At the age of 8, our daughter has become a statistic. She is one of the 3,000 kids who found out the week before school was out that she was supposed to attend summer school because of a single math test.
She has earned solid A’s and B’s all year. Her scores on the gifted test almost got her into the gifted program this year, and she got 85 percent on the Illinois Standards Achievement Test reading test.
Yet because she bombed the math portion of the ISAT, she is supposed to spend more than half the summer in school or repeat 3rd grade. Her teacher was shocked, and has recommended that she not be required to attend summer school, as has her principal. But the law–namely No Child Left Behind–is the law.
We believe that law is not in the best interest of our child. Her teacher commented that now she understands how a narrow focus on test scores alone is not necessarily a good thing. Another family at our school has a gifted student who also failed the math test, largely because the child was ill during testing.
We intend to home school our child this summer and try to have her retake the test. The sad thing is that she probably doesn’t need any help in math, just in test-taking. But when education is reduced to test preparation, something is dreadfully wrong. And if the system insists on reducing our daughter’s educational experience to a single test, we will become another statistic–one of the increasing number of families who are leaving the system altogether.
