King’s Corner

The biggest issue I have with the No Child Left Behind legislation is its heavy emphasis on standardized testing.  The basic premise of the law is that if the kids can’t pass a test then the school is failing, and then that school gets punished with budget cuts that make it fall even more behind.  Yes, it’s great that the spirit of the law is to hold schools accountable, but to assume that a child’s success can only be measured through a test is a great disservice to our children.  Never mind that a lot of schools are falling behind because of a lack of funding in the first place and digging them deeper into a hole won’t fix things.

So it seems odd that during the month of April I spent my evenings working for a company that writes and corrects standardized tests when I considered them to be such a thorn in my side when I was teaching.  Just think of me as one of those hapless animals in “The Flintstones” that frequently took breaks from their job to say to the camera, “Eh, it’s a living.”  And I do need to point out that I signed a confidentiality agreement with them, so I need to refrain from giving specific details about the project.  I can give you the most general of information, which is all you need for me to continue: I was correcting four elementary-level Social Studies short answer questions.  This particular question was about important figures in American history, and it asked the students to give specific examples of what these people did.

One particular student illustrates the extreme deficiencies in the system.  As I was reading through his answer to the prompt, I could sense that this kid really knew his American history.  I daresay that I was reading the work of a student that was potentially passionate about the subject, even.  But there was one critical flaw that prevented me from giving him a perfect score.  While the child had thrown out all the necessary key words that described the deeds of these Americans, his lack of command over the written word meant that he had merely provided a list of words instead of clear, or even partially clear, sentences with any sort of structure that could be understood.

Let me remind you that this was not and English test!   We were explicitly told that we were grading the content, not the delivery.  Spelling and grammar were not our concern.  And here’s where the test failed the child instead of the other way around.  I had a supervisor read through the response with me, but neither of us could justify giving full credit because of the lack of coherence.  This kid knew his stuff.  I could feel it.

Had this been a situation where it was a test that I had given to a classroom I could have handled this differently.  I could have pulled the kid aside after the test, sat him down, and had a conversation with him about these American heroes.  Sure, he couldn’t write out what he wanted to say, but I have the feeling that he certainly had a lot to say about the subject and would be able to talk my ear off to no end.  In turn, I could jot a little note on his test that says “Answers given orally”, give him his big, fat A+, and then find time to work with him on his writing skills.

I really wanted to find this student and have him flown into Minnesota so we could do just that.  As it stands, he gets a less-than-stellar grade than he probably deserves and could be incorrectly marked as having deficiencies in a subject that he could be a miniature expert in.  Sure, I’m making assumptions and going with gut feelings here, but in the eyes of the government this kid’s level of achievement is based solely on this test.  And if there’s enough of these kids that are misrepresented as being deficient then this school could be subjected to harsh penalties under NCLB that it doesn’t deserve.  That’s a bit maddening.

Such high stakes causes teachers to sink to the dreaded level of “teaching to the test”.  This is where the curriculum is narrowed to reflect not much more than what the students need to pass the test.  One would think that this wouldn’t be that much of a problem.  After all, these tests should cover everything that the kids need to know, right?  Yeah, one would think so, but more often than not it isn’t the case.  These tests can be horrendously narrow in scope and, as shown with this test that I’ve been correcting, artificially segmenting knowledge and skills.  Furthermore, there is a huge time commitment involved with administering these tests, and it’s not uncommon for teachers to have to take a whole week or more out of their teaching time to just sit their students down and make them take a test.

My problem isn’t just that this child was most likely penalized for not being able to effectively communicate what he knows, especially since in this situation my focus as a scorer should have been solely on the content.  It’s that the compartmentalizing of the subjects in these tests make them so much more of a waste of time than they should be.  As it stands, these students are taking separate tests to evaluate their writing and their knowledge of history.  Why can’t we do both with the same test?  If it’s so important to have these tests, why can’t we set up a process that takes the smallest bite out of the precious face time that teachers have with students?

My last full-time teaching job was as a middle school English teacher, and one of the problems with the school I was at was the almost insurmountable homework load that we put upon the students.  Somehow “rigorous” got mistaken with “busy”, but then again I was just as guilty of piling things on to the kids from time to time.  But one of the few explicit instructions given to me was “make sure the kids know how to write”, and a big part of teaching a student how to write is to have her write and write often, applying the techniques taught in the classroom and evaluating the success reached by the student in doing so.  Pile this on top of the vast amount of papers that had to be written for other subjects, and the amount of work gets ridiculous when the science teacher, the English teacher, and the history teacher all want a paper done at the same time.

Toward the end of the school year, I finally got a chance to sit down with the history teacher and try and figure out this problem.  I realized that a good number of the papers I was having students write were just for the sake of making them write, with a few exceptions being those in which they needed to process something they had read in my class.  My colleague, on the other hand, had a problem in that she was more concerned that the students get the content correct but would receive papers written so terribly that she felt obligated to add grammar and structure to her grading just to get papers that were readable.  The solution to both problems was so simple that it was a wonder that we weren’t doing it all year.

