Bonnie Margolin, a teacher in Florida, remembers a time before No Child Left Behind. She remembers when politicians did not tell teachers how to teach. She remembers when teaching was far more and different from preparing to take tests.
We are now trapped in The Testing Games. Like The Hunger Games, the odds are never in your favor.
“The obvious comparison is the idea that education is some form of competition. We know this concept is a popular one, just based upon the fact that our own US President named his education reform, The Race to the Top. In this race, states are encouraged to create education policies based on test scores. Student promotion, teacher evaluations, and school grades are all based on test scores. Funding is then tied to the student achievement. In simple terms, how well the students race decides how much money the schools get in funding.
“Talk about pressure on children. Walking into school on these test days is eerily as overwhelming to students as the anxiety felt by the young warriors headed out to fight in The Hunger Games. While our students “test for funding”, the warriors in the film had to fight to win food for their district. Just as our students know low test scores can cause them to be retained or to drop out, often ending their academic lives, the young warriors in the movie knew they were also in a fight for their lives.”
She volunteers to take the tests in place of her students. No dice. How about in place of her daughter? She awaits an answer from President Obama. Please, sir?
No answer. She writes that teaching is akin to The Hunger Games. Take the test. Race to the Top. Compete. Win or lose. If you lose, your school loses funding. if you lose, you are damaged goods.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
…sadly, too many administrators have become like game show hosts.
So VERY TRUE. Follow the $$$$$.
One of the saddest things, to me, about the reformy movement, has been watching once-trusted colleagues in administration embrace wholeheartedly the most humiliating and degrading practices and then eagerly foist them on those who still have the courage and ability to teach actual students.
I was a bit surprised but more saddened to see how they began using the stupid and useless walk-throughs to intimidate and demoralize. Then they started using the VAM observationsl tool to threaten any who dissent and they wield it like an axe in a forest.
I know a few good souls have stood up and spoken out but the vast majority have made it clear that they are career climbers willing to sell their souls and walk on the backs of anyone they can knock down in their own sick race to the top.
I have lost most of my trust and respect for administrators during the last few years. They have made it abundantly clear that they will do what they are told and we teachers better shut up and go along or else. It is sickening.
Well put and very true from my perspective, Chris.
“I have lost most of my trust and respect for administrators during the last few years. They have made it abundantly clear that they will do what they are told and we teachers better shut up and go along or else. ”
YEP!! GAGAers almost one and all.
Jennifer Lawrence should continue the role of test bubble warrior in the next installation of the Hunger Games franchise.
“The Hunger Games: Test Bubble Warrior.”
But education is but part of the new Darwinian America. Wealth creation, healthcare, participation in justice, elections, and higher education are only for the strongest, the ones with most endurance, the richest, and the most intellectually gifted.
If you are not in the top 10%, you are shut out from those components of societal functions. Yet, we see what happened in the plt of one of the recent Hunger Game movies, where DOnald Sutherland perishes as a consequence of pure evil greed and narcissism.
I think the Hunger Games is a source of seminal imagery of the kind of America most of us are trying to prevent from happening. . . . . .
Hunger Games, Ender’s Game, The Maze Runner, #edreform – we eat our young (or at least, the rich eat ours) – it has been that way for a long, long time…. look at the way we use our young as cannon fodder for war via the draft and also consider why young people ‘voluntarily’ join the military….
This is exactly what’s going on, now is Florida we’re seeing that the State hasn’t even released their text-to-speech capabilities for accommodating students with disabilities; many are fearful that students won’t have it! No time for practicing using it even if they do release it at the final hour before testing. Failure seems the only option in Florida!!
It’s a fixed game. Those of us in the bottom 90% are set up to fail. Just as in the ‘games’ the rules will change midpoint.
Right. It’s the Hunger Games. The past 3 years I have begun to see students who grew up with the mandates of NCLB. They struggle to think for themselves, write without prompting, or even know how to approach a situation without “the right answer.” And now there is a Hunger Games, er common core, for college. Share this link often. There is little in the media about this:
Click to access ccrstandardsadulted.pdf
Bonnie has it right. Our kids are the ultimate losers in this horribly dysfunctional game.
