As you psych up for high school (if you’re not there yet), you might have heard from older siblings or friends that it’s literally a series of tests. But things might change by the time you get there, partly because of some Chicago-area kids.
The kids are fighting the barrage of state standardized tests. Their strategy? Flunk the tests on purpose and get other kids to do the same.
The student organizers, who attend Chicago’s Whitney Young Magnet High School, say they got 200 city and suburban kids to flunk last month’s Prairie State Achievement Exam. Right now, the pilot PSAE test doesn’t count. But starting next year, transcripts will note whether a student passes.
The protesters reflect a national backlash against state-required tests. As more states create these tests to make sure students meet requirements in reading, writing and arithmetic, more kids have responded by simply refusing to take them.
“You’re seeing the beginnings of a low-level rebellion across the country,” says Steven Goodman, an educational consultant based in Washington, D.C. “And my prediction is, it’s only going to get worse. The (anti-test) movement is only going to keep growing.”
The common complaint? Students say school has become less about learning and more about preparing to take and pass standardized tests.
“We think education is about understanding and learning to establish your own opinions – and you can’t measure that on a standardized test,” says Will Tanzman, 18, a senior at Whitney Young.
Tanzman is a leader of Organized Students of Chicago, the student group fighting the PSAE. He helped form the group last year, when he and nine other Whitney Young juniors voluntarily flunked the Illinois Goals Assessment Program, or IGAP.
The PSAE is a five-part exam that juniors take in reading, writing, math, science and social science. The IGAP, phased out last year, was not tied to state laws requiring students to reach certain scores in these subjects. Instead, students’ scores were compared with broader state “goals.”
The PSAE and IGAP were not the first exams targeted by students. In 1997, Birmingham, Mich., juniors refused to take the 111-hour state High School Proficiency Test. Protests have hit Massachusetts, where 50 students skipped the state test; and Marin County, Calif., where 40 kids did the same. Parents in New York and Ohio have protested against excessive testing, and some Virginia students even wrote a play about the issue.
In Illinois, the movement has grown outside Whitney Young. The students who intentionally flunked the PSAE attend Crane, Kelvyn Park and Lincoln Park High Schools in Chicago and New Trier in Winnetka. Students from Evanston, Berwyn, Oak Park-River Forest and Springfield also said they participated in the OSC-led “flunk-out.”
The OSC kids also think the tests are biased against poor and minority students because questions reflect the cultural views of those who write them. But supporters argue that standardized testing is the most reliable method of measuring whether schools and teachers are getting the job done.
“You have to have some way of determining how students are meeting educational standards,” says Tom Hernandez, a spokesman for the Illinois Board of Education. “It’s also to determine how school districts are meeting those educational needs.”
U.S. Education Secretary Richard Riley also has proposed that all high school students should pass an exam before receiving a diploma. Riley, who once opposed exit exams, now believes that if young people do the work to pass such a test, they’ll be better prepared for college or the job market after high school.
Still, some experts believe that the more politicians push tests on kids, the more kids, parents and teachers will resist. Goodman adds that with the test issue, the flunking students have done their homework -and have a point to make.
“Unfortunately, a lot of (educators) feel the need to quantify something,” he says. “It’s a lot easier to grab for a number than to reach inside and figure out what somebody’s made of.”
COLLEGE KIDS TURN UP THE HEAT
College students are protesting again. Sure, they always have to some extent, but the number of protests dropped tons after the activist ’60s. But a survey out of UCLA shows that’s changing: Over the past few years, 45.9 percent of college freshmen have been involved in campus protests, the highest percentage since the survey began in 1966.
The big protest sweeping college campuses concerns working conditions in factories that make clothing with school logos (yep, the sweatshop debate). The protests are getting a lot of attention, partly because clothing with school logos is a $2.5-billion-a-year business, and schools get millions of bucks in royalties from that. Protesters in general want closer monitoring of factory conditions in countries from Indonesia to the Dominican Republic, as well as the U.S.
A recent sit-in to protest sweatshop conditions took place at the University of Wisconsin. After the school chancellor had 50 protesters arrested because they wouldn’t leave, students showed up at a later rally wearing T’s that said, “Jailed For Protesting Sweatshops.”
IN OTHER SCHOOL NEWS …
HOT IDEAS FOR TEACHERS
What do you think your teachers do all summer? Lie around catching rays? Get together and plan ways to torment you the next year? You’ll have to ask them we’re not goin’ there! But whatever they do, it could change if a plan by Education Secretary Richard Riley becomes reality.
Riley, in his annual State of American Education address last week, called for school districts to make teaching a year-round profession. He said teachers could use the extra months improving their teaching skills, planning for the coming year or teaching summer school.
But getting more out of teachers has a price, Riley said – they must be paid lots more. People with the same level of education in other professions make lots more money than teachers, and that has to change, he said: “We can no longer get teachers on the cheap.”
Oh, and in case you’re worrying… Riley didn’t call for year-round students!
Sounds like detention!
Should kids go to school in the evening? That was the question of a recent scholastic.com news poll. The specifics of the question were a little different: One school makes kids who don’t do their homework stay after from 3:15 to 5:15 p.m. to finish it. Is that OK, the poll wanted to know. When the results were tallied, almost 37,000 kids said no, it wasn’t OK, and more than 10,000 said it was. Illinois kids had a slightly different take on it: 2,314 said yes to the after-school school, and 407 said no. Overall, girls were more likely than boys to say yes to the whole deal. (To put in our two-cents worth, we think it makes sense to keep kids in school till they finish the stuff that was supposed to be done when the day began!)
For more cool polls, go to scholastic.com/newszone.
