Where Have All The Children Gone?
by Fred Barton
Editor, SLATE Newsletter, and Region 4 Representative to the NCTE/SLATE Steering Committee

In Frederick, Maryland, recently third- and fourth-grade students were asked to sound out pairs of words with similar vowels, such as "castle" and "manner." Seems typical enough until you learn that these were students at the Maryland School for the Deaf.

You read that correctly. Students at a school for the deaf were asked to sound out vowel sounds. And similar vowel sounds at that. James E. Tucker, superintendent of the Maryland School for the Deaf, complained. "As a deaf person, I'm not familiar with sounds," Tucker told The Frederick News-Post. "I have a problem answering these questions myself, and I'm an educated man." Well, apparently not, at least not according to the standards of the No Child Left Behind Act.

It could be argued that this situation is as much the fault of out of touch administrators who let the problem get this far as it is the frenzy of testing that is the result of NCLB. The exercise would be academic though, because there is one constant through all of this -- children are being harmed.

I wrote once before about four year olds having to read bar graphs, and now deaf children have to sound out words. The evidence begins to mount that these are not anecdotal stories. In Florida, a bill likely to be approved by the legislature would expand the state's much-debated "school accountability" system by testing incoming kindergartners and using their "readiness" scores to rate their preschools. That is right. Pre-schools. Elsewhere, the Ohio Third Grade Reading Achievement Test is becoming so stressful to the students that one teacher has them lie flat on their backs on the floor, practicing progressive muscle relaxation and visualization techniques to relieve stress before they take a language arts test similar to the state exam.

This is institutionalized academic child abuse and it is more than likely that for every instance that comes to the media’s attention, there are many more that do not. Not being the parent of an elementary age student myself, I wondered what parents’ reactions to all of this was, so I Googled the phrase “Standardized Testing Backlash” to see what would result.

Imagine my surprise when almost the whole first page contained sites like the Business Roundtable and the Public Agenda with press release after press release explaining that there was no backlash, and students felt the tests were “no big deal.” Knowing that Google ranks sites by the number of hits they receive, I found it a little curious that the very first site was from the Business Round Table and summarized “the best advice for business coalitions and standards advocates from around the country on how to address the ‘testing backlash.’” 

So is there a backlash against these tests? From testing proponents we get a mixed message, “No, but here’s how to deal with it.” From the parents of those students in Ohio, I would hope to hear a resounding, “Yes.” Elsewhere we read of schools doing away with recess and cutting back on art, music, physical education and ancillaries like field trips, all in the service of the greater good -- passing the standardized test. Tests are “no big deal?” Apparently the Business Round Table didn’t visit the children in Ohio.

Add it all up and it becomes pretty obvious what is going on. We are stealing childhood from our children. Katherine Mitchell, a professor at the University of Washington puts it this way. “In school it’s the culture of standardized testing and the resulting focus on a rather narrow curriculum. Outside of school it’s the loss of play space and the privatization of play space. There are fewer public parks than there used to be, and more places where parents pay to have their children play.”

Where will it lead? Dan Gottlieb, a Clinical Psychologist, writing in the Philadelphia Inquirer had this to say, “I have spoken to hundreds of children who suffer constant stress. Many feel alone and misunderstood, and complain that the only thing adults seem to care about is their performance. These children might not fit in any diagnostic category, but they are in a great deal of pain.” Tests are “no big deal?” Apparently the Business Roundtable didn’t visit the children in Philadelphia either.

It gets worse. Later in the same article he says, “I recently spoke with a group of high school seniors about what happiness meant to them. In a group of more than 300, not one person talked about love or community or having children.” I have written before about how the testing mania will turn schools into joyless places that require only obedience and linear, binary thinking. Since schools are a reflection of the society in which they are embedded, common sense tells us that the both the abilities and the disabilities we give them will be reinforced throughout their lives.

Various apologists for this attack on childhood excuse it by invoking a new social Darwinism. In a world economy children must be ready to compete. They must be highly skilled because only the most fit will survive. We must win, and to do that we must be able to crush the competition. This argument is, first of all, based on a fundamental misunderstanding of Darwin’s original thought.  In his theory, species which could adapt to changes around them were more likely to survive and reproduce. The determining factor was the environment, not the particular animal. Be flexible enough to cope with the vagaries of your environment, and you will survive. If not, extinction. Second, it fails to take into account that democracy is about people coming together in cooperation and consensus to discover ways to move the entire community forward.

Cooperation, consensus, and community. Three concepts that seem to be AWOL from children’s lives these days, and from the schools where they are supposed to be introduced to the values of a democracy, as well as learn how become contributing members to society. In The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics, Rob Norton defines the law of unintended consequences this way: “The law of unintended consequences, often cited but rarely defined, is that actions of people -- and especially of government -- always have effects that are unanticipated or ‘unintended.’" This is truly a sad, lonely, and dangerous time to be a child in this country, but what seeds unbeknownst to us, are being planted now, and what fruit will they bear when these children become adults?