A whiny letter from an irresponsible teacher shows us how the terror of the “government” is created and stoked in kids:
Our state and federal government say that I have to give these tests to you. That you must take them. And I need you to know how very sorry I am about that.
I have no control over this. I have no control over whether or not I give you this test. But, like I always tell you, I do have complete control over my own thoughts and my own words. So here is what I need to say to you.
I do not agree that these tests will tell me what I really need to know about you as a learner or as a human being. I do not agree that these tests will make me a better teacher. I do not agree that these tests will improve our schools. I do not agree that you need to sit in front of a computer for over five hours in order for the government to find out what you know and what you can do. I do not agree that you should not have a choice in how you are able to show all of the things that you are capable of doing. I do not agree that in order for the state to know that I am doing my job that you have to suffer through tests.
I believe that standardized tests are quite useless but that doesn’t cancel the dishonesty and nastiness of this open letter. Standardized tests are aimed at testing, first and foremost, how well teachers do their job. Yes, the tests often suck at reaching that goal but this is not a battle that should be fought through kids. The only responsible thing to do here would be to get kids excited about the test and eager to take it. Making them feel anxious and scared of the big, evil, scary “gubmint” is completely useless short-term and enormously counter-productive long-term. Children who grow up to the lullaby of “nothing good can come from the government” will not be equipped to preserve a functioning and strong government when they grow up.
In the era when the nation-state is collapsing and the governments of the eroded nations are retreating from all functions but half-hearted policing, I find the people who are fretting about too much government to be quite puzzling. When the “gubmint” goes away with its (admittedly silly) standardized tests, it will take many other good things with it. Public schools at every level are likely to be one such thing. One would think that teachers might have some interest in preventing such a development but not a single one of the massively popular secondary ed authors that I follow cares about anything but this idiotic war on the standardized test du jour.
Clarissa's Blog 
Kids don’t read the Huffington Post. If she whined like that in class, well that’s another story.
Dear goodness, I kept waiting for the writer to start saying “Mommy doesn’t like this either but we have to do this and it’s going to be ok” in cloying tones.
Of course I was tested every single year I was in school. The difference is that none of those tests were necessary for me to graduate. Feh.
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“Dear goodness, I kept waiting for the writer to start saying “Mommy doesn’t like this either but we have to do this and it’s going to be ok” in cloying tones.”
🙂 🙂 🙂
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I agree with your post. However, I do think that the testing actually serves an anti government and anti public schooling function. All the major testing initiatives have been lobbied for and funded by large private companies (like ETS.) So I think the teacher”s letter is way off the mark here. Standardized testing is transforming public education in to a private for-profit enterprise.
So testing needs to be resisted as much as possible. It’s making public schools much worse. Art programs, music programs, PE, recess, have all been cut in order to make room for more test drilling. It’s deeply problematic.
But no matter what, children need to learn to love school and to feel happy being there. Gloom and doom teachers serve nobody’s interest.
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“However, I do think that the testing actually serves an anti government and anti public schooling function. All the major testing initiatives have been lobbied for and funded by large private companies (like ETS.)”
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“For some mysterious reason, this point is very rarely made. The opposition to standardized testing is constantly framed as an opposition to the government, the big evil controlling government, which doesn’t instill confidence in the success of this project.”
Yes. Unfortunately we have two anti public schooling factions right now (i.e. “liberal” unschoolers, and conservative, religion fanatics). So standardized testing becomes a convenient enemy for both sides to attack public schooling more largely. Meanwhile, for-profit companies are reaping in unprecedented profits and laughing as they dismantle one of the most crucial institutions in American (or any modern) society. The whole thing is very depressing.
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The idea that policy makers and policy advocates suffer from myopia shouldn’t come as a surprise. ETS and other testing organizations also have myopia and are clueless as to how the world might be different. (I live quite near the main ETS campus and have known people working there. It is not the organization it was when Chauncey ran it.)
