Michael J. Petrilli drew a lot of criticism a few months ago when he proposed to give NAEP tests to children in kindergarten, arguing that fourth grade was too late to start assessing student skills.
Now he has an even more radical proposal: test the babies, he says.
He writes:
Earlier this year, I took to the pages of Education Next to make the case for NAEP to test starting in kindergarten, stating that, “The rationale for testing academic skills in the early elementary grades is powerful.” Therefore, “Starting NAEP in fourth grade is much too late.”
I was wrong, and I’m sorry.
Kindergarten is much too late. We must begin a program of NAEP testing for newborns. In the hospital. Before parents take them home. Maybe before parents name them.
If we wait until age five to assess students in math and literacy skills, that leaves a half-decade of missing data. How are we to know where our infants fall on a distribution scale of academic achievement? How many of them are already proficient? How can we possibly differentiate preschool playtime with success and rigor?
Some of my critics might point to the difficulty in assessing newborns. Sure, their precious, tiny hands can grip your finger in an act of sublime yet simple affection, but can they grip a pencil? How can they fill in the bubbles on a standardized test when swaddled lovingly in a blanket? How can they deal with a keyboard if they can’t sit up? Do not be swayed by such arguments, which only reinforce the mediocre expectations endemic to America’s nurseries.
Others will assert that newborns are already assessed through the Apgar test. Again, don’t be fooled! The Apgar only measures the ultra-basics, like muscle tone and respiration. Talk about low standards. We’re going to give babies passing marks just for having normal reflexes? Give me a break.
What next? Test the fetuses? Open the link and finish the article. Always good to see people making fun of their own bad ideas on April 1!
Diane Ravitch's blog 
It would be SO helpful if the politicians would let the educators determine what is to be taught and when. How long will this go on where the ignorant demand what our children should be taught. Letting politicians determine is the first step to autocracy, the Hitler youth movement et al.
Exactly
From you, it’s a good one, Diane.
From Petrilli, it’s not funny. Maybe it shows he has the tiniest bit of self-awareness that he just might have been wrong in his decades of damaging, faulty philosophy. But I doubt it. Has he ever given an inch?
(Sorry for not being in the spirit of the day.)
The Psalms day “you knew me before I was knit in my mother’s womb”. We do not need to test. We need to text. Just text God and ask how smart the kid is going to be.
Breaking ground for testing companies’ new markets.
File under reductio ad absurdum or farfetched satire.
It’s time to test the deformers and politicians. We also could benefit from having more data on them. How else can we know who is worthy of graft and oodles of dark money?
I have always thought that the legislators in every state should have to take their state’s 10th grade state tests and have the results posted very publicly…
April Fool!
It’s all ed reform has to offer public school students- testing.
Twenty five years of this “movement”, thousands of full time employees, billions in funding and the only thing they’ve ever come up with to offer public schools is testing and measurement schemes.
Public schools could just skip the ed reform middlemen, go right to the testing contractors and get exactly the same result.
All of Mr. Petrilli’s articles should be published on April Fool’s Day.
Agreed!!!!
Immediately thought April fools. But testing kids in Kindergarten should also be April fools. This man understands nothing about children but like many people like him, is so certain of his own superior judgement that he offers up his views with the certainty of a Donald Trump. In fact, in terms of their world view of moral compass, many ed reformers and Trump have a lot in common. Self-serving positions are always right.
Haaaa!!!
I would go further and would have parents tested before they plan on having a baby, since we need parents who provide educationally appropriate environment for their babies. Ergo, only qualified people can have unprotected sex. Since protected sex kills babies, the simplified law needs to be “Only qualified people can have sex.”
OK. Thought I would trot out my best April Fool’s jokes. Here they are:
Donald Trump
Madison Cawthorne
Ron DeSantis
Rick Scott
Marjorie Taylor Greene
Lindsey Graham
Matt Gaetz
Beevis and Butthead Trump
Princess Sparkle and Slender Man
Alex Jones
I could go on, of course. I have hundreds of them. But I do realize that all of these jokes are in bad taste. I hope Diane doesn’t get upset at my using these obscenities on her blog!
The key word is “data”. Meaning, cradle to grave “data” that defines who each of us is so that “data” may be sold for a profit to retailers, corporations, special interest groups, politicians and crooks like Trump that want to target anyone that may fit their product, services, or fraudulent con games.
It’s easy for me imagining someone like Trump paying for a list of easy-to-fool people he will con out of their money with lying promises.
Geeze, we are already being buried in SPAM and ADs, probably more than at any time in human history.
I, probably we, spend way too much time just deleting that crap every day without opening most of it and then there’s the paper SPAM that arrives in the snail mail daily, too. Most of that I cut up and recycle without reading.
I am particularly disgusted by the advertisements for health insurance, burial plots, and so on disguised as government notices.
Official Information about Your Health Benefits, Immediate Reply Required
Etc. But our politicians are more interested in The Great CRT Scare than in elderly people being scammed.
NYC was trying to switch retirees into Medicare Advantage without their consent. A judge recently ruled the retirees can keep traditional Medicare without additional cost. https://www.thecity.nyc/2022/3/3/22960355/retired-nyc-workers-medicare-switch-court-win
I should mention that it was the retired teachers that took the city and union to court for trying to break what they perceived was a contract when they retired.
