My kids' favorite book these days is The Very Persistent
Gappers of Frip, by George Saunders. In this strange and
wonderful tale, a girl named Capable spends her days
brushing tenacious burr-like creatures called gappers
from her family's goats and dumping them into the sea,
only to find them back again in the morning.
The persistence of the burrs, and their random focus on
various families' flocks, pits neighbor against neighbor
as they rush to point fingers at each other. In the end,
although she has tried her best, Capable gives up, sells
the goats and leads her neighbors towards a more
rewarding career in fishing.
Perhaps I love this little fable so much because I have been brushing
out my own burrs these last few years as I and other
committed parents publicly challenge accountability
reforms like NCLB. These reform movements, aimed at
narrowing the achievement gap between the haves and
have-nots, use a single test score to shape educational
policy and enact punishment on schools whose scores
don’t measure up. Like in the story, the harder I brush,
the more persistent these gappers.
I attend school board meetings embroiled in test
score data. I listen to teachers defend their right to
teach to the test as their only survival strategy. I
hear administrators justify the squeezing out of social
studies, science, PE, foreign language, recess, art and
music in pursuit of test score success. I hear parents
choosing schools based only on published test
scores. Indeed, the blind reliance on and pursuit of a
single, yet very fallible, test score drives every
decision on every level in education today.
And even when decision-makers agree that this is not
in the best interests of children, they are immobilized
by the sheer momentum of the accountability movement.
The movement's power point disciples over-populate
school board and administration conferences and make it
virtually impossible for decision-makers to come face to
face with the more unsavory side of testing.
But in the end, all this hysteria surrounding test
scores only causes distrust and fear, tearing
communities apart and causing powerlessness and despair.
Fingers are pointed, those who question are shunned, and
sadly, students and teachers flee the system.
In the story, village dwellers spend piles of money
to move their homes further and further away from the
gappers, only to find that they have backed themselves
into a swampy, gapper-infested mess. If only our
children weren't involved, this whole thing might be
funny.
Indeed, I am not laughing and neither are the
children, who now spend more time than ever on test-prep
worksheets instead of fun, engaging activities.
As Capable discovered, perhaps the only thing to do is
to break the cycle, drop the gapper brush, sell the
goats, learn to do something different, and hope that
others might follow. |
Listen
to the commentary: RealAudio