More About That Speech

When taking a test becomes MORE important than what a president of the United States says, then you KNOW public education is in the shitter.

It's really gone downhill in the past decade. It used to be that despite tons of right-wing propaganda, public schools did quite well up until the advent of No Child Left Behind and the "standards" mania (see the 1995 book, The Manufactured Crisis, for details). Now it's deskilling teachers from being professionals to being merely test preparation workers and proctors, making them into virtual slaves. They don't dare speak up for fear of their jobs, and they CAN be easily fired (it's simply a matter of unscrupulous administrators creating a paper trail to be used later) and blackballed from all 13,000 public school districts if they ARE fired. Districts have found clever ways to get around the tenure laws to get rid of malcontents all the while saying they can't fire teachers without tremendous expense.

Ohanian says this:

I wasn't planning on posting any articles about the ridiculous reaction(s) to President Obama's speech. Life is too short. But then Steve Krashen pointed out the part in bold. It emphasizes what I found so ironic about the ridiculous boilerplate lesson plans for the speech sent out by the US Department of Education. When curriculum is tied to standards and standards are tied to tests, then the test is the curriculum. There isn't time for anything but tests and test prep. When the test has infinitely more power than the President of the United States, what happens to the teacher's voice? The community's? Do you think students will learn the habits and attitudes the President claims to espouse from McGraw-Hill worksheets?

Teaching to the test was all the teachers did at the school I worked before I was unlawfully sacked. It was evident at the school's "PLC" or grade-level meetings. The teachers worked together on math and language arts curriculum to make sure they were all on the same page, doing the same thing at the same time in preparation for standardized tests. They did nothing but test prep and proctor. Meanwhile, science and social studies, to say nothing of art, were marginalized.

It's not going to get any better in public education. The handwriting was on the wall thirty years ago, when trashing of the public schools by the Friedmanites began to take hold. Few people saw what was coming.