With her focus being on the content of the paper and mine being on the structure, at the end of the year we had the students print off two copies of their papers and hand them in to both of us.  The students got a list of criteria from both teachers and wrote one paper to satisfy both the content and quality requirements.  The students had a smaller work load, the history teacher didn’t have to take the time to grade the grammar and effectiveness of delivery, and I didn’t have to take the time to manufacture a topic for the students to write about nor worry about whether or not what they were writing had any basis in fact.  We accomplished everything we needed to with less work, allowing us to focus our efforts on delivering a more varied and enriching curriculum as well as allowing more time to deliver it.

It takes a lot of time to administer these tests and, as it turns out, the knowledge and skills taught in schools are so vast and so intertwined that these tests are abysmally inadequate to effectively evaluate the students as a whole and, in turn, schools as a whole.  The nickname for “No Child Left Behind” is “No Child Left Untested”.  It is unfortunate that the law lives up to that nickname and not in a good way.  We have a need for accountability, and instead we’ve been stuck with poorly executed and time consuming testing that sometimes forces schools to narrow their focus to the bare-bones basics.  For what is spent on these tests, we are not getting our money’s worth when one looks at what we’re expected to get out of them.

We would be so much better with a system that takes a look at far more than test results and incorporates such things as the lives and backgrounds of the students, skills other than what’s evaluated on these limited standardized tests, and the richness and variety in the school system’s curriculum.  And then we need to stop punishing schools for failing.  A failing school is not like a bad dog that needs to have its treats taken away, more than likely it’s a starving, neglected dog that needs better care.  All it takes is poor results from one test to have money and programs stripped away from schools, and sometimes even the school community is split up as students are sent away.  Too much hinges on just standardized tests.

No Child Left Behind has the potential to kill our public school system.  And that’s scary.

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When Jennifer and I were looking to buy a house, we knew that our search criteria put location as a high priority.  Downtown Hopkins has a multitude of amenitites within walking distance, is a brief commute for my wife, and is connected to Minneapolis by frequent mass transit.  Add to that the pre-WWII housing stock in abundance and a straight street grid with sidewalks and you’ve got the urban landscape I desired in the suburban location Jen desired.  And while I have fond memories of the part of my childhood spent living in such a neighborhood, I still was not completely prepared for everything that comes with having a mere ten paces on either side of you.

On an evening earlier this month, we came home after dining out to find our neighbors having their usual weekend fire.  So, I felt obliged to show off the baby and meet their friends.  As it turns out, their friends had, at one time, rented the house that is now ours, and after Jen took the baby to put her to bed I stuck around for a few stories about the myriad of interesting folk that had occupied our house.  There were all kinds of crazy characters, the most amusing being a couple whose fights once escalated to the point that they were trowing furniture at each other, and my neighbors followed all of their their lives from the comfort of their own home.

The couple that they enjoyed watching the most actually lived on the other side of them.  There was one particular incident where the wife had locked the husband out of the house, and he spent a good hour banging on the door and cursing loudly as she hung out the kitchen window taunting him.  As I had been told, the whole while my immediate neighbors stood in their bedroom window, in full view of the fight, laughing loudly at the whole ordeal.

Slowly, as I sipped my beer and huddled close to the fire, I came to the realization that the possibility of my life being their amusement was a wee bit uncomfortable.  And the proximity of their house to ours didn’t make the feeling any better.

There is a teacher across the street, and over the summer she becomes quite the voyeur of the lives of her neighbors.  Last summer I learned all about all the people who live on this end of the block from her, not necessarily their names, but all the usual habits and goings-on.  She knows which cars should and shouldn’t be in the neighborhood, who has family over regularly, who doesn’t take great care of their lawn or house (me), and if anything looks out of place she’s not afraid to investigate.

But she’s also not afraid to contact the authorities if something looks horribly wrong.

Now, I like my privacy.  And my wife clutches dearly to hers.  Every day I look out my kitchen window and see all the shades pulled shut on my other neighbor’s house, and I see all of her children coming and going.  I look out my daughter’s bedroom window and I can see into the kitchen of the aforementioned couple (when the morning sun bathes their kitchen in light, I can easily count the number of magnets on their fridge).  Or, if I open the blinds in my bedroom, I can see what they’re watching on the television.  And I realize that if I can see them, they can just as easily see me.

Here’s the Catch-22: I like to let the fresh air and sunlight in more than I want to keep prying eyes out.  And I’m just as much a connoisseur of the show outside my windows as they are.  (The male half of the couple next door, by the way, enjoys singing to The Current.)

So here’s where things turn around.  After one particular shopping trip last summer, I had returned home to find that my daughter was wearing one less shoe than she had been when I left the house.  And the pair she was wearing were her red Chuck Taylor high-tops, a pricey and special pair of shoes, so of course I had to rush back out and down the street to find it.  I found it back at the bus stop, where she had apparently slid it off just after I had placed her back in her stroller, and I returned home relieved, left the door open to let in some air, and laid her down for a much needed nap.

