heck school system punishes a student for having good grades? I later was diagnosed with depression and PTSD.
I guess I was in denial, thinking it couldn’t have been that bad I wasn’t physically abused. Other students had it worse, ect. I finally am coming to terms that it was that bad, and it needs to end. An education should not have to come at the price of one’s sanity.
Students shouldn’t be receiving post graduation diagnoses similar to prisioners of war. What will it take? School shootings occur pretty often now, you’d think that someone would consider how much pressure a student is under to cause them to reach that extreme. So many parents are trying to homeschool their kids because our public schools are programmed to make kids obey more than they are to teach. Because teachers threaten students with being unable to go home, isn’t that what child hostage takers do? I have flashbacks when I get anxious enough. Yet this isn’t even on the news, because no one wants to admit our schools have become psychological war zones.
I appreciate you speaking out about this, and giving me the ability to finally realize it was that bad. I wasn’t overreacting I really was being forced by our country’s laws to go to a place where I was psychologically battered, and it was legitimately traumatizing,