I just got an e-mail from my daughter’s soccer coach. He’s canceling Thursday’s practice because of the all important 4th grade math tests this week. God knows the kids don’t need to be wasting their time playing ball in the park in the perfect weather of early May.
They need to be home resting up for shading bubbles on Scantron sheets so they will get the good scores that will get them accepted into a good public middle school so they will have a chance to get into a good high school so they can get good scores on their SAT tests so they can go to a good college and get a good job and life will be perfect.
We all know it’s more complicated than that. We know, now that our knees are getting tweaky and we go to the gym to maintain our weight rather than to play ball, that those days of playing outside for the fun of it are limited and it seems a terrible waste of the wealth of childhood to cut them short so that our children can focus on the test.
There will be so many tests in the years to come. Why do we have to put our kids through this high stakes testing sham? This test they are taking is designed as a diagnostic tool for the schools to assess the efficacy of the curriculum, not a test of an individual child’s achievement. It’s a joke that the test is being used this way. It should be a joke, but it’s not, because it is being used this way.
There really are middle schools in Brooklyn that will not accept any students that haven’t gotten the highest score of 4, on both the math and the English test. This test is a snapshot of what a 9-year-old can, (or is willing to do) at a particular point in time, which may or may not be affected by the weather, the temperature of the classroom, the child’s unexpressed need to go to the bathroom, and whether or not they like what they have for lunch. For 4th graders in New York City, these high stakes tests are an unwelcome initiation to the world of Hoops That Must Be Jumped Through, even though they are ridiculous.
Last year, in third grade, My Kid got 4s on both tests. I hope she gets 4s again. But, I can’t be proud, because I know that the test doesn’t prove a thing except that my child was a good test taker on that day. She got a better score than her friend who reads and writes at a much higher level.
But, her friend is creative and that is something that is no help at all to a child taking a standardized test.
Why are we all cooperating and teaching our children that play is a distraction and creativity is irrelevant? How is that supposed to help them in the future when their employability will depend on team building and new ideas?
This is an original post to New York City Moms Blog.