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25 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent examination of major, unspoken problems, October 26, 2002
This review is from: What Happened to Recess and Why Are Our Children Struggling in Kindergarten? (Paperback)
Anyone with children will realize that the Golden Age of Education is over. Gone are the halcyon days of elementary school where children were first taught how to be good human beings and live in a civilization, and academics came second. Now, with high-stakes testing and the punitive "No Child Left Behind" initive by the Bush administration (which is more accurately called "No Child Left Untested" by the author), testing has become paramount to just about anything else teachers do or have done in decades past. Case in point: a school district in Michigan has a 539-page curriculum for PRESCHOOL. Student's ranking in schools and teacher's salaries are directly linked to one or two tests that students take that focus on exclusive and often inappropriate material. Children in elementary schools throughout America are taking tests for days on end, racking up more test-taking hours than potential lawyers taking the Bar Exam. Wild animals used in Hollywood films have more break times in their days than your average schoolchild. Kindergarten curriculum, in the words of many people who run education, should be preparing children for college. In other words, as a nation, we have completely lost our marbles when it comes to testing and too many governmental folk are bowing down at the altar of test-worship. A local educator recently said, "if I need to know how Little Johnny is doing in school, I go to HIM, not to his Ohio Proficiency Test from 1999." This clear and obvious paradigm for finding out how a child is doing in school has been completely left behind in recent years, and is likely to keep on happening. Ms. Ohanian's book is frighteningly FULL of examples and incidents when educators have gone straight to some standardized test to see how children are performing in school vs. the children themselves. Where the teachers stand in all these goings on is somewhere between a soldier on the front lines being given totally ridiculous and dangerous commands, and a prisoner of war being forced to do whatever the Big Wigs say, or else they're likely to find themselves up against a firing squad (for example, a school in Chicago SUED a teacher for 3 MILLION DOLLARS for looking at a standardized test before administering it to the children. A teacher will go to JAIL if they even GLANCE over a child's shoulder during standardized tests in Florida). Ms. Ohanian asks some very good questions throughout her book, including why aren't teachers and parents DOING something about this national craze for test scores, and how is this REALLY HELPING any child to be tested to the point of getting sick and vomiting? She also asks some quite valid questions, like why are we spending billions of dollars testing children when so many schools are literally falling apart? Instead of shelling out 3 million dollars to a test-writing company, why not spend that money on repairing the SCHOOL? What do we hope to accomplish by testing children into the ground? What message are we sending our teachers and our children when their teacher is not only NOT allowed to even LOOK at the test, but risks jail time if they do? (can't you just see THAT one: HARDENED CRIMINAL: "whatcha in for, buddy? Murder 1?" TEACHER: "no, I looked over the shoulder of a first grader during a standardized test..."). The message is pretty clear: children don't matter at all unless they fall within a certain range on one or two standardized tests that are usually given once, graded by someone who is NOT an educator, and the results are posted months later (in Cleveland, our proficiency tests were taken back in March, but we're just getting the results of those tests NOW, 7 months later). It's also clear that teachers and parents are clearly not experts on their own children, because the LAST person to be consulted about how Johnny does in school are these very people: those who write the laws and the curriculum and who punish the schools and teachers are only looking at pages of statistics. Gaaah... Maddening... Ms. Ohanian's book is meticulously well researched and she cites startling and often frightening statistics and stories about what is considered "normal" educational proceedings in America today. I myself am rereading it for the second time, taking notes as I go and passing it along to my teaching colleagues. Actually, it's getting to the point where EVERY SINGLE PAGE documents something either useful, scary or enraging that I'm finding it easier to simply hand the book to friends and colleagues and say, "here, read this." My hope is that this book and others like it will actually DO SOMETHING-spark off a national debate and get parents and teachers and students to go out there and stop putting up with this nonsense. There's no reason children in North Carolina have to be tested on the spelling and meaning of "circumference" in first grade. Nothing good will come of testing our children so often that they loose the ability to THINK and can only regurgitate information and bubble in little circles with a no. 2 pencil. PARENTS know that. TEACHERS know that. FAMILIES know that. ANYONE who works with a child knows that. NOW we need to make sure that our lawmakers (who obviously all live in a totally different world from us Common Folk) begin to know that as well. Get the book, read it through, then pass it along to someone else. If the people lead, eventually the leaders will follow.
