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Wednesday, March 21, 2007
Terry Jeffrey :: Townhall.com Columnist
Kill This Test
by Terry Jeffrey
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When I was 4, I spent my days in the backyard, digging trenches, chasing lizards and playing with any number of my 10 brothers and sisters.

Had someone given me a literacy test, I surely would have failed. I was an unlettered preschooler.

No one tried to instruct me in reading until I showed up for first grade, where a Dominican nun taught me phonics. I paid attention for one reason: the sports pages.

When the San Francisco Giants played night games, my bedtime invariably arrived before the ninth inning. The best way to find out what happened -- whether Willie Mays had hit another home run -- was to read the morning paper.

Despite my toddling illiteracy and early lowbrow reading habits, I somehow eventually earned a degree in English from Princeton.

Looking back, I am tremendously grateful no one ever pulled me out of my backyard and tried to teach me the A-B-Cs as preparation for a federally mandated test.

That is one reason I believe congressional Democrats may do at least one good thing this year: Bills to reauthorize the Head Start program recently approved by House and Senate committees would terminate the mandatory testing President Bush has instituted for all 4- and 5-year olds in the program. This testing has a properly Orwellian name -- "The National Reporting System" (NRS) -- and deserves to die.

Enacted in 1965, Head Start funds public and private groups that run local centers which provide what the Head Start Bureau calls "comprehensive child development services" for preschoolers from poor families. In 1966, Head Start enrolled 733,000 children and spent $198.9 million. By 2005, enrollment had increased modestly to 906,993, but spending had rocketed to $6.8 billion.

In his first term, Bush embraced two ideas for Head Start. One was good, the other bad.

The good idea was to allow several states to take over from the federal government in managing local Head Start programs. (Congressional Democrats, joined by some Republicans, blocked this.)

The bad idea was to require testing of all enrolled 4- and 5-year olds. The goal, as the White House put it, was to "develop a new accountability system for Head Start to ensure that every center meets high standards in teaching children early literacy, language and mathematical skills."

Testing started in 2003.

One drawback of testing should have been obvious: It subtracted from the time a 4-year-old boy might have dedicated to whiffle ball -- so somebody could sit him down with flashcards of the A-B-Cs.

We will never now how many memorable ballgames never happened because a compassionate conservative wanted federal "accountability" for a program that should not have been a federal responsibility in the first place.

A Government Accountability Office report published in 2005 pointed to another problem: the potential for cheating. Not by the kids, but by their teachers.

Precisely because preschoolers cannot read and write, the "accountability" test must be administered to them orally -- and graded and reported to the government -- by "assessors" who also happen to be teachers and administrators for the very Head Start grantees the test is supposed to hold "accountable."

"Assessors are very involved in the scoring of the NRS, yet the NRS is evaluating the grantees that employ them -- thus, they are not independent," the GAO dryly concluded. "Assessors' input and interpretations could make the grantee appear to accomplish its goals, whether it actually does or not."

Head Start, properly constituted, can play a valuable role. Obviously, not every one has the luck I had as a preschooler to have a father who earned a good income, a mother (who despite her medical degree) stayed home to nurture her own children, many brothers and sisters to play with, a backyard to play in, and many interesting things and conversations going on around me almost all the time. With all these advantages, it apparently didn't matter that the first figures I mastered were the batting averages of baseball stars.

But the next time Republicans control the government, they should fight harder for the ancient principle of subsidiarity -- especially when it comes to children. Young children are best nurtured by parents. If parents can't do it, other family members should. If family members can't, private charities should. If charities can't, the local community should. If the local community can't, there may be a role for state government.

That may be why the Framers of the Constitution did not give Uncle Sam, who is nobody's blood relative, any power to care for 4-year-olds, let alone test their literacy.

Congressional Democrats may not know it, but stopping President Bush's testing would help push the federal government, ever so slightly, back toward that nice, little functional box it came in.
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Terence P. Jeffrey is the editor-in-chief of CNSNews

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(11 comments so Far)
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Reply # 1
Date: Mar 21, 2007 - 1:40 AM EST
At Home
If the government says or does anything--you can make a great case that it should do and say nothing--it should encourage families to keep their 4- and 5-year-olds at home with their mothers, where they belong, for their own good.
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Reply # 2
Date: Mar 21, 2007 - 6:25 AM EST
Dodgeball, what a game
And Red Rover! And hide-n-seek. And baseball without a bat and only 1 glove. And street football. And sitting out on a dark night telling *ghost* stories!

