Opting Out of State Testing: Motherhood and Boys' Dreams

Skyrim Screen Shot from here.

I. Boys Dream.

During breakfast my son explains how he and a few others are designing a 3D-RPG set in ancient times. The "few others" hail from England and they are actively recruiting other online friends from Japan and Australia and inviting them to bring on their mad programming and design skills. Although they are still discussing roles, they have identified game engine designer, pixel artist, 3D-modeler, environment builder, base programmer, and first person character model designer as essential roles that they believe they can fulfill.  My son's 13 and the boys he's designing with are between the ages of 12 and 15. None have taken official programming classes.  They learn from each other, others on line, reference materials, trial and error.  Their goal is to design and produce a kick ass game that has better graphics than Skyrim. I'm rooting for them.

As a mom, I recognize that the distance between my son's on-line learning life and school is vast and seems to be growing more so each week.  At home he is imagining himself as a programmer and has been learning C++ quite ardently for the last year.  C++ is a programming language and functions as a composing tool.  At school the composition models he is given and expected to follow are of the five-paragraph kind that are designed to replicate state testing.  The reading he does at school is limited to text book passages, test prepping, and YA fiction and children's literature, such as The Outsiders, The Giver, or Freak the Mighty. Alongside the literature are multiple choice NJ-ASK-like tests and short answer responses.  At school, social media is banned and collaboration is limited to peer response to state testing prompt writing.

Screen Shot from Skyrim.

Nary a Skyrim in sight. And frankly, that's problematic. Few of the school activities actually match what literate people do.

The quality of learning at public school is directly connected to the state mandated testing emphasis that has grown out of control since NCLB (No Child Left Behind) and has intensified even more so since RTTT (Race to the Top).  If we want to know why public school learning is less than we want and need, we need only look at those beyond the public school door who have removed the teacher from the classroom and replaced him or her with test prepping. Teachers are kept from teaching in some schools and instead are made to "do test prep."  Electives are replaced with test prepping courses. Curriculum is narrowed. The number of minutes dedicated to science, social studies, art, music, and language has been lessened. All of these actions reduce learning, interest, passion, and commitment.

It's discouraging as a mom to see how narrow the range of learning is at school and how test-centric it has become.  For example, my son, like all students at his middle school, had to take "Creative Math" as an elective, so that students had even more time to learn 'school math.'  What teachers and children at my son's school love and feel passionate about seem to be less an impetus for curriculum design than school reading, writing and math that are privileged on foolish and foolishly made state tests.

The one-to-one correlation between state testing and school curriculum is a mistake and is killing learning.

II. Parents Act.

My husband is a public school educator and I was one for more than 20 years, so it was challenging in many ways to say no to state testing mandates this year.  We did so realizing there could be professional ramifications to our actions.  Nonetheless, we sent a letter to the superintendent of schools and the Board of Education where we live requesting that our son be excused from the NJ ASK (New Jersey's state assessment for reading, writing, math and science).  Here's a portion of the letter:

We are writing to request that our child, XXXXXXX, who is currently a seventh
grader at XXXXX Middle School, be excused from all state testing (NJ ASK). We
have given this great thought and have concluded that the current diet of state
testing in New Jersey is potentially harmful to our son and does not yield important
information about our child. Since 2008 when XXXXXXXX was in third grade he has sat
for the week long assessment. Four years of testing have not provided us with any
reliable or important information about our son’s intellectual capacity. Rather, we
see that our tax dollars have simply been used by state officials to enrich companies
who profit by creating or scoring these measures.

We live in complex times and the archaic method of paper and pencil tests to
measure school math and reading/writing information need to be retired. These
tasks do not reflect the learning we seek for our child, nor do they represent the
complexity of thinking he needs in order to be both joyful and productive in his life.
Further the narrowness of the measures is also highly problematic.

As the state test is a privileged event in New Jersey, we are concerned that our son
is learning that the test content represents the totality of what is important to learn.
If this event occurred once in his life we would be less concerned. However, the
testing culture that permeates schools as a result of NCLB (2002) and the continued
emphasis by President Obama’s education department is informing what our
child thinks is important to know. We do not consider school-based mathematics,
reading and writing tasks as represented on state assessments as being important
and certainly disagree that these slices of contrived disciplinary knowledge are
representative of what a healthy child might come to understand. Simply put, we
want far more for our child and know that these tests stand in the way to better and
more complex understandings of what it means to know, create, and collaborate in
2012.