Shortly thereafter, I was in Jen’s and my bedroom to fold some laundry, and I heard a voice at the front door.

“Matt?  Are you there?”

It was a man’s voice, but since we were just getting to know the people who lived around us I wasn’t sure who it belonged to.

“Yeah, need something?” was what I called out as I started walking to the hall and over to the front.

“No, I just thought you left and I saw your door open.”

When I rounded the corner and got a view out the front window to the stoop, there was nobody there.  So I’m not entirely sure who it was that had checked in on the house.  But to this day the incident negates any ill feelings I get about just how visible my life can be to my neighbors.  In the end, it’s apparent that they have the best interests of everyone in mind.  The proper way to deal with the proximity is respect, and as long as we all live so close we may as well be friends.

I don’t mind giving up a little bit of privacy in exchange for some safety.  Mind you, that only applies to my neighbors and not government wiretapping programs, but that’s an entirely different topic altogether.

It hasn’t taken long for us to  be familiar with the neighbors.  I have no qualms with standing by their fire pit (and vice versa), the teacher across the street has great gardening tips, and the school librarian two houses down has two little girls that were just enamored with my daughter in an I-think-she’ll-have-someone-to-play-with type of way.  And the day would not be complete without seeing the UPS truck stop at the house across the street to pick up and drop off merchandise for the woman that runs a craft supply business from her garage.  It’s all part and parcel of living in a pre-auto boom city.  Everything is on such a smaller scale than the modern giant-house-giant-yard suburb, and it feels more appropriately human-scaled.

I haven’t gotten this feeling of, shall we say, closeness anywhere else that I’ve lived recently.  Even in the multitude of apartment buildings that I lived, where I shared common walls and hallways with other residents, the ultimate goal was to shield yourself from everyone and I never knew any of my neighbors there.  The townhouse in Eden Prairie was no better; with no outdoor space besides the common areas (the funny thing about “common” spaces is that when one resident uses it, the other residents tend to stay away) there was no safe haven from which to hang out, observe, and eventually greet your neighbor over the fence.  And that has been a comfort, being able to relax in the back yard and have that smiling face acknowledge you with a wave, or even a wave over and a freshly opened beer if they feel like company.

The short of it is, good fences and cafe curtains make for sufficient privacy, even when your house is ten paces from your neighbor’s.  And despite any perceived intrusion, it’s okay to open the windows and belt out your favorite song at the top of your voice.  Because if the neighbors can’t hear you sing, how are they going to hear you cry for help?

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Okay, so I stole the title from The Same Rowdy Crowd, but it’s a good title.  It’s fresh, it’s new, and I could just as well be putting you through an unimaginable amount of hell if you happen to follow this blog.  The thought is that I have some belief that I may have some sort of intelligent ideas and commentary to contribute and that I can do so on a regular basis.  But I’ve thought this before, and this previous attempt at a blog didn’t seem to be much more than short, glamorized tales of debauchery from my college days.  The tales didn’t ever get much better, but they did eventually got longer.

Hopefully you’ll get used to my tendency for self-depreciation.

One aim is to write and share my views and interpretations of news and issues that affect us here in the Minneapolis area (or just in cities in general), Minnesota, and/or the United States.  Most likely I will drift off onto a tangent or two (or three), but that is almost expected when one enters into a writing project with few hard, fast rules.

Another is for this to be an outlet for my creative writing.  On occasion, I will post snippets of fiction.  Possibly you will get a taste of a longer piece I’m kicking around (something guaranteed during NaNoWriMo), or possibly you will be *cough* treated to a complete tale of diminutive proportions.  On rare occasions I shall punish you with the horrible spectacle that is my poetry.  And you, dear reader, will sit back and take it.

Here’s what I’m offering to you, the reader: 

• Some level of quality to my posts.  Quick sentences and snarky blurbs about my personal life are more fitting for Facebook, and if that’s what you want, well, you can try adding me as a “friend” on that site..  If you’re going to commit your time and attention to my writing here, you deserve to have something of substance to read.
• Some level of relevancy to you.  In not so elegant terms, I want to care about what I write as well as have you care about what you read.  I will most likely write from the perspective of a college-educated city-dweller with progressive political leanings because, hey, it’s who I am.  But I’m also not below pandering to the masses, should there be any masses that ever read this.  If you see something you like, speak up and I’ll most likely give you more on those lines.  Engage me in the comments and I’ll try and make it worthwhile for both of us. 
• Some level of regularity to my posts.  I could try to quantify this promise in some form, but such a statement would be arbitrary and unbinding.  An empty promise to you and myself, if you will.  Oh, heck, let’s throw a number out there anyway.  I think I could reasonably put out two or three posts a week and still maintain my other two offers, as a start.  A word of warning, though: You may be subjected to recycled posts and writings from earlier blogs I’ve maintained, as well as other sources.  You will be warned as such.

And now, to quote the late, great George Carlin, “I have no real ending for this bit, so I’ll just take a bow.”

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