Standardized Testing-A Race to Nowhere

This week, I had a conversation with another educator who was ending a California State Testing week. The dedication of this teacher is commendable; although exhausted and stressed, this educator was hopeful that her students did well. She wanted them to have a chance at the best education possible. When I mentioned to her the best education possible is not based on state testing, she went through the myriad of reasons why testing is a benefit. The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, increased the role of the federal government in public education and also expanded the role of standardized testing. These alleged benefits of standardized testing permeate the public educational system causing harm to students, teachers and the future of public education as a whole. Race To Nowhere is an excellent description of the standardized testing movement.

According to the California Department of Education, the purpose of standardized testing is “to measure how well students are learning the knowledge and skills identified in California’s content standards.” In addition, standardized testing results will assist with focusing curricular instruction and organizing teaching methods. The goals of standardized testing seem to be falling short; instead of measuring student knowledge and focusing instruction and methods, the rigor of testing seems to be a silent erosion of our school system. A recent documentary, Race To Nowhere, chronicles the culture of today’s youth in public school. According to the documentary, the epidemic of standardized testing has produced a culture for cheating, disengaging students, stress-related illness, depression, burnout, and of compromised young adults seemingly unprepared and uninspired for the future.

"Only a handful of scholars and practitioners have argued in defense of standardized tests," wrote Lishing Wang and fellow researchers Gulbahar H. Beckette and Lionel Brown. The Educational Research Newsletter analyzed the pros and cons of standard-based assessments. According to the website one of the pros of these assessments are a common core of knowledge. These common standards assist in comparing grades across teachers and schools. Students should be expected to meet common standards that are challenging and are more than just minimum requirements regardless of socioeconomic status, race or disability. The other side argues that by imposing standards on students' minds they are constricting intellectual freedom. These standardized tests oversimplify the core knowledge and do not test higher-order thinking. Cookie cutter standards either dumb down instruction or condemn low-ability students to frequent failure. Students can become disengaged and burned out.

Regardless of the side of the argument, all students, teachers and schools are not created equal and this fact is not taken into account when examining the practice of standardization. The practice of standardized test are to meant to level the playing field when in fact the playing field with struggling learners in school is never level. In other words the interventions that are being used to assist struggling students is not individualized and unsuccessful. According to the California Department of Education website’s data for July of 2008, 13, 237 students took the Math portion of the California Exit Exam and 13, 373 students took the English portion of the exam. 29% of the students passed the Math and 30% passed the English portions of the test for the state. When we superimpose the same standards on every student, teacher and school, we receive results that are disappointing—a race to nowhere.

These disappointing results are rooted in non-profit school communities maintaining for-profit activities, i.e., test scores. Data has become the catch phrase and teacher’s names are associated directly with their student’s scores. Improvement has been demanded on the back of a shocked system, and therefore an increase of assessments and pacing guides has followed. This increase of standardized testing is big business for the private sector. There are four companies that dominate the testing market: Harcourt Educational Measurement, CTB McGraw-Hill, Riverside Publishing (a Houghton Mifflin company), and NCS Pearson- three test publishers and one scoring firm. Press reports value the testing market anywhere from $400 million to $700 million. There is a top-down chain between policy, content, materials, and instruction. Policymakers dictate the content, textbook companies convert the content into materials and schools purchase these materials for consumption by teachers and students. According to a blog entitled, When Pedagogy and Policy Collide, written by Brigitte Knudson, what America is experiencing is called “commodification” of education. In others words education has became a commodity or moneymaker. Knudson goes on to state, “Education – the process of learning – has been co-opted by an alliance of business and government interests, for the dual purposes of maintaining the government’s economic interests and propelling the private sector, all while fostering a climate of continual educational crisis in the country that places blame on a system of its own creation that is intentionally underfunded to perpetuate the cycle.” This marriage of big business, government and non-profit school communities continues to lead to disappointment and a move toward privatization of public education. It’s a lose-lose situation as reformers concentrate on splintered areas of need while big business and government erode the core, destroying the public education system right under our noses.

“Race to Nowhere is a call to challenge these current assumptions and mobilize families, educators, and policy makers for how to best prepare the youth of America to become healthy, bright, contributing and leading citizens,” Race to Nowhere website. This documentary is showing this month in Pasadena, California go to see it. Spread the news to educators, parents, students and your community. Join the Race to Nowhere Facebook Page in your area. This is the link for the Los Angeles page. If a page or community group is not available for your area, start one. Let’s continue to examine the facts regarding our educational system and make it our own again.

Is My Kid Too Proper?-What Happened to Respect?