All magical, wonderful times we won't allow our own children (or grandchildren) to have. Too worried about them and what COULD HAPPEN.

Maybe that was what INSPIRED those Edisons and Bells and others?? You think??
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Reply # 3
Date: Mar 21, 2007 - 7:43 AM EST
Give them an incentive and they'll read
When my neice was four years old, her cousins told her that she could not play cards with them (they were playing Mille Bournes, which is a French racing card game) because she could not read French. Her mother heard the crying and upon being provided with the explanation, bought her a set of Mille Bourne cards and told her the answer wasn't bawling, it was learning to read French. It took her all summer, both sitting and listening to her cousins and looking at the game cards, but by the end of the summer she could read enough French to play cards with her cousins.

My sisters and I learned to read well before we started school (we travelled with Daddy in quest of quarter mile dirt tracks for him to race his stock car on until I was 8) because otherwise we would have nothing to do in the back seat of Mama's car. Talking was emphatically not allowed "unless there's blood or your sister falls out the window". When I was in Grade 8 a girl at school taught me American Sign, and I taught my sisters, and it was possible to have conversations not only in the back seat of the car, but from the back of the marching band where us Baritone Sax players sat to the French Horn section where my sister was sitting, when it was necessary to find out who was going home after school to look after the other kids until Mama came home from the factory.

My youngest is a genius (240 IQ). He refused to answer any questions when the kindergarten examiner tried to assess his fitness for school, although she tried to get him to name his colours by complimenting him on his blue shirt when it was in fact yellow, for one example. Fortunately the examiner was smart enough to notice that this four year old was carrying a copy of "The Phantom Tollbooth." She engaged me in conversation and I told Steven, "Sit over there and read your book." That qualified as his entrance test. He later enlivened his preschool by showing the other kids how to make volcanoes out of common household products.

Give a kid a reason to learn, and he'll learn. And keep your eyes open and you'll figure out without a test, what he knows.
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Reply # 4
Date: Mar 21, 2007 - 11:50 AM EST
What?
You really can't put it together, can you? If the public school system in the US had been doing anything like the job we pay it half to three-quarters of a trillion dollars per year to do there would have never been a need for accountability testing.

The problem was that they haven't been doing what we pay them for. Indeed, as you yourself point out, they are quite willing to cheat in order to avoid people being sure that they aren't doing their job.

I have enormous sympathy for many well-meaning teachers and administrators in our public school system. In short, the society since the Great Society days has used them as first aid for every social ill that you can imagine.

If children's parents are too clapped out to make their kids breakfast why then the schools should be feeding the kids breakfast.

If children's parents are too morally depraved to supervise their kids behaviour why then the schools must built on-campus nursery schools for the kids' kids and run them to the nearest abortion clinic during school hours so that they won't wind up having to raise their little indiscretions as teenagers.

If society's social workers decide that kids getting home before their parents get home from work is child abuse why then schools should be providing "after school care" so that the social workers don't foam at the mouth.

The public school system in the past forty years has become the Vietnam War. The Great Society creeps decide that it was panacea for society's many ills. As a result they kept tacking new things the schools had to be responsible for onto their original mission statement of making sure that kids reached 18 literate and marginally numerate.

It's little wonder, given that schools are made the punching bag and mouthpiece for every dingbat social movement going, from gay rights to tree hugging to hating anything to the right of Mao, that they aren't managing to do their original job of insuring literacy and numeracy.

Anybody who's ever done serious management knows full well that an organisation's mission statement should comprise no more than three sentences. Ask to see public education's mission statement and you'll be reading for months.

While you were wondering about Willie Mays next home run I was loathing Micky Mantle and idolizing Roger Maris. Going to a parochial school as you did you may have missed my public school experience of taking the Iowa tests at my little school down in South Texas every year or so. The principal and school board thought that the Iowas, as they were called, were an excellent way of keeping track to see that they weren't making too big a mess of things.

