New York City: Leading the Charge Toward an Educational Abyss

High-stakes standardized testing is moving forward like a thousand-ton tank. President Bush's No Child Left Behind Act, soon to be up for renewal, defines accountability through Scantron bubble test scores, and education officials across the country have obediently leaped at the order to test, test, test our country's children. The disenfranchising fallout, for teachers and students, of year-round, test-obsessed oversight has been massive and tragic. And Gotham's top brass are pushing us deeper into the abyss.

The New York Times reported last week that New York City, home of the nation's largest public school system, has inked a five-year, $80 million contract with testing giant CTB/McGraw-Hill. The agreement means that students in grades 3 through 8 will take five reading and five math standardized tests per year -- up from an already-too-many three per year. High school students, for the first time, will be tested four times a year in each subject. Schools that don't show "adequate yearly progress" will be penalized.

Doesn't this sound creepy?

"I don't think it means more pressure. I think it means more learning," Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein said. He claimed that the present testing regime was "too intermittent" to help teachers judge progress.

This is a disingenuous statement. In fact, it is a bizarre hoax to promote standardized testing as a support tool for teachers to judge students' progress. If a kid does poorly on a standardized test, the teacher may try to help that student perform better on the next test. Everyone's reputation is on the line with those test scores. The scores don't really inform differentiated teaching: they label kids.

When I taught fourth grade in the Bronx, my students knew that many of their teachers referred to them as "ones" (failures) or "low twos" (barely satisfactory), and so on. They internalized the labeling. Needless to say, at an early age, the testing regime eviscerated the kids' self-esteem and their relationships with school.

High-stakes testing takes ownership out of teachers' hands by discouraging creative lesson planning and narrowing the curriculum. Health education, art, and music also fall by the wayside. These strait-jacketing methods of defining success and failure teach children and adults to "play the game" rather than become creative, literate, empowered, social, cooperative citizens. Testing lifts no one up, and it leaves behind low-income students and families, the ones with fewer out-of-school resources for academic enrichment.

There is a better way to educate children: it's called teaching! It involves tests, but it also includes class participation, collaborative presentations, teacher observations of students' growth, homework, family projects, interdisciplinary study, application of technology, community building, creative challenges, and other elements. This is not a radical proposal. We can have high expectations and strong curricular standards without selling our souls to McGraw-Hill. New Yorkers should respond with rage to this sanctimoniously packaged corporate sweetheart contract that robs children of their precious school days.

A great number of Americans --myself included-- can wax nostalgic about our public school salad days of learning when we remember taking a standardized test here and there, but those odd testing days did not dominate our everyday lives and paralyze us in a perpetual state of fear.