My thoughts and experiences
as a baby boomer
Creative Solutions
Homeschooling
Being a baby boomer, I have so many thoughts and ideas going through my head that it is hard to focus one one subject, but when I do, look out. I have so much ire on our so called education system. I am reading a book Dumbing Us Down, the hidden curriculum of compulsory schooling, by John Taylor Gatto. It is a small book, but it speaks volumes. Mr. Gatto taught for 26 years in New York City public schools, a number of these years in Harlem and Spanish Harlem. In 1990 the New York “Senate named Mr. Gatto New York City Teacher of the Year. Just after receiving the 1991 New York State Teacher of the Year Award, Mr. Gatto announced he was going to quit because he didn’t want to “hurt” kids anymore.
According to Gatto’s observations, the seven lessons taught in public schools from Harlem to Hollywood Hills, are these:
1. Confusion (The natural order of real life is violated by heaping disconnected facts on students.)
2. Class Position (Children are locked together into categories where the lesson is that “everyone has a proper place in the pyramid.”)
3. Indifference (Inflexible school regimens deprive children of complete experiences.)
4. Emotional dependency (Kids are taught to surrender their individuality to a “predestined chain of command.”
5. Intellectual dependency (One of the biggest lessons schools teach is conformity rather than curiosity.)
6. Provisional self-esteem (“The lesson of report cards, grades, and tests, is that children should not trust themselves or their parents, but should instead rely on the evaluation of certified officials.”)
7. One can’t hide (Schooling and homework assignments deny children privacy and free time in which to learn from parents, from exploration, or from community.) ¹
Traditional forms of instruction in America, even before the Revolution, had three specific purposes:
1. To make good people
2. To make good citizens
3. And to make each student find some particular talents to develop to the maximum.
I do not believe in the “No child left behind” act. This is an act to close the achievement gap with accountability, flexibility, and choice, so that no child is left behind. No Child Left Behind requires all government-run schools receiving federal funding to administer a state-wide standardized test (all students take the same test under the same conditions) annually to all students. The students' scores are used to determine whether the school has taught the students well. Schools which receive Title I funding through the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 must make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) in test scores (e.g. each year, its fifth graders must do better on standardized tests than the previous year's fifth graders). ²
Again, education is just teaching the kids to pass a test in order to government funding, as stated in the
NCLB act of 2001.
References:
1. Review - The Freeman - February 1993, http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/bookstore/dumbdnlapp.htm
2. No Child Left Behind Act, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Child_Left_Behind_Act
Opt out of standardized testing -
A Pennsylvania mother has decided she does not want her two children to take the two-week-long standardized tests given by her state as part of the federal No Child Left Behind law. And she hopes other parents will do the same.
Michele Gray's sons -- Ted Rosenblum, 11, and John Michael Rosenblum, 9 -- did independent study the week of March 14 while their classmates were filling in hundreds of bubbles in classrooms with doors marked, "Quiet. Testing in Progress."
Gray says the only legal exemption that would allow her kids to sit out the tests was a religious objection. So that's what she did.
But Gray says her concerns go well beyond religion. "The more I look at standardized tests, the more I realize that we have, as parents, been kind of sold a bill of goods."
She says the tests are not accurate measures of accomplishment, create undue anxiety for students and are used to punish schools.
She gives the example of her sons' award-winning school, Park Forest Elementary, which last year was put on "warning" status after the school's special education students fell below the level of progress the state expects on their exams.
"The more I looked at it, the more outraged I became," Gray said, "This is not something I want to be contributing to (or) something I want my children participating in."
Dr. Timothy Slekar, an associate professor of education at Penn State Altoona, agrees. It was his op-ed piece on the Huffington Post website that inspired Gray to take action.
Slekar is also a father and this year chose not to allow his 11-year-old son Luke to take the tests. He says schools are narrowing their curricula in an effort to boost test scores and wasting too much time preparing for, and then taking, the tests.
He says the tests aren't an accurate indicator of a child's -- or a school's -- performance. "I'm a father and an educator who's finally said, 'This is it. I'm done.' Something has to give. Something has to change," Slekar said.
Another education professor, Dana Mitra, also isn't happy with the tests, but decided to allow her third-grader daughter to take them this year because she's afraid that holding her daughter out could harm the school's test results.
"Given that we're interested in wanting our schools to be the best that they can, we feel pressure as parents to want to help our school," she said. She's not sure what she'll do with her daughter next year.
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