Thank you, Diane ! I am glad you enjoyed the article. I also wrote a few more parts and hope to continue the series. PS For the record, I did opt my daughter out of the ridiculous Testing Games this year. She broke the seal and refused Florida’s FSA exam. #KnowYourOdds #ControlYourOdds
Good for YOU, GaterBonBC.
Others have mentioned this out before, but this seems like a good time to point out—
That the hazing ritual known as high-stakes standardized testing converts a teacher’s students (each and every one of them an individual human being with unique needs, potentialities, strengths and weaknesses) into what Michelle Rhee calls “our most precious assets.”
That is, since not just the teacher but the entire school may live or die depending on the test scores that each student generates, then is being put in the position of determining which students are the test score raisers and which are the test score suppressors and how to manage the mix (by hook or by crook) in order to maximize survival. And don’t get me started about the pressures on administrators…
Genuine learning and teaching? Not just irrelevant to job priorities but more and more these days, a fatal attraction…
“Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them.” [Frederick Douglass]
Opt out.
😎
This post also hits on the crucial aspect of students believing that school is a competition. I recently read part of Nel Nodding’s book, “When School Reform Goes Wrong,” and it mentioned that students as young as nine were sleepless, nausea and anxious all because they feel the pressure of these tests. They are afraid that if they do not perform well that they will be punished and held back. Schools should provide a nurturing environment not a stressful one.
That’s what happened to my son as a ten year old. He was SO worried about the state writing test that he didn’t sleep well for several days. A week or so after the test, he and several classmates, without the knowledge of the parents, were called into the computer lab and forced to completely rewrite the 90-minute essay, because the computer somehow deleted their essays. That’s when my family began opting out of the testing.
NJ legislature is working on bills re refusal and not forcing Sit & Stare. Fine, but is this like telling William Lloyd Garrison that the overseers will use smaller whips?
Do we need to deluge Lamar Alexander & all Congress to insist that the testing system be excluded from ESEA?
I remember! I remember going to school in the 40’s and 50’s and I remember teaching in the 60s, 70s and 80s.
All of tis changed in the 90s when top-dwon mandates took over, in order to cause catastrophic failure of the schools, and to BLAME the teachers.
so sad.
great post.
And book two, “The Democracy Games”… ? Great analogy of testing to Hunger Games. Public education is the canary in the goldmine for something much larger at stake – US democracy. We need another manual in how to reverse the campaign finance issues that are plaguing/making “democracy” for sale to the highest 1 percent bidders in our nation.
i think its important to understand that public education was always designed and intended to be this way…
the ‘founding fathers’ of the US public education system (based on the Prussian system) were quite clear that the system was designed to identify and classify and sort children – make them standardised citizens to be used by the state…
You might like to read John Taylor Gatto on this… here’s an essay…. http://www.wesjones.com/gatto1.htm
and here’s an extract:
“…. Mass schooling of a compulsory nature really got its teeth into the United States between 1905 and 1915, though it was conceived of much earlier and pushed for throughout most of the nineteenth century. The reason given for this enormous upheaval of family life and cultural traditions was, roughly speaking, threefold:
1) To make good people.
2) To make good citizens.
3) To make each person his or her personal best.
These goals are still trotted out today on a regular basis, and most of us accept them in one form or another as a decent definition of public education’s mission, however short schools actually fall in achieving them. But we are dead wrong. Compounding our error is the fact that the national literature holds numerous and surprisingly consistent statements of compulsory schooling’s true purpose. We have, for example, the great H. L. Mencken, who wrote in The American Mercury for April 1924 that the aim of public education is not
to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. . . . Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim.. . is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States . . . and that is its aim everywhere else.
Because of Mencken’s reputation as a satirist, we might be tempted to dismiss this passage as a bit of hyperbolic sarcasm. His article, however, goes on to trace the template for our own educational system back to the now vanished, though never to be forgotten, military state of Prussia. And although he was certainly aware of the irony that we had recently been at war with Germany, the heir to Prussian thought and culture, Mencken was being perfectly serious here. Our educational system really is Prussian in origin, and that really is cause for concern.
