A Question of Balance

When you evaluate anything, you choose measures.  Unfortunately, the measures of educational success have become high-stakes test scores.

This emphasis is unnatural and unhealthy.  One can read all about its effects upon Success Academy at Chalkbeat.  Success needs to deliver  over high scores to please its financial backers.  It has all the earmarks of an obsessive compulsive disorder.  The children are prepped to the extent of having "dress rehearsals" in which they practice under real conditions, sometimes even using perforated reference sheets.

Prep begins as early as the Fall and intensifies in the Spring until it engulfs all other purposes of education.  Students take regular practice exams.  They even come in on Saturday for more.  They are evaluated based on their daily results.  The scores are made public in the school.  The high scorers have their pictures posted.  The students on the lower end lose their recess. 

Indeed, the test scores are so important that the school had to delay the Spring recess until after the exams.  Time and Tide and Test wait for no man!  Nothing must interfere with the relentless march towards the test.  Those who score high, a.k.a., the winners, in the practice assessments get nifty prizes, including basketballs, bracelets, food and, apparently, socks.  I'd wonder if the losers get underwear (like a child's worst Christmas-eve nightmare), but I know they get nada!  According to a teacher quoted in the Chalkbeat piece, "Their self worth is all tied to their performance on this test."  That is so wrong!

The school held a large rally, attended by about 2,300 students, before the tests.  The rally was billed as "Slam the Exam."  It would have been a great opportunity to bus everyone up to Cuomo again, that is, if Eva hadn't already got everything she wanted.  As I viewed a picture of the rally, I couldn't help but think how it's a short step from manipulating young minds to cheer for tests to manipulating them towards far worse things.  If Success Academies continue to expand at their present rate, and a great dictator comes along, it may be a short hop, skip and jump to totalitarianism:  "War is Peace," "Freedom is Slavery," "Ignorance is Strength" and "Test Prep is Real Learning"!  Maybe Orwell's 1984 has finally come due. 

To add to the humiliating nature of the whole undertaking, Success Academy sends e-mails throughout its entire network each day with teacher rankings based on student performance on practice tests.  Some teachers are enthused by the competition; others view it as demoralizing.  A teacher may be demoted if he or she fails to climb up from the bottom.  Hurrah for Stanley Kaplan, #1 several days in a row now and still going strong!

In order to drive home the importance of these exams, teachers are very active.  Teachers call homes with reminders every evening before a state test.  Seems like a nightmare to me.  For students who might arrive late, the school funds cabs for teachers to round up the potentially delinquent and chauffeur them to their tests.  There will be no fashionably late among these V.I.P.s!

In one of the most telling facts from the piece, I learned that teachers receive some strange supplies for testing days.  They get pencils, tissues AND "deodorizing powder to sop up vomit."  I hope students don't use the "dress rehearsal" to practice vomiting for the six-days of real testing!  And, I wonder how many at Success Academy really care about the social, emotional and, apparently, sometimes physical effects of all the stress put upon young children in the name of preparation for high scores.  And, I wonder how many just care about the test score at the end of it all.  Do teachers just mechanically mop up some kid's upchucked breakfast and then move on to the next spill?   

Under Stalin's Soviet reign, success was measured largely by increases in the production of steel, electricity and weapons.  Consumer goods lagged.  Freedoms fell by the wayside.  Many were forced to labor unpaid in Gulags.  Quotas proved oppressive.  Workers, supposedly the heroes of Communism, lost rights.  Electricity, Steel and missiles increased remarkably, but at what price?  Eva's test scores may also skyrocket.  And, some will see this as indicative of success.  But, as with Stalin's Soviet regime, we must ask ourselves at what cost?  At what point does testing, and the preparation for it, become a sickness, in and of itself?