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16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A profoundly moving book - Ohanian writes from the heart., July 31, 2002
This review is from: What Happened to Recess and Why Are Our Children Struggling in Kindergarten? (Paperback)
Susan Ohanian's book let me know that I wasn't alone - that mothers all over the country shared my outrage over high-stakes testing - mothers that are acting on their instincts in a big way. She writes - "a growing number of women in this country consider themselves on the brink of a new civil war, a war centering on the control of children. To protect their children these women consider all their time and all their energies sacred to the cause of test resistance. Politicians, take heed" (page 211). Through the pages of Susan's book - I found the last bit of courage I needed to take a stand against high-stakes high school graduation testing in my state. As I turned the last page, for me, there was no turning back. I think another American patriot is smiling down on Susan and her book. Just as Thomas Paine called the colonists to revolution in 1776 with his 50-page pamphlet "Common Sense" - Susan calls on parents of American public school children to see standardized test abuse for what it is - child abuse. We need to put this book on the best-seller lists - one parent at a time. Every copy sold tells the political and corporate establishment that we are taking our schools back. Not until we all know the truth about the high-stakes testing agenda can we have a meaningful national dialogue on this critical issue.
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
How High-Stakes Testing Harms Children, August 15, 2002
This review is from: What Happened to Recess and Why Are Our Children Struggling in Kindergarten? (Paperback)
Although the intended audience for What Happened to Recess and Why Are Our Children Struggling in Kindergarten? is parents, it's a rich resource for test-defiers from any perspective, a veritable OED - Ohanian Encyclopedic Disquisition - of stories, facts, and figures about standards, the high-stakes tests they've spawned, the corporate honchos who hawk them, the harms they bring to children, and the heroes and heroines who resist them. In his preface to the book, Alfie Kohn calls Susan "defiantly anecdotal," and the book does include her trademark stories of nonstandard children from her own classrooms and from parents and teachers across the country, but it's also packed with outrageous examples from actual standards documents and released items from a number of state tests. Florida elementary school principal (and outspoken opponent of testing abuses) Cathy Kitto wrote me shortly after she finished Recess: "If this book isn't a call to action, nothing ever will be." Much of the power of the book derives from Susan's omnivorous reading and her ability to make unlikely connections that particularize and illuminate her themes. Within a few paragraphs a reader might find a reference to Maurice Sendak's classic children's book Where the Wild Things Are, a quote from a New York Times columnist, and a document from the American Association for the Child's Right to Play. In a section called "A Lizard Career Path," she relates a story from The Boilerplate Rhino, by her favorite science writer, David Quammen, about a biology grad student conducting repeated speed trials with Mexican lizards, some of which improve their time while others get slower. Susan writes, "Are the people who insist that children must be tested and retested and tested some more listening? Plenty of kids are exhausted. Others, wise to the game, simply aren't interested any more. Sad to say, they've lost interest not just in tests but in school. At least none of the lizards vomited." Always an opponent of jargon, Ohanian deflates and deconstructs the business lingo that education bureaucracies and their corporate buddies bring into our schools. One of my favorite sections of the book is a long riff on "benchmarks," which Susan traces to its origins as a surveyor's mark, through its uses as a software tool, and into the schools, where teachers are forced to "bow at the benchmark shrine." Lest anyone conclude that this is mere linguistic diversion, Susan provides some incredibly detailed and difficult benchmarks for middle school social studies in South Dakota.
The final chapter of the book is a roll call of the Resistance, featuring stories and tips from grassroots organizers in many states. Ohanian honors and acknowledges the courage and commitment of parents, teachers, students, and a few administrators who are speaking out against high stakes tests. There's Juanita Doyon, button-making queen and parent activist extraordinaire from Washington state; Michelle Trusty-Murphy, whose 9-year-old son Connor may be the only child in Nevada to resist the state test; Florida teachers who called a press conference and ripped up their bribe money for improved FCAT scores; Connecticut valedictorian Annelise Schantz, who delivered a scathing indictment of testing with the governor on the dais beside her, and many more inspiring figures and stories from the Resistance. A number of professional test-related editorial cartoons, along with some original ones designed by Ohanian, add another layer of interest to Recess. The book also includes a thorough index that will help you quickly locate just the story or data you need to spice up your next letter to the editor. And in a final, sweet irony, the book is published by a professional division of McGraw-Hill - one of the largest test-makers in the country.
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