Our school's mission statement was pretty simple in those days, though. You learned to read and write and do basic maths as a minimum.

If your family was too disfunctional to keep you in school you usually wound up in the military or jail at age 16 mostly because nobody else had any use for you.

If you got yourself pregnant or got somebody elsepregnant, and about half of my junior class seemed to taken advantage of that feature of the human experience, you were out of school and married if you were lucky. You finished your education with a GED if you were willing to sort yourself out.

You DIDN'T presume that your school was your momma and daddy. It wasn't.

I work with accountability testing as my day job. Normed tests are imperfect ways of insuring educational accountability at best. The problem is that they're what we have to do until we can grit our teeth and shear off all of the reams of excess missions we've given our schools besides insuring basic literacy and numeracy.

We've murdered our schools by simply giving them so many things to do that they don't manage to do anything well.
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Reply # 5
Date: Mar 21, 2007 - 12:41 PM EST
hate those tests
I for one am against those tests and I don't mean just for 4 and 5 year olds. Somehow Einstein and Darwin managed to get educated without those tests. The tests are run by giant corporations that make their living making our children look dumb. If the children excel, they are out of a job. In fact if the children excel they push the age of achieving a level to the next lower age level. Adults can't pass these tests. I took them in my 20's and got scores. I had to retake them in my 50's to take a course of study and rather than reflecting the wisdom I had gained it gave me a lower score. It is not just the amount of time the tests take to be given in the schools, the schools are getting to be preoccupied with test preparation. Nothing prepares you for a test like taking them for hours on end, day after day, month after month, year after year. It kills education. It kills enthusiasm for learning.


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Reply # 6
Date: Mar 21, 2007 - 1:49 PM EST
Incentive vs Discouragement
AudiR10;

I got in trouble in 1st grade because my mother one morning had taught me to write my name in cursive (I had been interested in learning to read and write like the grownups) and that day when we signed our papers, I printed my name as we were supposed to, but practiced my signature on the back 3 times. The teacher caught me, grabbed the paper, and chastized me for it. I waited weeks for report cards to come out to see if I had in fact received the zero she said I had earned. When I began crying because I saw the zero, my mother gently pointed out that that was my "missed days" and I had not gotten a zero.

Move ahead a year and a half; I'd moved to a new school. About a week after the move we had "reading time" where each student was to bring a book to read. The night before I had still not gotten a book, so I grabbed one from my brother's shelf, read a few pages to make sure I could read it, and took it the next day. I was 7, perhaps 8 years old.

I began reading, when the teacher interrupted me and asked me a question which, to this day, has absolutely no meaning for me (I've gotten used to this from liberals) "what does that page *mean*"? Well, pages don't MEAN anything! Had she asked me what was happening, I would have told her that a chauffeur was waiting for his boss out front beside the car, and that he didn't think much of his boss. In front of the entire class she humiliated me, and told me I should stick to books my age. The book I'd tried reading was "After Many a Summer Dies the Swan" by Aldous Huxley.
Until 4th grade, nobody caught me reading anything but Dr. Seuss or "The Lion's Paw". The school librarian knew I could read (she was an older woman, a former teacher herself), so when some 6th graders came in and started harassing me, taunting me about reading "baby" books. She took a book from the very top shelf, the books only teachers were allowed to read, opened it, and ordered me to start reading. Preparing for more humiliation, I obeyed... the 6th graders shut up, and the librarian beamed proudly at me. We became fast friends, and I began reading whatever I wanted to read. In 1970, she got me a biography of Patton for the book report I wanted to do. A decade later I visited the school, and the book was still on the shelf, my name the only one on the sign-out sheet.
I found Ms Mertz, too. The 2nd grade hag... err, teacher who'd first humiliated me. I explained to her the events of following years, and that I was now in college. Her conclusion was that, because she'd knocked me down a peg, the Dr. Seuss reading had made me literate, not that I was already literate (they didn't have accelerated learning programs back then.)

Such teachers are now legion. Alas, the librarian's kind are all but extinct.

