Hi Listees, Ok all you activists types, we're gearing up for our Unite for Education Rally on May 8th at the State Capitol Building, 4:00 pm. Sacramento is my home town, so I'm planning to be ready. Judi and I are talking privately about a table, leaflets, and T-shirts. I'm starting a new organization (there can never be too many), Standardized Testing Opposition Platform (STOP). If you think of something better let me know. I will get some local involvement and print a couple thousand 3-column one-pagers (which can be nicely folded into thirds). I've got it all tentatively laid out and it looks good. I will recruit some students and have them take a copy to every member of the Legislature, you're never too young to learn some lobbying. Get your red pencils ready, I'm looking for peer review. It is about 650 words. Standardized Testing Opposition Platform v v (STOP) v v High stakes standardized testing is a booming growth industry in California due to rash political decisions made in the past five years by Republicans and Democrats alike. It may be driven by well-intentioned efforts to improve public education, but the impulse is entirely misguided. Standardized testing provides little valid or reliable information about true academic achievement, it is unethically imposed, it is tremendously expensive, and it actually defeats the purposes it is intended to benefit. We who are involved in STOP would prefer to be making positive statements for authentic educational reform, but feel compelled at this time to focus narrowly on the politics of this very damaging trend to quantify our children and to bring unjustifiable sanctions against them. The SAT-9, STAR tests, High School Exit Exams, Academic Performance Indices (API), and the like, are all part of a "one size fits all," standards-based model which allows individual students to be dishonestly compared and schools to be unjustifiably ranked. Furthermore, teachers may be unfairly evaluated and school administrators will be jerked around ...all falsely in the name of educational reform. State and community leaders who think that people will respond creatively and positively to the threats and sanctions provided by testing, misunderstand human behavior. Logically, they must assume that education must be imposed and hated. Conversely, we who oppose standardized testing believe education should be offered, enjoyed and embraced. The inner desire to excel will drive most people to perform rigorously and diligently without gold stars, rankings, awards ceremonies and the like. The real goal of educators is to help spark the flame of the inner desire, not to snuff it out. People who excel academically and think creatively do so in spite of, not because of, reward and sanction systems that may be imposed on them. Currently all school children in grades 2 through 11 are required to take SAT-9 tests. Half of them will score above the mean, half will score below, for that is how norm reference testing works. Each ranking between the 0 and 99th percentiles, inclusive, is occupied by 1% of the test takers. One quarter of California's youth today learn English as a second language. Many are beautifully bilingual and trilingual, but fluency and literacy is difficult for a large percentage of our children. Most of our bilingual students, and many other highly intelligent children, are basically being told they are stupid when they open the envelop with their SAT-9 results and see scores between the 0 and 69th percentiles, which they assume means F's and D's. At least 70% of our kids feel like scum when they see their scores. We know children who break into tears when they see scores in the 80's. Worse, the parents understand the system no better than the students and often are more upset than their children, which typically leads to more pressure, more drills, more of the bunch-of-facts model of learning. What gets left out? Now there will be even less focus on issues, concepts, or culturally valuable activities. There is even less time for social engagement, even recesses. School activities and community development projects are dumped. In short, authentic education is sabotaged. Standardized testing can only sort kids into their percentile rankings by asking some questions that are above grade level, and unlikely to have been taught. Other questions are often quite ambiguous, distorted, and even racist. This is unethical. Sometimes tests are scored incorrectly, and often our kids make mistakes recording their answers. Yet many, many decisions will be made based on these scores. Most teachers do a much better job of evaluating students. As such, high stakes standardized testing is very nearly pointless. There may be some value in multiple assessments for class placement that include an occasional standardized test, but the use of state-mandated, high stakes testing should simply be eliminated, along with the API. The only people who will miss the API are: · in real estate sales, or · in politics, or · spending too much time in elitist country clubs. [What follows is the footer, but it runs along the whole bottom of the flier, landscape setting, so you will have to imagine the way it really looks:] A A A A A For more information contact: Claudia Ayers 916.482.2082 claudia@midtown.net A A A A A -------------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe from the ARN-L list, send command SIGNOFF ARN-L to LISTSERV@LISTS.CUA.EDU.