A teacher in California sent me the latest state testing guidelines and was disturbed to see the large number of forbidden topics.
I was not surprised because in 2003, I published a book called “The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn.” I reported that testing and textbook publishers, the federal government and state education agencies collectively adhere to a long list of banned words, topics, and graphics (Do Not Show a Rainbow! Do Not Show a Female in a Tank Top! Do Not Show the Sole of a Shoe! Do Not Show a Cow with Udders! Do Not Even Mention Sex, Poverty, Religion,Violence, War, Witches, or Evolution!)
Actually, the only new addition to the list of banned topics is “complex discussions of sports,” and I assume this was added on the assumption that boys are likely to know more about sports than girls. So the topic is gender biased.
You might well wonder what material is permissible on the state tests once all if the below has been deleted. Me too. Maybe a discussion of the healthfulness of grains and vegetables?
Here are the current guidelines, no different from what I wrote about in 2003:
“To keep the California High School Exit Examination (CAHSEE) free from potentially biased, sensitive, or controversial content, the following topics are avoided on the examination:
“Violence (including guns, other weapons, and graphic animal violence)
“Dying, death, disease, hunger, famine
War
“Natural disasters with loss of life
“Drugs (including prescription drugs), alcohol, tobacco, smoking
“Junk food
“Abuse, poverty, running away
“Divorce
“Socio-economic advantages (e.g., video games, swimming pools, computers in the home, expensive vacations)
“Sex
“Religion
“Complex discussions of sports
“Slavery
“Evolution, prehistoric times, age of solar system, dinosaurs
“Rap music, rock concerts
“Extrasensory perception, witchcraft
Halloween, religious holidays
“Anything disrespectful, demeaning, moralistic, chauvinistic
“Children coping with adult situations or decisions; young people challenging or questioning authority
“Mention of individuals who may be associated with drug use or with advertising of substances such as cigarettes or alcohol
“Losing a job, home, or pets
“Rats, roaches, lice, spiders
Dieting, other concerns with self-image
Political issues
“Any topic that is likely to upset students and affect their performance on the rest of the test.
“It is important to note that these guidelines are applied in the context of the purpose of the test as well as the overall passage or item. For example, some topics (e.g., the socio-economic advantages) may be mentioned in a text, although an entire passage would not focus on these topics.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“Do Not Show the Sole of a Shoe!”
Okay, the others I get (disagree, but get). But why no shoe soles?
Offensive to many of the Muslim faith.
Remember the shoe throwing incident with Mr Bush?
Ah. Thanks – never would have thought of that.
I caught that one thanks to having lots of Muslim students over the years.
I don’t get “do not show a rainbow”.
Offensive to leprechauns?
Anyone…?
I’m guessing it would be interpreted as “gay.”
Disrespectful in Arab and other Asian cultures.
Effing amazing! They just banned Shakespeare, the Discovery Channel, and Greek tragedies.
stephenprius: you, sir, are quite obviously Rheeally misinformed. Some Centres of EduExcellence still include and even put on stuff, like, you know, plays by Shakespeare.
For THEIR OWN CHILDREN, the leading charterites/privatizers and their educrat enablers and edubully enforcers provide a wide variety of the performing arts. Behold:
[start quote]
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.
[end quote]
Read more at—
Link: http://schools.cranbrook.edu/programs/theatre
And now, on to the complex and controversial:
“Along with the History and English Departments, Cranbrook Theatre hosted Oakland University’s Greek Theatre students for a riveting performance of Antigone on Sept 13, 2013.”
But not to worry: there were no “[c]omplex discussions of sports.” Relieved?
Link: https://www.facebook.com/cranbrooktheatre
Thank you for your comments.
😎
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Texas Education.
Glad to see we are preparing students for the real world!
These guidelines are for test questions, not curriculum. I believe the intent here is to shelter test-takers from items that could evoke upsetting memories that would disadvantage the test-taker. Is it so bad to ban reading passages about homelessness on this single test because it might upset a homeless student? Questions about video games because they might be unfamiliar to students from tech-agnostic or underprivileged homes? Questions about abuse because they might upset an abused child who cannot turn to anyone during the test? Didn’t guidelines like this arise from test questions prior to the 1970s that disadvantaged urban or underprivileged or underexposed kids when questions reflected a middle-class, white America.
