Tested!

Linda Perlstein's new book, Tested: One American School Struggles to Make the Grade, is next on my reading list. I ran across a review of the book in tomorrow's LA Times. (The wonders of the web never cease to amaze....)

The link is to the full review, but newspaper pages often disappear quickly, so I'm posting several paragraphs below. I will wait patiently for my copy to arrive....


The conceit of Perlstein's book is simple: to reveal up close the effects on one elementary school, and, by extension, all public schools, of the testing and accountability culture mandated by the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act, President Bush's signature education initiative.

Statistical studies of this law abound, but an examination of its human effects is long overdue. "Tested" succeeds in filling this void on several levels, providing descriptions that, for many readers, will seem a stunning indictment of No Child Left Behind and the state and local policies it has engendered. The endless regimen of testing, drilling, report filing, student bribing and student berating that Perlstein describes could only have been conceived by politicians and ideologues who rarely set foot in actual public schools (and would never subject their own children to the Frankenstein classrooms their policies have created).

Perlstein chose Tyler Heights Elementary School in suburban Annapolis, Md., a campus of mostly poor and minority students surrounded by schools with far more affluent and academically prepared student bodies. But unlike troubled inner-city schools, suburban Tyler has considerable financial resources at its disposal with which to close the "achievement gap."

She begins with the announcement in May 2005 that, after years of poor scoring, Tyler Heights has dramatically improved its performance on the Maryland School Assessment, the annual testing mandated by No Child Left Behind. These questions set up the drama of the following school year depicted in "Tested": Was this a fluke, and Tyler a one-hit wonder? Or did the scripted lessons and ruthless teaching-to-the-test payoff, a worthy model for other schools? Or had the state lowered the bar so far on its tests that even failing students appeared to shine? Finally, there is the question that most haunts Tyler's principal and teachers throughout the book: Can we do it again?

In charting the answers to those questions, Perlstein depicts a school obsessed not so much with educating as with measuring education, and with doling out a kind of pallid simulation of knowledge. Stories, for example, are always analyzed for their structure, almost never for their actual content. Creative writing is discouraged in favor of repetitive paragraphs called "Brief Constructed Responses," or BCRs -- an acronym Tyler kids hear endlessly.

"They're learning to do the formula," one teacher laments midway through the school year, "and forgetting how to think."

The goal, Perlstein shows, is to limit teaching to ideas, skills and knowledge that can fit inside the confines of a multiple choice test. Teachers must follow a strictly paced and worded script that even mandates what classroom posters can be hung. Students are similarly regimented: Creativity and spontaneity only get in the way of data collection. And so the author treats us to the awful moment when bright kindergartners identifying long vowel sounds are told to stop -- because rigid lesson plans say they are supposed to know only short vowel sounds.

Perlstein shows the human effect of these priorities. Kids who once devoured chapter books write BCRs about hating reading (and themselves). Tempers flare, teachers accuse kids of not wanting to be smart. The principal constantly doles out prizes -- candy, ice cream, field trips, massage sessions -- to students just for showing up and doing what is required. The result of this bribery is predictable: A third-grader balking at a lesson about using the dictionary asks, "But what do we win?"

Perlstein contrasts Tyler with a nearby school that has a mostly white and affluent student population. Tyler gets more financial resources, but the other school has advantages Tyler lacks: parental involvement, stability at home and kids who've been read to since infancy. At the neighboring school, the annual tests cause far less consternation; science and social studies are still taught; teachers are given more leeway to construct lessons suited to individual classes (and to decorate their classrooms as they see fit); and reading is perceived as an enjoyable activity rather than the annoying precursor to a BCR.