We do not want to resort to removing our child from the school for the two weeks
of testing. Our concern is not with the public school or the board of education, but rather with the federal and state imposition of mandatory testing. We seek to be
honest and deliberate in our request for our son to be able to opt out of NJ-ASK
testing. Again, we request this primarily as we see this testing regime to be harmful
to him.

Please advise.

A week later we received an email from the superintendent who we like and respect that indicated that our request would not be honored as testing is written into state code and must be obeyed (at least by school officials).  I then forwarded to him a letter in which another family from a public school district in NJ with a seventh grader had been excused from the testing.  This seemed to give some pause as the return email from the superintendent indicated that my son would need to be out the following week of testing as it is make up testing and he also gave me the name and number of the state official in NJ. I did phone the NJDOE representative who to date has never returned the call.

The absence of a shiny letter giving us permission, gave us pause and we are better for it.  No authority was going to directly support our parental decision to remove our son from state testing.  We simply needed to take action. And so we did. During the testing week, our son attended school after the morning test was concluded and arrived late during the make up week.  We hope our actions are replicated and that a collective of parents helps to re-balance public school curricula so that teachers' and children's lives and interests may once again matter.

III. Love.

Circa, 1967 (M.A. Reilly)

Parents' love of their children represents a force far more powerful than multinational corporations or politicians and their political appointees.  In the weeks since our son opted out, the news stories about state testing from both New York and New Jersey reaffirm our decision.  From Pineapplegate to a daily tally of Pearson test errors to making 8-year-olds confess their secrets--the idiocy is apparent and reveals the greed that motivates state tests regardless of the rhetoric about "being ready for this century."

I ask you what is writing a five paragraph essay on a secret you've never told anyone getting a child 'ready' to do? 

I want to believe that love is greater than corporate greed; that it is greater than re-election hopes--regardless of what cloth these ideologies get wrapped in.  Beneath such dressing is a stink we cannot deny--one that is killing our children's dreams, motivating fine teachers to leave education, and oddly creating less and less skillful and confident learners.

When boys and girls dream...we ought to pay attention. As parents we need to stand up for our children and say NO to federal and state testing impositions.

Undo the Folded Lie

Wing Left Behind

"Creativity is the residue of time wasted," wrote Albert Einstein. I think about this observation as I recall the last few months spent visiting city schools where 'wasting time' is an anathema. The efficient education reform machine is juiced on the single test performance of children.  I think of this as I recall my own son's teachers who in the past have who told me in hushed tones that he spends a lot of time looking out the window, daydreaming, as if such behavior was aberrant. Some seemed a bit surprised when I acknowledged what had been said and added, "Yes I know. He's learned that at home."

Nurturing the child's imagination ought to be our concern, our wonder, our delight, our obligation.  It needs to be our national interest and we need to stop pouring tax dollars into testing regimes and the awful prepping that accompanies such national attention. In the classrooms I have been visiting, the imagination is largely undetected.  Truth be told? These visits break my heart.  Recently, I met two young teens who were characterized by their teacher. One was characterized as 'mentally retarded' and the other,  'autistic'.  The teacher agreed that I would have the opportunity to meet the boys and to work with each of them. She expressed concern about the boys' reading given the directive that she had received that limited her choice of texts to 'grade level texts' and ones that exceeded the students' reading ease.  Her school is 'readying' fro the Common Core. We have to use hard books, she says. Her mission is to 'move students from level 1 to to level 2' in state testing.

"I don't know how I am going to move them to level 2," she confided. I know of no other way to characterize many of the teachers I meet other than to say they seem beleaguered, frightened, and terribly uncertain of themselves as teachers--as thinkers.  Student performance on a single state test matters more than anything else. It is no longer hyperbole to say that their very livelihood depends on how their students perform on this single measure.