A good test designer (and I assume there are some out there, despite our collective distaste for testing mania) needs to design a test that measures what it is intended to measure. Therefore, s/he must remove barriers or distractors, or the test is less valid.
The guidelines are used both for tests and for textbooks. Every education publisher has similar guidelines, even those who do not publish tests.
“. . . needs to design a test that measures what it is intended to measure.”
You’re asking for an impossibility because these “tests” are in no way a “measuring device” as the teaching and learning processes are not amenable to “measurement”. These tests may assess something and then put some fancy shmancy numbers to that assessment but that doesn’t mean anything was measured.
This concept is one of the main logical problems involved with the whole edudeformer schemes: that the teaching and learning process can be measured-it can’t!!
Tests work well when teachers use them in real time to access how much learning took place and see if the lesson needs to be retaught using different methods and/or material and even then a bubble test isn’t as good as the word the students turn in.
When a teacher corrects the work from a lesson, they can see if that material must be retaught.
Standardized tests, as you say, can’t measure the quality of teaching or what a child might have learned and forgotten.
They don’t want to talk baseball? Five great MLB teams in the Golden State.
Are religious people making up these lists?
Done appropriately, those are all the topics that the kids like.
I am sitting here shaking my head , and now I am headed over to the Arizona Diamondbacks web site.
“Five great MLB teams in the Golden State.”
And none as good as the Cardinals!!!
Interesting, because the 9th grade math Smarter Balanced test that my just son took included a performance task on baseball statistics. So his English teacher had to explain baseball to the class in the classroom preparation. No infield fly rule discussion, however — I suppose that would be a complex discussion of sports.
This is an excellent list as these are real life experiences we don’t want them prepared for!
The only focus should be on being ready for college and the proscribed list has nothing to do with their entrance into the surreal world of college life!
Bazinga!
Oh wait, “basing” refers to the Big Bang Theory where all of those things occur and so I guess I shouldn’t say that either….
I guess there is no rational response to the Test Question Guidelines.
Darn spell checker, I meant Bazinga ,
Oh well enough on this topic, back to my day job educating kids about the things they are not supposed to be tested on :}
My students often discuss the massive amount of material on standardized tests that they can’t relate to at all, like porcupines and redwoods. An article about a homeless teen would, at the very least, evoke interest or compassion…or something. My mother was an alcoholic. It would have been nice to know that somewhere in the world there were teens with the same problem. People don’t understand kids if they think that relevant, sensitive subjects shouldn’t be on tests.
Even though I’m not surprised, I was still stunned to see the extensive list. This is the result of political correctness gone mad and I’m sure it accelerated with the advent of the Internet and social networking where any nut group or nut case can make noise and find others who will join them putting pressure on elected representatives with the threat of losing votes and donations.
This may be a bigger threat to democracy and freedom of expression than even Bill Gates, the Walton family and the Koch brothers.
Then this piece came out this morning explaining how the Koch brothers are taking over America one Congressional election at a time:
http://news.yahoo.com/the-kochs-make-their-political-money-count-022742677.html
So the only thing allowed is instructional manuals. Real life is off limits, as well as anything a human might actually care about. Stunning and horrific.
…which explains the instruction manual, fact based text focus of the CC$$.
“Itsy bitsy spider climbed up the water spout”. Think of all the damaged young lives over the years. Luckily, most of the insect and reptile family was not banned.
*Country music – wife left you, dog ran away, isn’t specifically mentioned, as that would be redundant.
Several years ago, I headed up the development of a 6-12 basal literature textbook program. Shortly after the program was published, we got a big sale–$250,000 dollars worth of texts–in a Missouri town. A couple weeks later, we got a letter from the Superintendent of Schools in that town telling us that he was returning the texts and would not be paying for them. Why? Well, we had included in the program James Thurber’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” which contains this line:
“They’re so damn cocky, thought Walter Mitty, walking along Main Street; they think they know everything. ”
The story was in an 11th-grade American literature textbook. Evidently, the morals of 11th-grade students would be irreparably damaged if they encountered the word “damn” in a classic American short story by this great American humorist.