However, there’s a problem with the assumption regarding the end to public education. Several state constitutions guarantee this education. The form may of course change; Pennsylvania for example now has a statewide online academy in addition to local schools. Whatever the form, education will continue in many places. (You know how hard it is to pass constitutional amendments. If voters have to approve the elimination of public schools, it’s not going to happen.)
Now there are some states that appear to be run by elites and don’t really care about their residents. The poster children for this are Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas and Louisiana. (One could ascribe the slogan to them — “let’s party like it’s 1859.”) If schools were closed in these states, I’m not sure anyone would notice.
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I agree that it’s doubtful that public education would ever officially end; however, “online academies” will be public education in name only and wipe out everything that is positive and valuable about our current public education models. With online academies, students stay home, they, don’t enter in to the public square, don’t socialize effectively; don’t engage with people without stifling parental oversight etc etc. It’s the primary/secondary school equivalent of MOOCS and I think it’s a disastrous route for public education to take.
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“With online academies, students stay home, they, don’t enter in to the public square, don’t socialize effectively; don’t engage with people without stifling parental oversight etc etc. ”
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Before jumping to conclusions, let’s look at the quality of what’s out there and remember that we are talking about primary and secondary education. I’m a great fan of public schools, but I’ve seen situations in which home schooled children do better than their in-school peers. A lot depends on the commitment of the parents, and I suspect most parents aren’t up to the challenge.
In terms of upward mobility, GOP revisions to the tax code, social safety net and laws regarding equal opportunity have already done a number on that. It’s not possible to undo all that damage with schools alone.
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I know that the issue of homeschooling has been rehashed on this blog many times so I won’t jump in to it here in any extensive way. But I feel very strongly (and I think Clarissa and I agree here) that homeschooling is always worse than outside schooling. Private schooling, religious schooling, public schooling are all better than homeschooling. With the possible exception of very ill children (and then it’s home hospital), I feel very strongly that homeschooling is abusive at its core and should be illegal. I truly find it an abhorrent practice.
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Based on what I have personally seen, I emphatically disagree. One example is a child who is autistic. His mother is highly dedicated and he is active in sports programs. His academic and social capability is several grade levels ahead of where he would have been in a normal school program. Again, I know the people and have personally seen this.
In another example, one of the finalists in a national science competition was home schooled.
I am not saying that home schooling is correct for everyone. In the right circumstances, however, it may be a preferable course of action.
Your blanket assertion about it being abusive is at best naive and is contradicted by what I have observed first hand.
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Since my very first posts on homeschooling, I have received so many emails from the people who had been subjected to it that I still feel like my heart is going to break over the sheer number of needless suffering. And all of their stories look good from the outside. The conclusion I drew from these stories is that nobody can even begin to imagine how this is lived from the inside.
Curiously, there has not been a single story – not a single one – that any CHILD has chosen to share about a positive homeschooling experience. There were mountains of such stories from parents but not a single one in all these years from the former children.
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Home schooling is still in its relative infancy and it takes time and maturation to be able to look back and voice a real opinion. Clearly, if a kid has been bullied, then there are obvious advantages, and I’ve heard from kids about that. If a district lacks the resources to deal with special needs children, there are obvious advantages. If the district lacks money for science equipment (e.g., microscopes) and the family can provide this, there are advantages (I have seen this first hand as well). However, like with everything else parents do, it will be awhile before the student gets a perspective on what happened and whether it helped or hurt.
A related issue is the huge disparity in what public schools provide. I saw one elementary school principal charter two buses for an 600 mile round trip to take students whale watching off Cape Cod. At the other extreme, there are elementary schools where field trips are a thing of the past. If children are to receive enrichment, the parents have to do it in these districts.
US News and World Reports does a national ranking of US high schools. They aren’t randomly placed.
Back to topic. My bias is against charter schools. A few are good, but most are designed to make the owner wealthy at the expense of taxpayers or parents (or both). In many cases, home schooling is a superior alternative.
