Book Review

By Gloria Pipkin

	What Happened to Recess and Why Are Our Children Struggling in Kindergarten?: McGraw-Hill, 2002

Although I've been a fan of Susan Ohanian since I first discovered her writing in Learning magazine back in the 80s, I first "met" her after she skewered standards-based education reform in One Size Fits Few: The Folly of Educational Standards. At a time when people within and without the teaching profession were pushing and shoving for a place of honor on the standards-and-accountability bandwagon, Susan was kicking its Firestone tires, reading the fine print on the sticker, and fearlessly warning us all about the dangers to children posed by this runaway national obsession. Her book delighted me so much that I posted juicy chunks of it to an email discussion list for English teachers and raved about it far and wide. Susan's editor saw some of my posts, forwarded them to Susan, and we became fast friends, and later, self-proclaimed soul sisters and occasional writing partners. Last year I had the pleasure of actually meeting her in the flesh, when she came to Florida to speak. So now you know: this review doesn't pretend to be unbiased; I am an unabashed Ohanian fan.

Although the intended audience for What Happened to Recess and Why Are Our Children Struggling in Kindergarten? is parents, it's a rich resource for test-defiers from any perspective, a veritable OED — Ohanian Encyclopedic Disquisition — of stories, facts, and figures about standards, the high-stakes tests they've spawned, the corporate honchos who hawk them, the harms they bring to children, and the heroes and heroines who resist them. In his preface to the book, Alfie Kohn calls Susan "defiantly anecdotal," and the book does include her trademark stories of nonstandard children from her own classrooms and from parents and teachers across the country, but it's also packed with outrageous examples from actual standards documents and released items from a number of state tests. Florida elementary school principal (and outspoken opponent of testing abuses) Cathy Kitto wrote me shortly after she finished Recess: "If this book isn't a call to action, nothing ever will be."

Much of the power of the book derives from Susan's omnivorous reading and her ability to make unlikely connections that particularize and illuminate her themes. Within a few paragraphs a reader might find a reference to Maurice Sendak's classic children's book Where the Wild Things Are, a quote from a New York Times columnist, and a document from the American Association for the Child's Right to Play. In a section called "A Lizard Career Path," she relates a story from The Boilerplate Rhino, by her favorite science writer, David Quammen, about a biology grad student conducting repeated speed trials with Mexican lizards, some of which improve their time while others get slower. Susan writes, "Are the people who insist that children must be tested and retested and tested some more listening? Plenty of kids are exhausted. Others, wise to the game, simply aren't interested any more. Sad to say, they've lost interest not just in tests but in school. At least none of the lizards vomited."

Always an opponent of jargon, Susan deflates and deconstructs the business lingo that education bureaucracies and their corporate buddies bring into our schools. One of my favorite sections of the book is a long riff on "benchmarks," which Susan traces to its origins as a surveyor's mark, through its uses as a software tool, and into the schools, where teachers are forced to "bow at the benchmark shrine." Lest anyone conclude that this is mere linguistic diversion, Susan provides some incredibly detailed and difficult benchmarks for middle school social studies in South Dakota.

The final chapter of the book is a roll call of the Resistance, featuring stories and tips from grassroots organizers in many states. Susan honors and acknowledges the courage and commitment of parents, teachers, students, and a few administrators who are speaking out against high stakes tests. There's Juanita Doyon, button-making queen and parent activist extraordinaire from Washington state; Michelle Trusty-Murphy, whose 9-year-old son Connor may be the only child in Nevada to resist the state test; Florida teachers who called a press conference and ripped up their bribe money for improved FCAT scores; Connecticut valedictorian Annelise Schantz, who delivered a scathing indictment of testing with the governor on the dais beside her, and many more inspiring figures and stories from the Resistance.

A number of professional test-related editorial cartoons, along with some original ones designed by Susan, add another layer of interest to Recess. The book also includes a thorough index that will help you quickly locate just the story or data you need to spice up your next letter to the editor. And in a final, sweet irony, the book is published by a professional division of McGraw-Hill - one of the largest test-makers in the country.

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Gloria Pipkin is the coordinator of the Florida Coalition for Assessment Reform, Inc. and the co-author (with ReLeah Cossett Lent) of At the Schoolhouse Gate: Lessons in Intellectual Freedom (Heinemann 2002).