What I'm trying to point out is the difference between my teacher, and you and the librarian. You two showed *faith* in the child. You encouraged your niece to believe that she could achieve, that teacher discouraged me from trying.

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Reply # 7
Date: Mar 21, 2007 - 3:14 PM EST
Nice attempt at censorship...
Quel courage! Thin skinned today, are we? Well, here it is again.

You really can't put it together, can you? If the public school system in the US had been doing anything like the job we pay it half to three-quarters of a trillion dollars per year to do there would have never been a need for accountability testing.

The problem was that they haven't been doing what we pay them for. Indeed, as you yourself point out, they are quite willing to cheat in order to avoid people being sure that they aren't doing their job.

I have enormous sympathy for many well-meaning teachers and administrators in our public school system. In short, the society since the Great Society days has used them as first aid for every social ill that you can imagine.

If children's parents are too clapped out to make their kids breakfast why then the schools should be feeding the kids breakfast.

If children's parents are too morally depraved to supervise their kids behaviour why then the schools must built on-campus nursery schools for the kids' kids and run them to the nearest abortion clinic during school hours so that they won't wind up having to raise their little indiscretions as teenagers.

If society's social workers decide that kids getting home before their parents get home from work is child abuse why then schools should be providing "after school care" so that the social workers don't foam at the mouth.

The public school system in the past forty years has become the Vietnam War. The Great Society creeps decide that it was panacea for society's many ills. As a result they kept tacking new things the schools had to be responsible for onto their original mission statement of making sure that kids reached 18 literate and marginally numerate.

It's little wonder, given that schools are made the punching bag and mouthpiece for every dingbat social movement going, from gay rights to tree hugging to hating anything to the right of Mao, that they aren't managing to do their original job of insuring literacy and numeracy.

Anybody who's ever done serious management knows full well that an organisation's mission statement should comprise no more than three sentences. Ask to see public education's mission statement and you'll be reading for months.

While you were wondering about Willie Mays next home run I was loathing Micky Mantle and idolizing Roger Maris. Going to a parochial school as you did you may have missed my public school experience of taking the Iowa tests at my little school down in South Texas every year or so. The principal and school board thought that the Iowas, as they were called, were an excellent way of keeping track to see that they weren't making too big a mess of things.

Our school's mission statement was pretty simple in those days, though. You learned to read and write and do basic maths as a minimum.

If your family was too disfunctional to keep you in school you usually wound up in the military or jail at age 16 mostly because nobody else had any use for you.

If you got yourself pregnant or got somebody elsepregnant, and about half of my junior class seemed to taken advantage of that feature of the human experience, you were out of school and married if you were lucky. You finished your education with a GED if you were willing to sort yourself out.

You DIDN'T presume that your school was your momma and daddy. It wasn't.

I work with accountability testing as my day job. Normed tests are imperfect ways of insuring educational accountability at best. The problem is that they're what we have to do until we can grit our teeth and shear off all of the reams of excess missions we've given our schools besides insuring basic literacy and numeracy.

We've murdered our schools by simply giving them so many things to do that they don't manage to do anything well.
Flag as Offensive

Reply # 8
Date: Mar 21, 2007 - 3:34 PM EST
2nd try: test, kindergarten, etc
[1] I am presently enrolled in Test and Measurements class as pre-req for my Masters. There are a number of teachers who are working toward Educational Counseling. We have had several interesting discussions about NCLB testing (TAKS in TX) and how much they hate it.
[1b] Schools have every reason to excel on tests, just look at how many are above the "state average". Corporations do run the testing, however, no one just creates or changes a test randomly. It requires a great deal of work on norming the standards (giving the test to scads of kids). Making their tests too hard or not having them meet Testing Standards are NOT in the Test Company's interests! I do not know which tests Bytheocean was unable to pass as an adult, but one ought to realize that reputable tests have guidelines and requirements that the one you pick up at Barnes & Noble or online do not necessarily follow.
[2] When I began school in Pomona CA in 1977, the school had a meeting with all of the parents of kindergarten aged students (5 by Nov. 1st, I made it by 4 hours). They asked how many kids knew colors, numbers, alphabet. There were about 8 of us (white kids of Bible College students living in the apt complex across the street on the WRONG [gang-shootings wrong] side of this town). We all knew too much for Kindergarten. I do not remember what happened to the rest of them, but I went to school every morning for half a day and was in a first grade classroom where I sat in the corner of the room reading for most of the time while the teachers taught in Spanish. The next year I started first grade at a Christian school. Two years later we had moved to West Covina CA. So my mom went to the nearby elementary school to see about enrolling me. I was to be starting 3rd grade and they asked "Can she read?" After my mom nearly blew a gasket about "CAN", they began giving me books to see my level. Eventually they stopped and asked me a few other questions. My mom was told that I could, except for some science knowledge, probably pass the 9th grade equivalency test that the state was using to decide if kids could graduate. I attended another Christian school until we moved to Texas.

