Letter to the Editor, as it appeared in the Delaware County Times
March 18, 2008
To the Times,
As I watch my 5 year old chase his 3 year old sister around a playground I am struck by the fact that other than health care there is no issue that parents think about more than education for their kids. Yet, most people who do not work in public schools or send their children to public schools have no idea how different our schools have become in the last seven years. No Child Left Behind has radically changed education and has taken a nice sounding slogan and turned it into a very bad policy and damaged the kind of education tax payers are providing for our children.
The average public school student today, beginning in the 2nd grade when kids are 7 years old, spends 1 out of every 8 days either taking a standardized test or practicing for one. You remember those sheets filled with little bubbles you had to fill in as you made sure you had a #2 pencil. That means that 1 day out of 8 is a day when our kids are not learning new things. When our teachers are not looking for new ways to engage their students and 1 out of every 8 days that no progress is made in helping our kids to grow and be engaged by the world around them.
The goals of No Child Left Behind are admirable, but by limiting what our kids can learn we are in fact leaving all of them behind. Our schools need to be places where kids can be challenged and exposed to a wide variety of subjects. They should not be places where children as young as 7 complain of migraines or express fear that they somehow will not measure up as they fill in all those circles on the test form. And now on top of the current level of testing which mandates that the state test for reading and math every year from 2nd through 8th grade and again in 11th grade comes the proposal that students must pass six different exams at the high school level in order to obtain a diploma. If things continue to move in this direction why have creative lesson plans and dynamic teachers at all? We could have our kids walk into school with their pencils sharpened and go to work on those little circles. But think to your own education and the teacher and the lesson that stands out; that changed you. None of us grow through testing. We grow through experiences with other students and through the care and nurturing of teachers who take the time to engage us. This precious time is now taken up with testing. Testing like all things has its place, but it must not be the focus and the engine that drives our schools to such a degree that it drowns out curiosity and the desire to learn.
This is why I am proposing a Students, Parents and Teachers Bill of Rights to ensure that we teach our kids and not just test them. We need to have high standards and accountability in our classrooms and the professionals who teach our kids welcome them, but we must make efforts to limit the amount of time spent on testing our kids. Our schools must be able to increase the amount of time we spend teaching and the way we give our current state assessments must be reevaluated to put a priority on learning, not on treating each of our kids as one more piece of data.
The educational theorist Howard Gardner has said that our schools must strive to teach "the true, the beautiful and the good." This is what our schools must strive to achieve. Let's not leave kids behind and instead place our priorities on sharing with our kids that which is true, beautiful and good. We can do better and must do better by our kids. And maybe we can get rid of some of those #2 pencils in the process.
Tom Quinn
Springfield
Democratic Candidate for the General Assembly - 165th District