Public Radio listeners know that in Lake Wobegon, all the children are
above average. However, if all the children there are above average, then
an equal number of children somewhere else are below average.
With a wife who teaches fifth grade in Bridgeport, and a son-in-law who
teaches seventh grade in Woodbury, I often hear more than I thought I'd
ever need to know about what's going on in our schools.
In Bridgeport, the Integrated Reading and Language Arts Curriculum states
as its first goal that all students will score "at or above the 50th
percentile on a norm-referenced test." In other words: All Bridgeport 5th
graders will be average or above.
"What's a norm-referenced test?" listeners may well ask. The Connecticut
Mastery Test (CMT) given to fourth, sixth and eighth graders, the pre-CMT,
given to third, fifth and seventh graders and the Scholastic Aptitude Test
used for college entrance are all norm-referenced. These are tests created
to differentiate between students- to sort and rank them. The tests are
carefully designed so that a graph of the scores produces a bell-shaped
curve. Most children should score at the top of the curve which is
average: 50 percent or grade level. By design, then, as many children
must score below fifty percent as above it.
This means that if one year the average score is in the 60th percentile,
the test will be made more difficult to bring the average down. All towns
and Boards of Education aspire to be just like Lake Wobegon, that is, to
have their students be above average. However, norm-referenced tests are
designed so that half the kids will fail.
Standards and testing drive education today. The talk about tests makes it
seem as if they exist to determine if students have mastered certain
academic competencies, but in reality, the test is designed so that half
the children won't succeed. Any question that all the students could
answer would be replaced by a question that some couldn't answer, even if
the original question reflected appropriate grade-level skills.
The tests have other problems, too. They are often culturally-,
geographically- or linguistically-biased. Many questions are ambiguous,
especially if prior knowledge or creative thinking is involved. The tests
are kept top-secret, and there is no feedback to students or parents except
a bar-graph which compares their performance to other students.
Everywhere throughout the state, the pressure is on. The kids haven't been
back in school for a full month yet and the goal is to quickly get them
ready to take the tests next week. Students are learning how to
"bubble-in" answers to multiple choice questions and how to write a short
essay on an assigned topic according to a very specific formula. And then
there's "cloze" practice (filling in the words from a list to complete a
sentence) to measure degrees of reading power.
Most of the children in Woodbury couldn't score above average if students
somewhere else didn't score below. That's where Bridgeport comes in. Yes,
we believe every child can learn. But here are some of the facts.
When I saw Suzanne's computerized class list, I noticed that it said
"capacity 25" at the top. In fact, the list contained 32 names. The union
contract mandates 5th grade classes should be no greater than 30 students.
Nevertheless, Suzanne has a smaller class than other teachers with as many
as 34 kids. The real shame is that the administration sees class size as a
contractual problem, rather than as an educational issue.
For eight of Suzanne's students, this is their first year in an
English-speaking situation, in a new school. The Bridgeport administration
pays substitute teachers so little, that there are rarely enough of them.
This not only often deprives the students of art or gym or music when those
teachers are absent, it also deprives teachers of much-needed planning
There are many other problems connected to poverty and large bureaucracies
which seem worse in the city.
The Connecticut Mastery Test is another abstraction in the educational
system that exists for the benefit of the administration. These tests drive
and shape the system, the curriculum and textbooks. However, teaching to
the test clearly doesn't address the urgent needs of many children,
especially in our cities.
This is Bill Duesing, Living on the Earth
(C) 1998, Bill Duesing, Solar Farm Education, Box 135, Stevenson, CT 06491
Bill and Suzanne Duesing operate the Old Solar Farm (raising NOFA/CT
certified organic vegetables) and Solar Farm Education (working on urban
agriculture projects in southern Connecticut and producing "Living on the
Earth" radio programs). Their collection of essays Living on the Earth:
Eclectic Essays for a Sustainable and Joyful Future is available from Bill
Duesing, Box 135, Stevenson, CT 06491 for $14 postpaid. These essays first
appeared on WSHU, public radio from Fairfield, CT. New essays are posted
weekly at http://www.wshu.org/duesing and those since November 1995 are
To Unsubscribe: Email email@example.com with "unsubscribe sanet-mg".
To Subscribe to Digest: Email firstname.lastname@example.org with the command