The great British historian, Lord Macaulay, thought that talk of some sort of "golden age" was nonsense. "No man who is correctly informed as to the past, will be disposed to take a morose or desponding view of the present," he noted. It is in this spirit that we review this week's collection of sob stories on how NCLB, testing, standards, and assorted ills have ruined the magical teaching and learning that supposedly took place daily in U.S. classrooms before the onset of this draconian regimen called standards-based reform. In the Washington Post Magazine, Virginia teacher Emmet Rosenfeld complains that his state's Standards of Learning have driven him out of the Fairfax County classroom he occupied for a decade. "The intense pressure to raise test scores eventually squeezed the life out of school, both for my kids and for me," Rosenfeld complains. One of his fellow teachers notes with a sigh that he hasn't had the time for his annual coffeehouse: "Desks draped with tapestries, espresso maker bubbling in the background. Kids recited poetry into a microphone or played confessional songs on guitar." We don't even know what to say about this. A Time magazine article expresses a similar sentiment. Until recently, Garfield/Franklin elementary in Muscatine, Iowa was a bastion of progressive learning - students went "eagle watching on the Mississippi River, to the University of Iowa's Museum of Natural History, and have two daily recesses." But apparently, many students couldn't actually read the exhibits at the museum. Until the school redoubled its efforts to prepare students for the state's accountability test (i.e., to teach them basic computation skills and reading), barely half achieved minimal proficiency in reading and math on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills. Now, according to Ripley, "the percentage of fourth-graders who passed the reading test rose from 58 percent to 74 percent; in math, proficiency went from 58 percent to 86 percent." But Franklin elementary "has become a very different place. The kids are better readers and mathematicians and test takers" but teachers "bemoan a loss of spontaneity, breadth, and play - problems money won't fix." Spontaneous illiteracy: now there's an educational outcome for you.
"The best answer," by Emmet Rosenfeld, Washington Post Magazine, February 22, 2004
"Beating the bubble test," by Amanda Ripley, Time, March 1, 2004