Posted on 04/29/2004 10:18:07 PM PDT by FITZ
"April is the cruelest month," wrote T. S. Eliot, and I found myself in complete agreement as the raison d'etre for education, the TAKS tests, reached its terminus this week.
My despondency, however, must be small compared with the travails of some children in many parts of Texas, who found themselves, in the months leading up to the tests, ushered into special -education status or unceremoniously ejected from their host schools.
I am convinced, albeit intuitively, that the pressures to produce stellar test results sets up a corresponding momentum to shield mediocre students from being folded into the accountability roster.
One Machiavellian way to accomplish this is to push children who are struggling to make the grade into special- education classrooms. It is not hard to imagine that a committee of educators in cohort with specialists may bend its good intentions to place the imprimatur of learning-disabled status on some children who have been ill-taught or who are ill-equipped to read. Pliant parents may buy into the rationale without a comprehensive understanding of hidden motives at work.
These occurrences are probably rare, but the incidence of one is one too many.
Sometimes, children are also treated like chess pieces that are strategically sacrificed to achieve checkmates.
It is not uncommon to find that children's transfers are revoked when they have established themselves as liabilities for TAKS testing.
Enrollment is good for schools, for it brings in money. At the beginning of the school year, there is great enthusiasm for accepting students from outside the district's boundaries, but once the transfer students' academic profiles are in place, money sometimes cedes its throne to projected test results.
I imagine that when revocation orders are prepared, those school administrators who place a larger currency upon their careers and their schools than they do on children take into careful consideration the proclivities of parents to challenge or to appeal the decisions.
Again, pliant parents who are susceptible to silver-tongued speech and to suave persuasions seem least able to protect their children from vagaries.
While April is the cruelest month for a handful of children, it is a disagreeable and dismal one for many.
Weeks of listening to "test talks," taking a catena of full-blown practice tests that are dry runs for D-Day, and working on countless ditto assignments have a deflating effect on children's psyches. Masterful teachers can alleviate some of the tedium with creative lessons and engaging teaching styles, but ennui trickles into classrooms, nonetheless, and floods the fertile landscape of imagination and creativity.
When I attended school in Calcutta, India, I took as many high-stakes tests as children take today, but I do not recall even a single classroom hour spent in preparatory huddle. Perhaps the need for it was obviated because no test question in any discipline was set up to be answered in multiple-choice format.
The weeks and months teachers in El Paso spend grinding for the test would be worth it if the exemplary school rankings such efforts produced led to robust scholastic gains for children in high-school and university milieus.
But such is not the case.
The number of local high- school graduates who are enrolled in remedial classes at UTEP speaks volumes for the failures of our educational system.
Ramnath Subramanian, a fifth-grade teacher at Hacienda Heights Elementary School in El Paso, writes often for the El Paso Times on educational topics. E-mail address: ramnath10@aol.com
A union worker that doesn't want their work productivity measured? Next thing you know they'll want 3 months vacation every year, in the summer.
Teacher unions want essay questions instead of multiple choice tests because the scoring is much more subjective and pliable to manipulation. And the high cost of scoring essay answers insures this.
failures of our educational system, I don't think so.
It is doing exactly what it was designed to do!
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