The odd fact of a Prussian provenance for our schools pops up again and again once you know to look for it. William James alluded to it many times at the turn of the century. Orestes Brownson, the hero of Christopher Lasch’s 1991 book, The True and Only Heaven, was publicly denouncing the Prussianization of American schools back in the 1840s. Horace Mann’s “Seventh Annual Report” to the Massachusetts State Board of Education in 1843 is essentially a paean to the land of Frederick the Great and a call for its schooling to be brought here. That Prussian culture loomed large in America is hardly surprising, given our early association with that utopian state. A Prussian served as Washington’s aide during the Revolutionary War, and so many German- speaking people had settled here by 1795 that Congress considered publishing a German-language edition of the federal laws. But what shocks is that we should so eagerly have adopted one of the very worst aspects of Prussian culture: an educational system deliberately designed to produce mediocre intellects, to hamstring the inner life, to deny students appreciable leadership skills, and to ensure docile and incomplete citizens – all in order to render the populace “manageable.”
It was from James Bryant Conant – president of Harvard for twenty years, WWI poison-gas specialist, WWII executive on the atomic-bomb project, high commissioner of the American zone in Germany after WWII, and truly one of the most influential figures of the twentieth century – that I first got wind of the real purposes of American schooling. Without Conant, we would probably not have the same style and degree of standardized testing that we enjoy today, nor would we be blessed with gargantuan high schools that warehouse 2,000 to 4,000 students at a time, like the famous Columbine High in Littleton, Colorado. Shortly after I retired from teaching I picked up Conant’s 1959 book-length essay, The Child the Parent and the State, and was more than a little intrigued to see him mention in passing that the modern schools we attend were the result of a “revolution” engineered between 1905 and 1930. A revolution? He declines to elaborate, but he does direct the curious and the uninformed to Alexander Inglis’s 1918 book, Principles of Secondary Education, in which “one saw this revolution through the eyes of a revolutionary.”
Inglis, for whom a lecture in education at Harvard is named, makes it perfectly clear that compulsory schooling on this continent was intended to be just what it had been for Prussia in the 1820s: a fifth column into the burgeoning democratic movement that threatened to give the peasants and the proletarians a voice at the bargaining table. Modern, industrialized, compulsory schooling was to make a sort of surgical incision into the prospective unity of these underclasses. Divide children by subject, by age-grading, by constant rankings on tests, and by many other more subtle means, and it was unlikely that the ignorant mass of mankind, separated in childhood, would ever reintegrate into a dangerous whole.
Inglis breaks down the purpose – the actual purpose – of modem schooling into six basic functions, any one of which is enough to curl the hair of those innocent enough to believe the three traditional goals listed earlier:
1) The adjustive or adaptive function. Schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority. This, of course, precludes critical judgment completely. It also pretty much destroys the idea that useful or interesting material should be taught, because you can’t test for reflexive obedience until you know whether you can make kids learn, and do, foolish and boring things.
2) The integrating function. This might well be called “the conformity function,” because its intention is to make children as alike as possible. People who conform are predictable, and this is of great use to those who wish to harness and manipulate a large labor force.
3) The diagnostic and directive function. School is meant to determine each student’s proper social role. This is done by logging evidence mathematically and anecdotally on cumulative records. As in “your permanent record.” Yes, you do have one.
4) The differentiating function. Once their social role has been “diagnosed,” children are to be sorted by role and trained only so far as their destination in the social machine merits – and not one step further. So much for making kids their personal best.
5) The selective function. This refers not to human choice at all but to Darwin’s theory of natural selection as applied to what he called “the favored races.” In short, the idea is to help things along by consciously attempting to improve the breeding stock. Schools are meant to tag the unfit – with poor grades, remedial placement, and other punishments – clearly enough that their peers will accept them as inferior and effectively bar them from the reproductive sweepstakes. That’s what all those little humiliations from first grade onward were intended to do: wash the dirt down the drain.