***************

I had an iPad with me and asked the first boy if he had ever used an iPad.  He said he had not and as we sat next to each other I showed him how it turned on and opened a folder of books.  He indicated that he wanted to see The Three Little Pigs.  I opened it and eased the iPad in front of him.  As we moved through the first screen, he quickly took over figuring how to interact with the text. After a lot of huffing and puffing, I asked if we might stop the book even though we had not reached the end. I asked if he could return to the beginning of the book and perhaps he might show the story to the other boy (who had been sitting near by watching his class give an efferent retelling of a  story).  He agreed and he was quickly joined by the other boy.  What was pretty remarkable was the amount of language the boys generated talking to one and to the book. There were no questions to answer, main ideas to determine, or details to name.  Story existed, at least for the moment, as pleasure.

Their laughter and chatter must have been contagious as it seemed to attract another boy who quickly took my seat and half way through the story the three were joined by another four boys. Within a minute or so, another teacher appeared and herded the boys back to their desks explaining that they needed to write a test-prep essay. One boy squawked and I asked if he might remain until the story was concluded as he had been following along from the beginning. The teacher agreed.

Because these children had not passed the state test during previous administrations, they are subject to two periods of ELA and two periods of mathematics. As a result, they do not have art, music, dance, woodworking, culinary arts, gaming, language, or any type of elective.  They know nothing of hanging out, messing around or geeking out as Mimi Ito describes.  Such worlds are not only banned from school, but are also not valued.  There is the mistaken belief that adding more test prepping time will lead to better test results. In addition to these double periods--social studies and science classes are also offered. At some schools, social studies is simply an excuse to do more "literacy" AKA: test prepping. Once a week the children participate in physical education. In most schools I visit there are no computers, handhelds, or any other type of potential assistive technologies in use or in some cases even present. 

At some schools the teens remain in a single classroom all day. They do not have an occasion to move. One teacher confided how hard this is for some of the learners as they have ADHD. She says how she couldn't do what is required of her students.  Her comment about ADHD had me recalling a comment Jonah Lehrer made recently on a radio show. He was discussing his new book, Imagine: How Creativity Works, on the Brian Lehrer Show (3.22.12) and it got me wondering:

What if school was based on the continuous reinvention of self, rather than accumulation of information?

Jonah discussed how it was once thought that creativity declined as one aged.  Lehrer says this has been found to be false. It appeared to be so as when one ages some become "weighted down with too much conventional wisdom" (Lehrer, Kindle Locations 1789-1790).  In contrast, creative people consistently reinvent themselves.

Imagine school based on reinvention?  Imagine how differently students and teachers would be understood and situated if the retrieval and remembrance of information ceased to be the main emphasis and instead occasioning the definition and reinvention of one's self were privileged.  Would we need to refer to children as 1s, 2s, partially proficient, ELLs, Speds? Would terms such as 'mentally retarded' still find voice? Would we need to classify children?  Might we redefine malady as sources of creativity?  Lehrer makes this observation:

Or look at a recent study led by Holly White, a psychologist at the University of Memphis. White began by giving a large sample of undergraduates a variety of difficult creative tests. Surprisingly, those students diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) got significantly higher scores. White then measured levels of creative achievement in the real world, asking the students if they’d ever won prizes at juried art shows or been honored at science fairs. In every single domain, from drama to engineering, the students with ADHD had achieved more. Their attention deficit turned out to be a creative blessing (Kindle Locations 602-606).

This capacity to be distracted--a stimulus for creativity--is ruthlessly removed from the day-to-day lives of children and teachers at school. The efficient machine does not recognize distraction as an asset.  This efficiency is a human spirit killer. From the President to the town realtor--from the parent bragging about his/her child's state test score to the CEOs of companies raking in billions on selling tests, scoring services, curricula, test prepping materials, resources, and professional development--we each bear the blame of limiting children and we have the voice to undo it.

Auden, in "September 1, 1939"  said it best, when he wrote:

All I have is a voice 
To undo the folded lie
Of the sensual man-in-the-street 
And the lie of Authority 
Whose buildings grope the sky: 
There is no such thing as the State 
And no one exists alone; 
Hunger allows no choice 
To the citizen or the police; 
We must love one another or die.

How do you unfold the lie?
Where have you started?



Work Cited
Lehrer, Jonah (2012-03-19). Imagine: How Creativity Works. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Kindle Edition.