-Caveat Lector-
New York Times
December 6, 1999
Soccer Moms vs. Standardized Tests
By CHARLES J. SYKES
MILWAUKEE -- After decades of endless gold stars, happy faces and
inflated grades, American parents apparently were not ready for a
reality check about how much our schools are really teaching our
children.
Across the country, new, higher academic standards that states
adopted in a spirit of educational reform are being dumbed down,
and supposedly rigorous graduation tests are being diluted or
dropped, as evidence mounts that too many students will fall short
of the higher expectations.
It is not surprising that more rigorous state standards have come
under fire from the usual opposition coalition of civil rights
groups, progressive educators and teacher unions. What is striking
though, is the opposition from soccer moms.
In Wisconsin, where legislators backed off plans to require a high
school graduation test, most of the opposition to the exam came not
from troubled urban schools, but from affluent suburbs. A group
calling itself Advocates for Education and based in the Milwaukee
suburb of Whitefish Bay, insisted, "High-stakes testing will be
detrimental to education and unfair to children." Suburban critics
in many parts of the state fretted about the pressure that tests
would place on children. After suburban parents lobbied
parent-teacher organizations, the State Legislature voted to scrap
the graduation test before a single student had taken it.
In New York and Massachusetts, officials yielded to pressure to set
absurdly low passing grades for their new tests, while in Virginia
and Arizona, state boards of education are already backing away
from tests that proved to be too tough for even the so-called
better schools. In Virginia, only 7 percent of schools met new
achievement standards, and in Arizona, 9 out of 10 sophomores
failed a new math test.
For much of this century, the educational establishment has behaved
as if it were addicted to bad ideas, indulging its own wishful and
romantic thinking even in the face of mounting evidence of failure.
The new tests were supposed to counteract the trendy
experimentation, watered-down curriculums and questionable teaching
methods by introducing both accountability and consequences for
failure.
But for decades, the schools had been allowed to obscure the fact
that many children were not mastering basic subjects. The constant
positive reinforcement of unrealistic grading and easy tests was
meant not only for the children, whose self-esteem remained strong
in the face of shaky math and reading abilities, but for their
parents, as well.
For many of these parents, the new tests were a very rude shock.
Accustomed to thinking of educational difficulties as somebody
else's problem, they and their school districts suddenly faced the
possibility of failure.
As reformers have belatedly discovered, they badly underestimated
the extent to which parents as well as teachers and bureaucrats had
a vested interest in believing that whatever else might be wrong
with American education, their own children were above average.
Support for high standards came with an unspoken caveat: they were
quite all right when they were applied to someone else's school and
someone else's child.
So instead of sounding an alarm about the need to change the way we
teach our children, one state after another is fudging the test.
And a remarkable number of parents have gone along with the move to
ratchet down the standards, expectations and consequences.
Reforming the schools sounded like a good idea until it hit home.
Charles J. Sykes is the author of "Dumbing Down Our Kids."
--
So S&B and the other unmentionables have already won.
bring on the NWO and lets have it done with
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