Bottom line: the choice of method of education has to take into account what’s actually available. I would make a different choice in Florida or Missouri than I would in Pennsylvania or New Jersey. I would make a different choice in southern Virginia than in Northern Virginia.
The label, public education, really doesn’t mean all that much since there is such an extreme variation in what it represents.
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“Home schooling is still in its relative infancy and it takes time and maturation to be able to look back and voice a real opinion.”
“Back to topic. My bias is against charter schools. A few are good, but most are designed to make the owner wealthy at the expense of taxpayers or parents (or both). In many cases, home schooling is a superior alternative.”
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I also want to add that I went to one of the worst schools on the planet: it was a school for party apparatchiks where every grade was bought, corruption was insane, kids like me were pariahs, and there was no knowledge imparted at all. But I can promise you that if I had been kept at home with my PhD father and my super-effective pedagogue mother, that would have been an absolute tragedy compared to going to that school.
Even the best parents on the planet cannot substitute for the hugely important skill of existing outside of the parental gaze that any developing human being has to acquire.
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And the very last thing because this has been rehashed too many times already: I was kept at home until the age of 7 with the best, most adoring, engaged, phenomenal grandparents anybody could have. And even today, when I’m 38, I’m still lagging seriously behind my peers in terms of being able to function in the workplace. I haven’t found anything I could do to catch up. And this was just until the age of 7. I cannot even begin to imagine what happens to people who can’t have a normal schooling experience at 10, 12 or 15 and have to be stuck at home with Mommy.
But yes, there were amazing, super important reasons to do this to me. Aren’t there always.
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Relative infancy? It is centuries, milennia old.
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In Scandinavia, school doesn’t start until 7. Before that is daycare, of course…
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My sister went to a kindergarten since the age of two and I never did. As a result, I always felt like I was lagging behind my own sister who was 6 years my junior in terms of fitting into life.
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Have you seen this article, The Rise of Homeschooling Among Black Families?
The reasons these parents in this article give for homeschooling and how they seem to do it is different than our discussions on the homeschoolers we’ve seen.
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There are always reasons. There are always super respectable explanations that can be reduced to “The world is so scaaaaary.” But one day the kid will have to step from under the Mummy’s skirt and into the scaaaaary world. It would be great if the scaaaariness of the world were a little less hyped up by the neurotic parents but not everybody is this lucky.
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I’m still lagging seriously behind my peers in terms of being able to function in the workplace. I haven’t found anything I could do to catch up. And this was just until the until the age of 7
That may have an effect, but I’m not certain that has everything to do with you being at home until 7. Socialization is very important, but you also have to look at what that socialization is teaching the kid. Reading that article I wonder if my mother would have home schooled me and my brother if she had been aware of it as an option. She would have been more swayed if she thought it would make us “normal” on one hand, but on the other hand the very fact of homeschooling us would have been a constant reminder that we were not “normal”. She absolutely needed at least one of us to be “normal”, and as a kid I knew better than to spill my guts about everything and anything that went on in school because that was not “normal”. Of course I wasn’t “normal” because I was an ethnic and religious minority in a religious school.
I don’t disagree that homeschooling is more about the parents than the kids.
The Amazon preview of this book is fascinating when you look at these parents’ issues.
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“That may have an effect, but I’m not certain that has everything to do with you being at home until 7.”
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I am against all the over testing but what is odd about this teacher is that she thinks the students will be confused, will not understand why it is happening, and will be convinced they are not smart. Why is she turning it into this kind of bogeyman? What if it is merely that there are questions they do not understand or do not know the answers to, so that they just do a mediocre job? Why does it have to be this huge phantasmagoric thing … she is acting like it is a torture chamber, gas chamber or lobotomy.
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“Why does it have to be this huge phantasmagoric thing … she is acting like it is a torture chamber, gas chamber or lobotomy.”
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