A few years before that, I was working for McDougal, Littell. The company was, at the time, small and independent, and it made very innovative programs. We had the state adoption committee in Texas refuse to adopt our health program because it contained the line “Humans and other mammals lactate.” They were upset about the reference to lactation, even though this is one of the definitive characteristics of mammals, but what really caused them to blow a gasket was the description of humans as mammals. Humans, you see, are supposed to be some sort of separate creation, apart from the animal kingdom.
Once I was working on a grammar and composition program. We were just about to send the whole thing to press when we got an urgent call from the publisher. He told us that we had to go through the entire program and take out the word imagine and all of its inflected and derivative variants (imagining, imagination, etc). Why? Because various fundamentalist Christian groups had decided that the root of the word imagine was magus, meaning “sorcerer.” By asking kids to use their imaginations, we were, therefore, doing the devil’s work! Of course, the fundamentalists had the etymology ALL WRONG, but that made no difference. We had to create an IMAGINATION FREE program.
But it isn’t just such “ethical” and religious objections that lead adoption committees to reject programs. I once put together a literature textbook program that contained extensive instruction, throughout, on varieties of inductive, deductive, and abductive inference. Unlike other programs, we went into a great deal of detail in our instruction on these topics. In other words, the thinking strand in the program was a mini course in logic. Well, shortly after the program hit the market, it was denied approval by the adoption committee in one state because it didn’t treat “inferencing,” which was in their state standards. Of course, induction, deduction, and abduction are the major types of inference, but because we hadn’t included the word “Inferencing” in our A-level headings, the state decided that we didn’t teach inferencing and so did not meet its “standards,” and there was no appealing the decision.
This kind of idiocy happens all the time when you have distant, centralized committees making these kinds of decision. But that’s what the ed deformers are up to. They want the CCSSO/NGA to act as the censor librorum of educational materials in this country, to have them decide for the rest of us what THOUGHT is and is not acceptable.
What’s the alternative? Let local teachers make their own decisions about curricula, pedagogy, and learning progressions, subject to decisions made by local school boards. Now, you may think that that will lead to censorship, but here’s what happens, there. A school board makes a stupid censorship decision. It’s VERY PUBLIC. The decision gets out. People, in the age of the Internet, react to that decision with howls of derision, and then they back off it.
The play Romeo and Juliet appears in all the big basal literature textbooks at Grade 9. If you compare the play as it appears in those textbooks to a trade edition of the play, you will find that in each of the books from the big publishers, ROUGHLY A FIFTH OF THE PLAY HAS BEEN CUT DUE TO CENSORSHIP, typically no indication that this censorship has been done. So, if you are teaching that play from one of those texts, know that you are teaching a highly censored, highly sanitized version.
Amusingly, those same textbook programs all have, in their 12th-grade English lit survey texts, Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress,” which is basically a poem in which the speaker presents an argument for jumping into bed. As you will recall, the poem presents the memento mori argument–do this now, while you have the chance, for in no time at all, you will be dead, and you will have missed your opportunity. The poem contains many lines that, if understood, register pretty high on the shock-value meter. For example, the poet says to the beloved, if you wait until you are dead,
. . . then worms shall try
That long preserv’d virginity,
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust.
But, evidently, fundamentalist nutcases don’t want to be bothered with reading a long poem like “To His Coy Mistress” or don’t understand what they are reading if they do attempt the poem, so this one has gone unnoticed.
Now, if you cut every carpe diem love poem from every K-12 textbook, you would immediately rule out a third of the classics from the canon of English Renaissance literature, and much of the material from other eras.
The dentist who sat on the state textbook adoption committee in Texas for a long time and who had enormous influence on state adoption criteria called for eliminating all homosexual authors from the curriculum. I suppose that this would mean any authors who at some point had same-sex relations or who wrote, somewhere, about same-sex relations. What would that mean? Well, it would mean no
Edward Albee, W. H. Auden, James Baldwin, Balzac, Djuana Barnes, Rita Mae Brown, Lord Byron, Truman Capote, Noel Coward, Emily Dickinson (likely; see her letter to Susan Gilbertm though this might be simply an example of the common “romantic friendship” genre of nineteenth century women’s writing), E. M. Forster, Allen Ginsberg, Langston Hughes, D. H. Lawrence, Abraham Lincoln (see Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln, by Harvard historian John Stauffer), Maugham, Melville, Plato, Proust, Rimbaud, Sappho, Shakespeare (highly likely; see the sonnets), Virgil, Alice Walker, Whitman, Oscar Wilde, Tennessee Williams, Tennessee, Jeanette Wintersen, and Virginia Woolf
to mention just a few. The list could go on and on.
