tests

SUMMER IS THE season for high school football practice. Two years ago, the players at Central Catholic High School in Portland, Ore., got a different kind of coaching, brought in by head coach Steve Pyne. For the first time, U.S. Army recruiters would serve as volunteers to run the football team through their strength and conditioning paces—helping them prepare for the annual “Holy War” matchup against archrival Jesuit High School.

According to an article in the U.S. Army’s monthly Recruiter Journal, the Army “footprint” for the big game included a Humvee parked outside the stadium and a pre-kickoff event in which local recruiters placed “unit patch decals from various Army divisions” onto players’ helmets.

“Not once at practice did we talk about the Army,” said one of the recruiters. “It wasn’t about the Army. It was about how we can integrate ourselves into the community in a way the community will accept us and not feel like we are a threat.”

In recent years, the Pentagon’s military recruiting capabilities have experienced a quantum leap—including unprecedented access to Christian high schools. Not only are military recruiters using football to gain entry into parochial schools, but they are increasingly relying on military testing in schools to access students’ private information without parental consent.

Jan Resseger 9-01-2012

THE SO-CALLED “accountability movement” has been a bipartisan movement; virtually no one is proposing that we cut back on standardized tests. They’ve come to dominate school for children and teachers, and they’ve narrowed the curriculum. They’ve caused people to feel pressure to cheat. While standardized tests have been emphasized less in schools where children are highly affluent—those children still get an enriched curriculum—children in schools that are poor get a heavily test-prep curriculum that’s not very enticing.

At a higher level, standardized tests are at the core of the test-and-punish philosophy of No Child Left Behind (NCLB). All the punishments are based on test scores; whether it’s identifying failing schools and closing them if their scores are too low or giving teachers poor evaluations, and maybe firing them, based on student test scores—or whether it’s the very draconian ways of dealing with the bottom 5 percent of schools in the NCLB waivers and Race to the Top grants, as Education Secretary Arne Duncan proposes.

High-stakes testing is at the core of what’s wrong with where we’re headed. Because the stakes are so high, they’ve caused a narrowing of the curriculum. The tests required for NCLB are basic reading and math. They don’t test social studies or the arts. Because the scores matter so much, they’re driving policy all around it.

Jonathan Kozol, author of Fire in the Ashes, talks about the gripping stories of poor children, the problems of “obsessive testing,” and how to build a school system worthy of a real democracy. An interview by Elaina Ramsey.

Elaina Ramsey 8-07-2012

Take a test to measure your “intelligence.”