Pennsylvania TownHall -- Where the Voice of Pennsylvania is Heard!

From the Kitchen Table

Educational Hula Hoops

by Peg Luksik

The State Board of Education has unanimously decided that every student in Pennsylvania's public schools should have to pass state-created standardized tests in order to graduate from high school. They base this new mandate on the results of the PSSA, saying that the diplomas granted by every local school district are not equivalent in value. They have already passed the regulations that would put this new requirement in place, beginning with children now in sixth grade.

In passing this latest educational reform, the State Board has not said who will pay for the development, implementation, and scoring of the tests themselves, what will happen to students who do not pass the tests, what will happen to districts with higher percentages of non-passing students, who will pay for the remediation of non-passing students, or what effect this program will have on local district curricula.

The American educational system is based on the concept of local control, where parents and teachers came together to determine the educational program that best suited the needs of the children in their combined care. It worked. America's educational system produced the most highly educated people in the world.

Then the government stepped in, with top-down reforms that moved from one educational fad to another. Local schools were force fed "reforms" like open classrooms, whole language and outcome-based education, each of which cost millions of dollars to implement, and each of which proved to be a failure. In every case, local parents and teachers spoke against these fads and were ignored – to the detriment of their children and their pocketbooks.

But instead of realizing that such educational mandates do not work, the State Board is once again attempting to invade the local schools with yet another unfunded, unproven initiative. An initiate which is based on a fundamentally unsupportable premise – one that says every child can learn to the same level, and that a school district should be held accountable to ensure that this impossibility happens.

To understand this basic flaw in the underpinnings of universal high stakes testing, let's assume that students must be able to demonstrate proficiency in vocal music. The first task to establish what level of performance constitutes proficiency. Vocal performance levels run the gamut from "being able to sing a leading role at the Metropolitan Opera" to "sings in the show and enjoys it," to "can't carry a tune in a bucket."

If the state is going to set a proficiency level that every student must be able to demonstrate, it must set the standard at a place where most students can actually reach it –which immediately eliminates the highest levels. If the local district is held accountable to ensure that every child meets the state standard, all instruction will be geared to reaching that goal, to the detriment of any student who actually could have reached the higher performance levels. If a particular student is unable to reach the artificially-set state standard, they are subjected to unending remediation or are prevented from graduating.

So under this proposed system, the gifted and talented students lose, the special-needs students lose, the "average" student loses the chance to rise above mediocrity, and the local district pays for losing the ability to meet the needs of the individual children in their school.

It's time for parents and teachers to hold the educational bureaucracy accountable for THEIR performance, and insist that they leave education in the hands of the real experts – the parents and teachers who actually know the children in the local school.