Censorship lives thanks to the invisibility cloak called Political Correctness where small well funded groups loudly condemn and bully the rest of us often with threats and lies. The tyranny of the mob the Founding Fathers warned about.
Have a look at Diane’s The Language Police, if you haven’t read it. She covers this ground beautifully.
Our 7th grade students read “Tears of a Tiger” and “The Outsiders.” Tears deals with drunk driving, child abuse, depression, suicide. It’s an incredible book that the kids really connect to and love. The Outsiders addresses poverty, abusive families, loss of parents, murder, gangs. They also love it. Reading books that address these topics in a safe environment is a great way for kids to explore their feelings about life. We can’t keep sugarcoating everything.
That kind of stuff interests kids and turns them into readers.
But, of course, we can have them read pablum in textbooks about Josie and Yolanda taking spot to the firehouse. Oh, wait. Sorry. Fire fighters deal with disasters. Oh, and they are called “fighters.” Both on the censorship list.
I’m new to this blog, so I didn’t see the initial post about banned topics. This is absolutely absurd to me! I can’t believe that there are so many ideas that have to be avoided, especially since most of them are the ones that would actually be of interest to kids. No wonder most of our students are disengaged from the testing process. 😦
These a priori lists effectively turn the curriculum into pablum.
We live in a time when scientists are hard at work using recombinant DNA techniques to create NEW FORMS OF LIFE. Soon, we shall be using these to alter the genetic code of humans to eliminate the 4,500 or so diseases that have a genetic basis that we know about. In other words, we have entered into an era in which we shall control the code of life itself. This changes everything. It’s as significant a development as was the discovery of fire.
But we are forbidden to write about these matters. I have seen this stuff forbidding discussions of genetics on HUNDREDS of lists of taboo topics from educational publishers.
The nutcases who support these lists seem to agree with Orwell’s pigs that “Ignorance Is Strength.”
This reminds me of the first time the Staff Developers visited our school to talk about the then new Regents. They gave us a similar list and I said, I guess you’re worried that the students might actually be interested in what they are reading.”
I feel the same way. I’m curious though–in their attempts to eliminate any potential bias or unfair content, aren’t they actually doing the exact opposite? I feel like the topics that they actually end up using after all of the banned ones are considered require more background knowledge than would have been the case if they wrote about kids’ interests. A handful of kids have been to certain museums or had specific travel experiences that give them a big advantage over most of the students, especially in the areas where the needs of the population are greater, like in my district.
well said, jfraad!
One of my favorite testing stories: when I was MD when they were piloting their latest iteration of standardized tests (yes… there WAS a time when state departments actually vetted standardized tests before they were used to rate schools, teachers, or students) one of the questions asked students to look out the window and write a paragraph describing what they saw. The problem: over 20% of MD schools had classrooms where the windows were such that all students could see was the sky or had no windows at all (the schools built in the 1970s had “open designs” and/or were concerned about energy) … The folks in Iowa or wherever the test was designed failed to realize this little nuance… get ready for lots of these kinds of glitches as SBAM and PARCC are rolled out.
Wayne Gersen, as a member of the board of NAEP, I saw many terrible test questions, including some that had two right answers or no right answer.
I have had to prepare my students for the SBAC field test which will waste our time for far too many days this spring. I have noticed that quite a few of the practice test questions have answers that seem highly debatable or just plain wrong. This is extremely troubling to me. I oppose excessive standardized testing for so many reasons (so well articulated by the fine commentators on this blog). Now, on top of this, I have discovered that the SBAC product just seems to be a thrown-together poorly-edited mess. Why couldn’t they just hire some veteran English teachers to get out their red pencils and find these silly mistakes? Oh, my bad … I forgot for a moment that we’re all no-nothing old fogies collecting big bucks by working in failure factories.
It’s comical to hear that testing designers would fail to consider something as problematic as what you’re describing. They’re able to come up with a ridiculously long list about topics that need to be avoided, but nobody can stop and think about the fact that not all classrooms have an exterior window?!?! I find this amusing, to say the least.