6) The propaedeutic function. The societal system implied by these rules will require an elite group of caretakers. To that end, a small fraction of the kids will quietly be taught how to manage this continuing project, how to watch over and control a population deliberately dumbed down and declawed in order that government might proceed unchallenged and corporations might never want for obedient labor.
That, unfortunately, is the purpose of mandatory public education in this country. And lest you take Inglis for an isolated crank with a rather too cynical take on the educational enterprise, you should know that he was hardly alone in championing these ideas. Conant himself, building on the ideas of Horace Mann and others, campaigned tirelessly for an American school system designed along the same lines. Men like George Peabody, who funded the cause of mandatory schooling throughout the South, surely understood that the Prussian system was useful in creating not only a harmless electorate and a servile labor force but also a virtual herd of mindless consumers. In time a great number of industrial titans came to recognize the enormous profits to be had by cultivating and tending just such a herd via public education, among them Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller….”
somehow it veered away from this for a period of time in the late 50s up to about the 80s, with free college and a focus on liberal arts/humanities and hippies and the anti-war movement, and then the oligarchs got frightened, and have been in the process of reasserting their power and bringing us – via our kids, the next generation – back inline/online ever since….
Sahila: “Dumbing Us Down,” sits on my desk (next to Jerry Mander’s “In The Absence of the Sacred” and “Reign of Error”
Recently, Gatto was interviewed by Rob Kall on his radio show, and Rob who is the publisher of Oped News where I write, asked me to read and edit the transcription of the interview so it could be published at the site.
Thus, I had the chance to listen to Gatto talk about his new book “Weapons of Mass Instruction.” Something that he said reverberates. He said that back in the day, when he taught, all teachers looked for the ‘genius’ in each child, and helped every kid to be the best he could be.
We enabled learning, using whatever talent and education we possessed. That was the objective.
Gatto is not widely read, which surprises me, as he certainly grasps our education system and the dynamics of what is occurring.
if I were to recommend books that trace the recent tragedy of public education,
“Reign of Error” (Diane’s brilliant book)
“Dumbing Us Down,”
“Weapons of Mass Instruction,” and
“In The Absence of the Sacred” are at the top of my list, but joined by a new book that for the first time tells in story from, the reality of teacher’s experience today’s changed workplace:
“Bravery,Bullies and Blowhards,” by Lorna Stremcha, is that book, which about to be released.
I cannot recommend it highly enough, because I came to know the author (as I covered the teacher abuse movement) and I can verify, that she bore witness to this in Montana; Also, from my own experience and that of thousands of others http://endteacherabuse.org
I can say that this book puts out the reality of the teacher’s experience in the schools across this nation today — areality on the educational landscape of the past two decades — when everything changed; that was when ‘top-down’ replaced ‘bottom-up’ ( as Rob Kall would say) and due process went out the window.
I offer to you, the rationale which has come to enable the worst behavior of administrators, who (as Duane explained on this blog) are GAGAers… They Go Along to Get Along with mandates from on high…which is to ensure the teacher leaves before she is voted in benefits.
http://citywatchla.com/8box-left/6666-lausd-and-utla-complicity-kills-collective-bargaining-and-civil-rights-for-la-s-teachers
So, the children and the facilitation of learning is the LAST thing on the agenda of those who control public education, and THAT Sahila, is what HAS CHANGED, and why public education is hanging on by threads.
Also, If you wish to email me for a private conversation on this subject, you can message me
http://www.opednews.com/populum/messagesend.php?to=40790&from=40790&a=n&o=&entry=%2Fauthor%2Fauthor40790.html&submit=Send+Message
at my author’s page at Oped News (OEN)
http://www.opednews.com/author/author40790.html
I found the parallels between the movie versions and teaching in public schools to be so disturbing that I started to cry. Worse still, my two kids with whom I was watching at home, now college grads in their 20’s, totally understood why I was so upset because they too can see the parallels.
The testing concept is a farce.
The very idea that more funding should go to those who are already succeeding is absurd. As a society, those who are already underfunded will continue to be further and further behind.
It seems that that is what some people want. And, they succeed at convincing certain groups that caring about everyone is “Socialism,”. So her we are.