A mother writes:
Environments of chronic stress are not exclusive to Title I schools in Texas. My daughter attends 3rd grade an Exemplary school in a university area of highly educated and involved parents. We are beginning to observe the over emphasis on rewarding performance, fear of making mistakes, perfectionism, and a lack of nurturing social and emotional development. Work is mostly independent and repetitive rote memorization of math facts and vocabulary. In fact, there is very little social interaction among students and little attachment to teacher, who is very businesslike and impatient. My daughter has developed chronic anxiety and sleep problems, chronic stomach aches and constipation. Her teacher uses statements like, “Whoever does best on this practice test I will take it to show the principal?” If she doesn’t make perfect scores she worries. The principal’s STAAR goal this year is 100% on math, as if 98% last year wasn’t good enough. Would you like to be the student who causes this school to miss the mark?
We will not have healthy school environments in elementary school until we get rid of the statewide testing and measure children by healthy developmental standards.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Wendy Lecker wrote a column entitled State-Sanctioned Child Abuse that appeared in the Stamford (CT) Advocate Friday, 11/15/13 that addresses the stress that this mother has described.
“Dr. Samuel Meisels, director of the University of Nebraska’s Buffett Early Childhood Institute, agrees that a school culture focused on high-stakes tests is exactly the type of environment that we should avoid for children who experience toxic stress. Dr. Marcy Guddemi, head of the Gesell Institute of Child Development maintains that for children under 8, current policies combining an age-inappropriate curriculum with standardized testing are nothing short of child abuse.”
http://www.stamfordadvocate.com/news/article/Lecker-State-sanctioned-child-abuse-4986416.php
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What a great article. Thanks for the link.
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As a Texas teacher in a non-tested subject, I feel the pressure as well. We are constantly told that we are preparing our students for the next grade level exit exams. What we do is NEVER good enough. That can wear you down if you think about it.
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Once upon a time, children were allowed to be children, to develop at the natural gait of the human brain, and to have time to just play. Well, that was once upon a time.
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In our house, it remains that way!
There is hope. Keep hope alive. Keep hope alive.
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AND teachers were allowed to REALLY TEACH! So, students REALLY LEARNED!
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Bravo
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This entire mentality of treating young children that all they are, is a test score, is eventually going to backfire. It is going to cause us to raise an entire generation of humans with a plethora of emotional problems. What good is that?
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“Eventually” implies that it hasn’t happened or isn’t happening yet. Believe me, it IS. It is happening in my house and it burns me to see my brilliant younger child, who used to be a “smile with feet,” becoming more and more morose. And the homeschooling is likely to happen sooner rather than later – and her I thought all this time, that it would be the older non-neurotypical introvert who would need it most, and soonest.
Nothing “eventual” about it. :-‘(
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Our kids also attended “exemplary”-rated elementary schools in Austin ISD. My duty, as a mother, is to shield my children from this chronic and stressful testing. This will be our 4th year to opt our son out of benchmark testing and STAAR testing. Please consider joining the Opt Out Movement. Help us spread the word:
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Texas-Parents-Opt-Out-of-State-Tests/121316371311714
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Wonderful!
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I can almost picture Alfie Kohn shouting, “see, what have I been telling you? Neither rewards nor punishments are helpful and both are usually harmful.
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We want our children to always do their best, but when the guidelines for “best” are unattainable then we are setting them up for failure. Continued failure can have long term effects on their psyche. Why try if the results you desire are impossible to reach?
Our current “society ” is creating a generation of citizens who will feel and act like losers. We need to convince our kids that they are winners no matter what the tests say.
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What bothers me the most about this letter, is that the teacher is “businesslike and impatient”. What kind of teacher is that? This is the exact opposite of who teachers should be and how they should treat their students. Our classrooms should be a place where a child feels comfortable, at home so to speak… a place full of life and conversation. With what is happening now – standardized testing pressures – teachers have to stand up for themselves and more importantly, their students. I believe that teachers would rather be free in their classrooms, adhering to general guidelines and standards, but released from the pressures of standardized testing. Every teacher needs to take their classroom back and fight against the “push”.