The state guidline training should include watching The Music Man, another good source on how to spot controversial material.
Heed that warning before it’s too late!
Watch for the tell-tale sign of corruption!
The minute your son leaves the house,
Does he rebuckle his knickerbockers below the knee?
Is there a nicotine stain on his index finger?
A dime novel hidden in the corn crib?
Is he starting to memorize jokes from Capt.
Billy’s Whiz Bang?
Are certain words creeping into his conversation?
Words like, like ‘swell?”
And ‘so’s your old man?”
Well, if so my friends,
Ya got trouble,
Right here in River city!
Exactly. But at least Harold Hill ended up touching the lives of children positively.
Did anyone else notice the irony that the topic of testing is not one of the banned subjects? Why not have test questions about testing? It would take absurdity to the next level.
Almost always, when one of the major educational publishers sends a job out to a writer or editor (or to a development house, which then sends the job to a writer or editor), it is accompanied by such a list.
If you have national standards, then that creates a scale for educational publishers at which it’s very, very difficult for any but the largest to compete, and the bigger they are, the more conservative about all this they will be because they will be selling the same product everywhere, in urban California and in rural Alabama, and that product will have to please everyone–the thought police on the left and on the right, and will have to be as bland as Wonder Bread was.
So, that’s another reason to oppose mandatory, invariant, state and national standards, to have voluntary, competing standards or guidelines or frameworks instead, and to allow autonomous local schools and districts to choose their own materials. If you have national standards and the monopolies that thrive under those, you will have censorship. If you have voluntary, competing standards, you will encourage the emergence of smaller publishers, lots of competition, market fragmentation, and more variety, and all that competition and market fragmentation will put pressure on publishers to create materials that are NOT pablum, that are engaging and interesting and, yes, sometimes provocative.
Years ago, when McDougal, Littell was a tiny startup, it published an innovative program called the Man series. The program was quite successful in liberal areas. In West Virginia, there were riots over it, and (literally) book burnings.
Those were the good old days. Seriously. Someone was saying something in a textbook that was worth saying. It was so worth saying that it angered idiots.
Say no to the National Mandates for Training of Children of the Commoners (let’s call the CCSS what they are)
and yes to real innovation, variation, diversity, and competition.
But won’t local autonomy mean more censorship?
Well, in the Internet age, here’s what happens. Some fundamentalist dentist on a school board decides to yank Catcher in the Rye or Slaughterhouse-Five from the local school library. Word about that spreads virally. There are hoots of derision from every corner of the globe, and then the fundamentalist dentist backs down or is voted out.
Some years ago I was on a local textbook committee in a town in California, and was asked to read a state math textbook for compliance with the standard that the names that occur must represent the gender and ethnic balance in the state. So here was a problem in the section on quadratic expressions. “Maria stands on the top of a building and fires a pistol in the air.” I’m sure they had a list of names that they randomly inserted into the problems (the old fashioned “A can row twice as fast as B” not being as human). But this illustrates a larger point:
General rules, however well meant, are often a blunt instrument.
Saying that an examination cannot include “young people challenging or questioning authority” would bar questions about the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the American Revolution — no reading the Declaration of Independence with its relentless criticism of King George. Or the invention of non-Euclidean geometry. Or Edgar Guest’s poem that starts “They told him that it couldn’t be done.” Sad.
Long ago I was a high school student in California. We seniors were preparing for the Subject A examination for English. If we did not write an essay well, we would be enrolled in remedial English when we entered the University of California. [This comment then qualifies as related to the blog about the Language Police.]
One of the choices for the exam was a question related to this idea: “Americans accept Negroes as sports and music stars, but not as business and civic leaders.” I don’t remember the exact wording, but I remember the proposition. After all these decades, it follows me. This is an important idea to ponder. Is this still true? Periodically I use this statement as a yardstick to evaluate whether society’s mores have changed since 1960.
After reading the list of topics to avoid in tests, I wonder what is left to discuss or debate or write about in high school English. Can an education be relevant that is not open to discussion about violence or death? How do you engage students if you cannot address opinions about race or sex? How do we train our youth to listen to the ideas of others and find consensus with those whose fundamental beliefs are contrary to our own? How, then, we will teach the young how to govern a democratic republic? Or is living under a government of the people impossible?
Lately-minted Ph.D.