Is my kid too proper acting? This week my 17 year old was participating in a new slam poetry group; since the group’s practice is during dinner she brought food. According to my daughter, the other members were not eating, so at an appropriate moment my daughter asked the leader’s permission to eat. “I brought my dinner, am I permitted to warm and eat?” she asked. At this moment the teenage group ripped into gut-busting laughter. “Are you serious?” one of them asked. “Did you really say that right now?” another chimed in. My daughter looking and feeling a little dumbfounded wondered what was so funny. She went on to explain it is proper etiquette to ask, no one else was eating and she did not want to be rude. The laughter continued. My daughter was correct in asking could she warm and eat her food in a place she had not been before. That fact that others laughed is a telling sign of respectful behavior in today’s society.

The deterioration of respectful behavior in young adults has been a trend in recent news. In April, the New York Post ran an article about teenage “wilding”. This term originated in 1989 when a jogger in Central Park was attacked by a group of wild frenzied teenagers. According to the New York Post, groups of teenagers assaulted, robbed and terrorized subway riders in Manhattan just last month. This behavior is not respectful or proper.

Remember the days of Miss Manners? Miss Manners was the pen name of Judith Martin. Miss Manners answered questions about proper etiquette and manners in over 200 newspapers worldwide. Doesn’t seem like people care much about Miss Manners now a days. Between the road rage and “wilding” it almost seems like our society craves the “bad behavior”. Shows like “Big Brother” and “ The Real World” capitalize on the lack of manners and proper etiquette of twenty-somethings. These shows are very popular with the teenage crowd. The reality show Ladette to Lady’s premise is to teach proper etiquette to loud, foul-mouthed uncultured women. This reality show displays a transformation from wild child to polished lady. It’s dramatic but the sentiment is in the right place.

It may be popular to wild out but it is not proper or respectful. It is ok to have manners in today’s society. We can go back to teaching our children to respect their elders, speak properly, and carry oneself with dignity. The thug-like attitude that steps on the feet of others is not cool or pleasant. The days of yesteryear are longed for as we enter new and challenging times. Our media, music and entertainment do not support the etiquette of Miss Manners, although we can teach our children proper etiquette so they can turn out to be respectful teenagers. When my children were little I was yelling while driving. I would often call out, “idiot!” Then one day my little girl called it out before I could. That was the end of that word. I had taught her how to yell at others. Modeling good behavior and respect for other people can be the strongest example. All is not lost in the area of good behavior; many young people are lovely and caring individuals. It’s proper to ask to eat at someone else’s home, open the door for others, help elderly people across the street and speak without using filthy language. So, start with the young people in your life. Model good behavior, monitor media examples and call them on bad actions. This can be the start of a new era of good feelings and respect for one another.

Stanley Greenspan: Inspiration for an Educational Revolution

May 3rd 2010

Dr. Stanley Greenspan died this week; he was a great man. His official webpage described him as: “Stanley I. Greenspan, M.D., is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Pediatrics at George Washington University Medical School and Chairman of the Interdisciplinary Council on Developmental and Learning Disorders. The world’s foremost authority on clinical work with infants and young children with developmental and emotional problems, his work has guided parents, professionals and researchers all over the world.”

Dr. Greenspan taught me new ways to teach struggling students. I first met him six years ago when a parent suggested his training course. When I heard him teach the Developmental Individual-difference Relationship Model (DIR), bells and whistles went off in my head on how to teach non-typical learners. His model examines the student in the areas of home life, biomedical profile, sensory profile, and emotional development. This model gave me the additional inroads to students and knowledge of how and when to offer new areas of support. I used Dr. Greenspan’s work as a framework for teaching. This was the beginning of my educational revolution.

When I call for an educational revolution, I am not proposing that teachers know every aspect of a student’s home life, biomedical profile, sensory profile, and emotional development. What I am stating is that creating a relationship with your students and having some knowledge of their home life is important in building educational success primarily with low achieving and struggling learners. The fact that a student chews on his or her pencil or gets up ten times to throw out a piece of paper provides information about how calm their body is or is not in the educational setting. If a student is not creating ideas independently, he or she could have challenges in emotional development. With the use of this model, test scores and lives will flip in a positive direction.


This is the first line of defense I choose to fight, teaching struggling students how to engage learning to be successful well-rounded citizens. For example, three families contacted me in the last two weeks to ask for help with their children’s education in public school. One was an AP student with auditory processing, another an Asperger’s student with an accommodation (504) plan and lastly, a student who left public school for private school only to find out he was not understood there either. The tools I learned from Dr. Greenspan assisted these struggling learners in ways others tools did not. Regardless of the area of educational reform (privatization, standardized test scores, disempowerment of teachers, or corporate influence) the struggling learner is demanding our attention, and focusing on the struggling learner is necessary to make change.