Millennial Debate Standardized Testing Debate
Download 0.62 Mb.
|
Alienates StudentsStandardized tests alienate kids from school and turn parents into test preppersAnya Kamatez, journalist and education writer, 2015, The Test – Why Our Schools are Obsessed with Standardized Testing – But you don’t have to be, Kindle Edition, page number at end of card 3. They are making students hate school and turning parents into preppers. “The tests are boring!” complains Jorge, a sixth-grade student at Leaf. “You don’t really want to sit in a chair for three hours. There’s no breaks. You can’t stand up and stretch, go to the bathroom, get a tissue, get a drink of water. It makes us really stressed, so we don’t do as well.” A little bit of stress can be healthy and motivational. Too much or the wrong kind can be damaging and toxic. When you put teachers’ and principals’ jobs on the line and turn up the heat on parents, students catch the anxiety like a bug. Claire Walpole, a Chicago parent, blogged about her experiences assisting her daughter’s class with computer-based testing. Her daughter broke down on the way home on the second day. “‘ I just can’t do this,’ she sobbed. “The ill-fitting headsets, the hard-to-hear instructions, the uncooperative mouse, the screen going to command modes, not being able to get clarification when she asked for it. . . . It took just two days of standardized testing for her to doubt herself. . . . ‘I’m just not smart, Mom. Not like everyone else. I’m just no good at kindergarten, just no good at all.’” Especially in the elementary grades, teachers and parents across the country report students throwing up, staying home with stomachaches, locking themselves in the bathroom, crying, having nightmares, and otherwise acting out on test days. As a first- and second-grade teacher, giving mandated state tests, educational consultant Sara Truebridge said, “I never gave a test where I didn’t have one child totally melt down. Just crying. These are second graders. They can’t do it, they’re nervous, they’re tired, they’re showing tics, they’re not sleeping. And these may be the most gifted kids in the room.” Research dating back to the 1950s has shown that 25 to 40 percent of students suffer anxiety significant enough to depress test performance and that these anxious students perform 12 percent worse on average. The current thinking is that anxiety distracts people from the task at hand, as their minds are focused on negative thoughts about shortcomings and their imminent failure, and that this negative self-talk also interferes with working memory. All of these effects undermine the reliability of standardized tests to discern students’ true competence. And as the tests draw more and more focus, they destroy students’ enjoyment of school. The anxiety doesn’t end when students go home. The pressure of high-stakes tests is driving parents to act against their own values. “Parenthood, like war, is a state in which it’s impossible to be moral,” wrote Lisa Miller in New York Magazine in 2013 in an article in which she describes sending a fourth grader to school with head lice so she could take the state-mandated English exam to get into competitive middle schools. From striving immigrants to the very wealthy, it’s becoming more commonplace for families across the country to spend thousands of dollars annually to help their kids prepare for the standardized tests that will get them into public gifted kindergartens, private schools, competitive middle schools and high schools, and, of course, college. Since the 1970s, among affluent families the total amount spent on out-of-school enrichment has grown from $ 3,500 a year to $ 8,900 a year, both in 2012 dollars. For working-class parents whose kids are more likely to be labeled failing, school-mandated tutoring, afterschool programs, and Saturday and summer school sessions crowd out limited time and resources for extracurriculars or other enrichment. “She goes in the morning to the extra tutoring before school, she stays after school, she’s pulled out during class,” says Rosendo Soto, a firefighter in Texas, whose middle child is struggling with the tests. “We’re on spring break now, I’m working intensively with her every day on math and writing expository stories and personal narratives. It’s all geared toward these tests, tests, tests. She’s nervous, fearful, and I have to remind her every day it’s just school. I feel like we’re sending her to be tortured.” The money parents spend on preparing kids for tests dwarfs what schools are spending to give them. The total test preparation, tutoring, and counseling market in the United States was estimated at $ 13.1 billion by 2015, and the global private tutoring market was estimated to pass a whopping $ 78.2 billion. That counts the companies like Kaplan, Princeton Review, and Grockit that hold classes, sell books, and offer online services, and the national and international chains like Kumon, Sylvan Learning, and Huntington Learning Center that accept kids as young as eighteen months old for pre-academic and after-school drilling and prepping. That estimate also includes money spent on private tutors, who can charge anywhere from $ 45 to $ 1,000 an hour, and independently operated “Saturday schools” or “cram schools” that are expanding from their traditional Chinese-, Korean-, and Russian-speaking immigrant roots to attract more and more mainstream American families. What these dollar figures don’t convey is the time, anxiety, and opportunity cost that come along with them. Instead of giving them time to pursue a creative passion, a sport, play outside, or just be together as a family, millions of stressed-out parents are frog-marching their kids through hours of the most boring kind of studying on top of the time they spend in school. No matter how much you want to convey to your children the spirit of fair play, the joy of learning for its own sake, the belief that they are more than a score on a piece of paper, sending them to test prep is an action that speaks far louder than words. Kamenetz, Anya (2015-01-06). The Test: Why Our Schools are Obsessed with Standardized Testing–But You Don't Have to Be (pp. 19-20). PublicAffairs. Kindle Edition. Directory: uploads uploads -> 587 Return function, r i(X) r i(0) r i(1) r i(2) r i(3) 1 0 2 4 6 Thermal Station, I 2 0 1 5 6 3 0 3 5 6 10 uploads -> Department of science and humanities department of mathematics part-a questions and answers uploads -> The Case Against the nypd’s Quota-Driven ‘Broken Windows’ Policing What Is It? uploads -> For want of a nail uploads -> Ownership Models There are two different types of ownership models uploads -> Police Militarization uploads -> City of rising star regular meting thursday, july 14, 2016 uploads -> Township of winfield uploads -> Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act of 2014 uploads -> The Black Panther Party’s Ten-Point Program What We Want Now! Download 0.62 Mb. Share with your friends:
|