Luna del'Corvo

Have you ever had the sneaking suspicion that public education in the US doesn't have time to help the best and brightest reach their true potential, and ignores completely the students who struggle the most, have the biggest gaps in their knowledge or abilities, or are at the bottom of the grade scale?

If so, I have bad news for you: you are 100% right, and Enter your cut contents here.

For background, my school just got a new principal. (the previous, very effective, and once well-loved principal hied off with not even a single week's notice to a cushy, high-performing, suburban, and suspiciously pigment-challenged gradeschool. So much for 'well-loved; people were pissed.) Anyway, he left, so now, new principal.

This new principal has been doing all the things new leaders should never do. In short, she came in with something to prove and is trying to reshape the entire school to fit her old school. (Why don't more people actually READ Machiavelli? They'd avoid so many of these blunders. But I digress.) In any case, almost everyone can't stand her.

Among her new 'initiatives' is that we all must scramble to arrange kids by test scores (red flag 1), and set up interventions with these targeted groups. Note that this would not be such a big deal if the classes did not mix the most advanced students and those with pretty severe remedial education needs. But OK, sure, let's try to divide them up for a grand total of 60 minutes a week (like that will help) and try to address these deeply systemic failures.

At this point, you are probably thinking we will be doing intensive work on core skills, tailored to each student's strengths and weaknesses based on their performance on various tasks in the classroom and their grades. You would be wrong.

We are setting each student, in carefully chosen groups, down in front of math and reading software. The ones that will be getting actual skill-based instruction? Those who read several years before grade level, of course? And they will be getting intensive reading and basic math instruction, right? Well, no, and no.

What they will be getting in their small group instruction will not be content, reading, or core skills. It's test-taking. They will be learning test-taking strategies.

Who will be getting this targeted, small group instruction, for which we are shuffling and disrupting and scrambling? No, not those who are drowning in the failure of the system to prepare them, nor the best and brightest with the world before them if they can be challenged sufficiently to hone their minds. No, the ones for whom we are doing this are those whose standardized test scores we can nudge into the next category. These students are also chosen solely on those test scores; class grades are not even considered. But how, I hear you wonder, will these better scores help them if they don't have the grades to match or if they can't actually succeed in the classroom? Well, you see, their grades, their learning, or their success are not the point of this operation.

If you have not yet understood the quiet part no one is saying out loud, but we all know, let me lay it out. The test scores are the point. Not the students, the scores. The new principal wants the school's numbers to go up. So she looks good. Devil take the hindmost, she wants to bring home better numbers in the first round of testing under her tenure, because I am sure it will involve bonuses, advancement, or even just recognition for her.

To be fair, I am not honestly sure she is even aware that this is what she's doing. She may well think she is fighting to save whom she can or somesuch. The logic of administrators is bizarre and frankly foreign to me. And it is the case that good test scores can also, on occasion, bring better funding (one would assume the opposite, no?) So these scores may lead to some benefit for the school. Even assuming that is true, however, which students will enjoy those benefits? Meanwhile, never forget that the district spends millions every year on programs, initiatives, consultants, and so on, while we struggle to have enough teachers or even enough pencils.

So if you have wondered why America is becoming increasingly stupid, this is why. Education, like everything else in this god-forsaken dystopia, is a numbers game. And the only numbers that count are test scores and dollars.