[3] Therefore and thusly... I can see the point of wanting to know if the federal Head-Start dollars are being spent usefully. And we generally use tests to determine that. But local control wuld be a whole lot better (of course). and probably assessing kids in the middle of Kindergarten to see if the HS kids were up to standards, since the purpose is to ready them for K, anyway.
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Reply # 9
Date: Mar 21, 2007 - 8:43 PM EST
Test Those Who Test Themselves
Yes, Terence, there is a Test Monster.

There are simply too many scholastic tests of all sorts. And they lose effectiveness and cogency because of improper or dishonest application. Much-vaunted teachers and principals are responsible for this on the local level. I don't classify all teachers in this menagerie, but the group's large enough to invent the NEA.

Family and neighborhood and friends are where early education and responsibility should be taught. Not only is it cheaper, but it's easier and more effective.

My parents didn't believe in pre-school, or kindergarten, or whatever they call it these days.

I was taught to read by Mom and Dad who asked me to comment daily on news articles I read. I started reading books, because I wanted to read. Learning to do it was a pleasure.

We lived in a neighborhood with a bunch of kids, so I did my socializing with them---male, female, all ages. I also had three siblings. My oldest brother taught me baseball and the time-honored application of science reflected in the tin can telephone, neither of which would I have learned at school.

I'm glad I didn't have to attend kindergarten. I rather enjoyed the running around and playing and learning and socializing through the day: Billy, Joan, Sandy, Marie, Tommy and other assorted children of the area. And there were no scholastic tests or competitions---unless you count the disagreement my friend Billy and I had about how a bird flew. Looking back, we were pretty much both right. We had only observed part of the behavior.

My sons didn't have to attend kindergarten. I'm glad. Geoff learned to read early, and he read the cover off many a book. Jon was equally precocious.

Both they and me were well prepared for first grade. And we didn't need testing to help us.

With all the testing and pre-school this and that, many children don't have much of the important early learning experiences with life and culture that they need. Schools should only be there to fill in the voids---no create them.

There's simply too much testing and too little learning going on.
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Reply # 10
Date: Mar 21, 2007 - 9:26 PM EST
I can't believe I'm reading this
Jeffrey wants to kill the test because the test is administered by people who have a vested interest in the outcome of the testing.

So he wants to throw the baby out with the bath.

It would not occur to Jeffrey to have the test administered by a independent agency (Don't even try to tell me it costs too much. The gov't has been throwing our money at schools for 40 years).

I would be perfectly content with dumping Head Start altogether, since what it amounts to is 14 years of non-productive schooling for these kids instead of 13. But if we're going to keep it we MUST test it.

I was fed up long ago with people who whine about tests. When you get a real job in the real world you will be tested every day. And you won't be graded pass-fail. You will be repeatedly and continuousy graded by your employer, subjectively and objectively.

And if you haven't learned to handle it in school you'll flunk your first few tries badly.

When I was 20 years old there was a popular joke among some adults that school prepares a child to do everything in life except earn a living. Today this is no joke. It is reality.
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Reply # 11
Date: Mar 22, 2007 - 12:13 AM EST
AudiR10
240 IQ? Wow, your boy IS a genius...considering that estimates of Albert Einstein's IQ are between 215 and 220.

Either your son is the one who's finally going to come up with a workable unified field theory, or you've got some bad information.
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