This must be an April Fools joke. If not, Petrelli is a fool for suggesting it.
Petrilli is a fool.
Who is this guy? I have looked him up, & can’t find anything about his background other than he is an author, in Fordham Inst., w/Education Next & other, IM0, info. irrelevant to knowledge & background RE: early childhood education, teaching, pediatrics, ANYTHING that, to me, renders him qualified/an authority about infants, children, psychology & American public schools. I tried to look back in your blog posts, but couldn’t find anything just now.
Anyway, it appears he is just a fool (& his pictures don’t look great, either), & not just on April 1st.
Mike Petrilli is president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a very conservative think tank that supports charters, vouchers, high-stakes testing, NCLB, Race to the Top, and every other failed reform. TBF is funded by Gates, Broad, and a long list of conservative foundations. Mike has never been a teacher. He worked in the George W. Bush administration.
Who knew Petrilli has a sense of humor?
I forgot it was April Fools Day before reading the link and then the post, and you. Got. Me. Good. Whoa, was my jaw on the floor for a minute there. I actually thought Petrilli was calling for testing newborns. That was A Good One! TAGO!
But that was this morning. This evening, I have a different take. Petrilli is a slippery fish. I remember learning about corporate advertising techniques when they appeared in textbooks as the California English Language Arts learning standards called for teaching about persuasion in the early aughts. There’s one called the door in the face technique. How it works is that you make an offer so outrageous, it has to be turned down, and that makes your real offer seem reasonable by comparison. Petrilli might be making fun if his own ridiculous idea of testing kindergartners, but he might otherwise be trying to make his ridiculous idea of testing kindergartners seem sane by joking about an even more preposterous suggestion, testing babies. Just a thought.
Also, I am tired of being tricked and sometimes ridiculed on this blog. My teaching job is hard enough without having to figure out whether what I’m reading is true when I come home. Angry parents, angry students, angry bloggers, angry reformers… Enough! I’ve had it. I’m leaving. April Fool.
LCT, the Petrilli post was in the “humor” category. No, you can’t leave, not over a bad joke.
Diane, I’m not leaving. That was my bad joke. Sorry I wasn’t clearer I was joking.
You said it was April’s Fools Day, but I had to be sure.
Come to think of it, let me expand on that. I have been the victim of an attack by an anti-mask parent recently, and have been, well, distracted to say the least trying to pick up the pieces of me. I haven’t been here reading and commenting as much lately. But no matter what I’m going through, as long as your living room is open to me, I will be here. No matter what.
There will always be a place for you.
I don’t usually use emojis, but ❤️.
Time to test Petrilli. No joke.
He couldn’t pass the grade 8 CC math test
I doubt that more than a score of the members of Congress could pass the grade 8 CCmath test. The number would be even lower in state legislatures. Don’t mandate tests for children that you yourself can’t pass!
This guy is out of his mind. What parent, in their right mind, would LET their child be subjected to this nonsense? The logic is not following any line of thinking that would help the development of children. Any one who signs up for that needs to have their own mind evaluated first.
NEA has asked us to write our Congresspeople, so Kathleen, a retired music teacher in Ohio (my wife) sent this:
As a retired teacher in your district, I care deeply about the education of our nation’s children and whether they become competent citizens able to read and discern fact from fiction. We have seen social and cable media corrupt our faith in government, perpetrate and perpetuate lies that have led to the attempted overthrow of a duly elected government.
We have seen states lie about the accuracy of elected representatives, and then seen state parties try to prevent people not of their political persuasion from voting. We have seen news media become ad campaigners not bound by facts. And we have seen state constitutions emasculated by legislators who do not follow the very laws they were elected to uphold.
Part of this process is the corporatization of schools and the defunding public schools in order to benefit corporate and religious charter schools with public taxes. These schools are not bound by public school standards. Our children deserve schools that hire licensed teachers to teach within accepted, scientific and historical principles, teachers who protect students’ civil rights, under the direction of elected, accountable school boards, not the whim of a politically motivated rump group that would take away the rights of teachers and students. It is the public school system that has historically helped to bind our people, our states into one nation which is under attack by fascistic-leaning politicians.
This is what has happened in Ohio where a charter school like EPCOT practiced fraudulent business practices and funded political campaigns instead of funding children’s education. Our legislature has operated without regard to their constitutionally mandate to fund the public school system equitably and adequately as legislators for several decades have defied the state supreme court mandates to do so. Without such protected education, our students can’t tell fact from fiction, and they fall prey to any slick, emotional purveyor of untruths. We have seen what happens when ignorance rules the emotions.
In closing, please help end the support of corporate and religious (like Fethullah Gülen) schools that are unaccountable to the public and harmful to young people.
Jack, it would have been a better letter if she stuck to the facts at hand.
#1 I support the Department’s effort to regulate charter schools.
#2 No federal money should be allotted to charters managed by for-profit organizations, whose bottom line is profit, not education.
#3 I strongly support the Department’s requirement that applicants for charter money must perform an impact analysis of whom they will serve, whether they will take children who are English learners and in need of special services, whether there is a need for another school in the district, and what fiscal impact they will have on existing public schools.