Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

396 Indeed, the battery of tests given in grades 4, 8, and 10 follows a tradition with which teachers are quite familiar. It is one more example of a numerical indicator that can be improved over time without significantly increasing our students’ understanding. In other words, the test is designed so that the first-round scores will be low and so that scores can be improved, year by year, by an evolving cottage industry of coaching techniques. Teachers know how to prepare students for tests like these, but they will certainly fail to do so this year since they received the guide documents only three months before the actual tests. But test scores will go up in subsequent years as teachers take valuable class time away from what they know is important and spend it on test preparation. Government officials will then make public statements about raising academic achievement, and, once again, our students will be shortchanged. We are former mathematics teachers who continue to work in education. We are out raged that teachers and students have to waste valuable classroom time on tests that are not only poorly constructed, but also contain content that is unnecessarily vague, complicated, and inappropriate. We are worried that MCAS will raise havoc with existing curriculums without any real benefit to students’ mathematical expertise. We examined the mathematics guide documents closely, and will comment specifically on those for grade 10. We encourage the public to look closely at this guide and those for other subject areas as well, since much of the debate over MCAS has not focused on the quality of the tests. Our claims that scores will rise over time without any benefit to our children is based on what we found: The majority of the sample questions are shallow, one-step problems, and it’s possible to solve most of the problems using very little mathematics. But the ques tions are posed using unnecessarily sophisticated mathematical notation or appealing to conventions that are not universally taught in 10th grade classes. In other words, the tests ask trivial questions in obscure ways. Teachers all over the state will soon abandon curriculums that they know are educa tionally sound so they can teach material of questionable content validity to prepare students for the MCAS. [Ed. Note: The May 5, 1986 St. Louis Globe Democrat article “School Officials Upset by New Plan” reports that school officials in St. Louis made the same, exact prediction. (See 1986 entry.) This process also correlates to the National Center for Educational Statistics’ plans to judge “teacher quality” by increase in “student performance”—teach-to-the-test. (See 1992 entry for Filling the Gaps. )] T HE S PRING 1998 ISSUE OF A SSOCIATION FOR S UPERVISION AND C URRICULUM D EVELOPMENT ’ S Curriculum Update was devoted to arts education and the main article was entitled “Arts Edu cation: A Cornerstone of Basic Education.” This writer, always a supporter of music and art in the public school curriculum, was educated regarding the real purpose of arts education when reading Arts and the Schools by Jerome Hausmann, one of the four books commissioned for John Goodlad’s federally and foundation-funded The Study of Schooling . (See 1979 Schooling in the United States .) The Curriculum Update article exposes these same “reformed” purposes for arts education as devised by those contributing to America’s dumbing down. Excerpts fol low from this enlightening article:

CLAIMING ITS PLACE IN THE CORE CURRICULUM “Today’s school gatekeepers think of arts education as they experienced it, as holiday