Schools need more vigor, less rigor
Commentary by
Robert Koehler
Sharpen your No. 2 pencils. The authoritarian-minded have taken over the classroom and miseducation is getting serious. Spare the standardized test and spoil the child.
As the No Child Left Behind Act (can you spell "cynical"?) settles in as the law of the land, a tainted urgency grips our schools, to redirect resources and gear up to meet new federal proficiency-measuring requirements: Test all the little ones, every year, from third grade on. That'll make sure no kid graduates stupid.
The problem, as I see it -- speaking as a former writing teacher but, more important, as a parent of a teenager in high school -- is that this "accountability"-fixated piece of legislation is profoundly confused about the difference between proficiency and understanding, and reduces the educational process to a forced march through Right Answer Land.
Its solution to the education crisis in this country, and the shame of our having left so many children behind for so many years, is not, oh, smaller class size and more individual attention for more students -- and certainly nothing exotic, like more joy, more compassion, more self-esteem-building, more bully-control -- but that bargain-basement reform of the drill-and-whack crowd, more rigor.
No education reporter could live without that word these days. It crisps up any paragraph, exudes a no-more-nonsense aura. "The rigorous new federal testing requirements ..." Cuts to the chase, right? How could anyone object to a little more of this in their child's school?
But look up the word, as author, teacher and anti-standardized-testing activist Susan Ohanian did on her Web site, and you get to the heart of the reservations many people have about the direction the Bush administration is pushing our schools. "Rigor" means: "harsh inflexibility in opinion; strict precision: exactness; rigidity, stiffness; austerity; a condition that makes life difficult, challenging or uncomfortable, especially extremity of cold."
Think rigor mortis.
You nurture kids in warmth, not cold. But warmth is not the centerpiece of the No Child Left Behind Act, objectivity is: the cold, stark measurement of whether our kids know diddly-squat, and if not, why not. Where they fall short, heads will roll. Be scared, all ye who keep our property taxes high.
This legislation has little to do with the messy, complex business of helping young people come into their own by learning how to think, write, control their emotions and tap their latent genius. It has everything to do with establishing authority. It presupposes that all knowledge is official and finite, like, say, the state capitals. You either know them or you don't. Proficiency means nothing more than the ability to say back what's in the book. The answers you give aren't supposed to contain surprises.
What's sad and chilling is how low we're reaching in our expectations of the young. When learning is all rules, no discovery, then the student closes up, becomes stupid, and can't grasp the rules, no matter how simple.
I remember, for instance, my daughter's third-grade teacher lamenting how much trouble the kids were having with, of all things, paragraph indentation. She was the first of a series of teachers I've encountered who were locked into having to teach to a looming, merciless achievement test.
Such tests exert an enormous gravitational pull on the classroom. This one decreed that students had to write in five-paragraph blocks, topic sentence, blah blah blah, conclusion. The whole thing was poison; it stiffed them out of their creativity, and they responded by glazing over at paragraph indentation.
Far too many of my conversations with teachers over the years have been about what some test or other requires the kids to know, and it has only gotten worse. Now that my daughter is in high school, every class is a moving sidewalk of pre-established expectations, and no one speaks of joy, learning for its own sake or the nuances of subject matter. The teachers are hysterical to get through the material.
So now we're ramping up to leave no child behind by testing them more, judging them more and, guess what, inevitably decreeing that a fixed percentage are failures. But the ones who do poorly on the tests can have their alternatives explained to them by local military recruiters -- who, thanks to an obscure clause in the No Child Left Behind Act, will have their phone numbers.
— Robert Koehler
The Spokesman-Review
2003-01-01
http://www.spokesmanreview.com/news-story.asp?date=010103&ID=s1281667&cat=section.commentary
INDEX OF MILITARIZATION OF OUR SCHOOLS