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If you look at pictures of Michele Rhee’s office reception area (Students First), it is sleek and designer and shiny. I think there is pressure for teachers to be like power business people now, in clothing that needs to be dry-cleaned and thus a short level of patience for snotty noses and little hands that are dirty from playing and learning about the world by involving themselves in it. I agree with you. The business models being projected onto our schools are having effects in many many mindsets.
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Joanna Best: good observation. It reinforces what I feel is one of the main [if unspoken] assumptions in the self-styled “education reform” movement: that children are merely miniature versions of adults.
A very old and uninformed and pernicious idea that is dead wrong. There is no understanding or appreciation of the reality that not only children develop and learn at different rates and speeds and ways and times—but that people keep learning and changing (for better or worse) throughout their lives.
Let me amend the above with one crucial caveat: that only applies to OTHER PEOPLE and OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN, i.e., the vast majority of us. The select circles in which the leading charterites/privatizers travel have a very different opinion and feeling about THEMSELVES and THEIR OWN CHILDREN.
For only a very small sampling of how different the education for the rheephormista crowd is, a few select links:
Link: http://www.harpethhall.org [re Michelle Rhee]
Link: http://www.lakesideschool.org [re Bill Gates]
Link: http://www.sidwell.edu [re President and Mrs. Obama]
Link: http://www.ucls.uchicago.edu [re Mayor Rahm Emanuel]
Thank you for your comments.
😎
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Opting out of the test isn’t enough, or at least it wasn’t enough for my child. That’s why we’ve decided to homeschool. I have a high strung child and I want him to know that it’s okay to be imperfect. To make mistakes and learn from them. I know that public school isn’t the right setting for him.
Opting out is a start but that does nothing to change the school’s testing mentality.
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Simply put, we are running our education system correctly when a visitor can walk into any school and instantly conclude that it is a place where the humanity of children is valued above all else. And that conclusion will not be drawn from a damned humanity bar graph.
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It will be drawn from student work hanging and child-created projects displayed. And laughter. And smiles.
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The Curriculum Coach at our school (the death star-like lady who works in the data room and enforces all things CCSS) told me that the best method for teaching math to third graders was one she learned from a college professor and she explained it and I asked her if a child were struggling to understand the CCSS bar diagram approach to working a word problem (even if the child can work it in their head, or is simply not understanding it at all) would she abandon the CCSS method for a moment and show the kid how to solve the problem, and she said “No.”
I find that to be deplorable. And I find it to not make any sense what so ever. I find it inhumane and I find it sad that she is so convinced of an untried and unpiloted national curriculum and the micromanaging that accompanies it that she elevates it above the level of a child understanding something.
Pardon my French, but WTF?
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I would add that I am not attacking this lady as a person. She is very nice. But the role she is paid to play (which she takes seriously, as a good employee) is ominous and compliant to a system I have reservations over. I mean no ill will toward her. I am illustrating her expected persona in a descriptive manner to point out her role compared to that of a teacher. Why should this role be played out by anyone in a school for young children makes no sense to me.
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What breaks my heart the most is the populace of teachers who have been trained to trust, to hasten towards and not tarry in implementing classroom practice that their districts bring to them as best practice. And so it is that in this instance of Race to the Top they do not question that which they probably should. And they turn their feet towards a system of educating that the proud have derided cruelly. In not turning from their mission to carry out the duties of their district, they espouse the decrees of those with questionable motives.
I weep over it. And I feel for them. What action can a teacher take who wants to remain for the children?
There has to be an answer to this. There has to be.
