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?