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This parent at Tanglewood Elementary School in Ft Worth Texas is beginning to recognize what other parents across the state see. When there is exclusive emphasis on “performance”, the children see themselves as having to “perform” for acceptance and recognition. It leads to chronic feelings of “not measuring up to expectations”. It causes the children to have chronic shame, as well as fear of “rejection”. This chronic stress in childhood of not measuring up to expectations is linked with Borderline Personality Disorder (ref: MHASP). Can we look around in society today and recognize those personality disorders? Narcissistic PD and Borderline PD have become “normal”!
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And add to the fray… the chronic stress a child feels who has learning issues and learns but just not in the normed way or at the normed pace. This child truly is abused because he/she is made to take a continual battery of high stakes test that he/she is incapable of “doing well” on EVER and yet is required to prep for this test, take this test and fail this test repeatedly at the expense of actual learning he/she could have if only allowed. The emotional abuse is just horrific. Maybe special education teachers should file their most important documentation – the mandated reporter of abuse form! Add classroom teachers and anyone else in the school environment connected to these students and testing. Would the public then take notice? What depths of absurdity must our nation go to in order for a change to occur?
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The new rating system in Texas mandates that the school scores higher each year. So there is no more “Exemplary”. The demand is now to show growth each year. So you can never be good enough. It’s time for parents to take back the schools from the government. They are attempting to turn our schools into factories and the product is the child. Children are not little cogs in a machine, they develop when they are ready. Yes, we need high standards, but the parents, communities, and schools need to set those standards, not the politicians.
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It’s extremely bad for children. What does STAAR test teach kids? Learning how to become a smart student by being like Japanese kids who swallow everything teachers and schools say throughout high school?? Forget it. None of Japanese students who take national annual achievement test at 4th and 8th grades are NOT able to achieve 100% proficiency. Many of those who are generally considered “good students” are not even getting close to 90%.
There is a clear trade-off for test-related stress for children. In my country, many kids are having serious consequence of high-stake test demands. Some of them get depressed–or end up being a hikikomori–“pull-in” (confining into a private room as an act of anti-social behavior) throughout adult life. And there are very few psychiatrists who can take care of at-risk students.
STAAR test mandate is threatening enough to affect kid’s life in a long term. Can school boards and state BOE take any responsibility for turning kids into “shut-ins”???
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“None of Japanese students who take national annual achievement test at 4th and 8th grades are NOT able to achieve 100% proficiency.”
Whoops! I forgot to remove ‘NOT.’ My bad.
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The first book ever published in the United States, The New England Primer, contained this line:
“Tell B for the beast at the end of the wood
who ate all the children when they wouldn’t be good.”
(I’m quoting from memory, so I might not have the line exactly right. But you get the idea.)
The reformy crowd haven’t moved much beyond that sort of attitude about education. It’s about getting tough with those slackers and deadbeats–teachers, students. Gates typifies these people. He said in an interview recently, “If you think that the high stakes tests are hard, just wait until you have a boss.” Typical authoritarian personality type.
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The sort who cannot imagine that education and work, for ordinary people, can be, should be joyous.
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cx: The reformy crowd hasn’t, not haven’t, of course. Oh, how I wish one could edit these posts!
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Before Arne Duncan was appointed CEO of Chicago Public Schools, he worked as an administrator in the CPS Office of Talented and Gifted Programs (dept. names have changed a number of times). The gifted elementary schools — not always but often — had a rigid, accelerated curriculum with an overemphasis on desk work and homework instead of hands on activities; no daily recess; and no parents were allowed to volunteer in the school or classroom, even in the earliest grades. One mom tried to observe her preschooler during the day, which is her right, and she told me the principal called the police to remove her. (Just so happened the officer was an old boyfriend!) Another mom referred to the school as Fort Knox. Yet another mom approached Arne Duncan to ask why the school was keeping parents out, and he just laughed, she later told me.
We got the message: it was test scores above all else.
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It is time for Bill Gates to recognize his symptoms: intellectual with repressed social emotional development. He cannot empathize with children, nor can he recognize how his delusional thinking impacts them.
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