Posttraumatic Test Disorder: A New Disability?

One might posit a Maslow-style hierarchy of responses to the standardized test mania that has swept the United States as the misbegotten child of “reform,” another word for corporatization of public education. Pearson and other test-producing corporations are raking in profits at the expense of parents, children, and educators. At the top of this response hierarchy are the academic arguments against testing: that standardized tests are being cobbled together contrary to acceptable practice standards for test development, that tests are being overused and misused to draw unwarranted conclusions about students, teachers, schools, and communities. All of these are true, but they aren’t the concerns that trouble parents.

At the most basic level of this hierarchy parents are worried about the health, welfare, and safety of their children who are being exposed to toxic levels of testing. If test mania continues we may need to consider a new category of disability: PTTD, or Posttraumatic Test Disorder. You may think this is a joke; it’s not. Consider how “shell shock,” a World War I era term, has evolved into our current understanding of posttraumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, the physical/mental response to trauma. Similarly, we may soon need to reconsider old-fashioned “test anxiety” in a new, more serious light.

Parents’ concerns are justified. As increasing amounts of testing have been mandated by federal and state legislatures, more and more parents are noticing in their children the symptoms of stress associated with test anxiety, such as headaches, nausea, anger, and fear. When these anxiety responses occur occasionally, they may be fairly easily managed. But the ramping up of teaching to the test, practicing for the test, and taking the test renders such anxiety a nearly constant companion, an endless trauma state.

“Stressed elementary students in grades two through four tend to show emotional stress behaviors such as crying, throwing tantrums, wetting themselves, and vomiting,” says Tim Urdan, assistant professor of psychology at Santa Clara University. “The older kids, such as those in high school, are more likely to show ‘rebellious’ responses: refusal to participate, cutting class, and deliberately undermining the test by answering incorrectly on purpose.”* Parents cannot fail to notice these anxiety symptoms, and they are worried and angry that mandated over-testing is the problem, regardless whether the tests themselves are good or bad. They are bad for kids.

The dirty, not-so-little secret of test-oriented education systems is that they produce more problems than positives. They are conformity-based and do not encourage creativity, but even more problematic is that the stress caused by intensive standardized testing tends over time to inhibit learning. Tiredness, worry, lack of appetite, and increased infections—all stress-related—disrupt the ability to concentrate.

Sometimes test anxiety leads to more dire consequences. Across Asian test-oriented education systems, for example, student suicide frequently is attributed to test anxiety. The researchers who wrote China’s annual “Blue Book of Education” (2014) concluded that “most of the teenagers who killed themselves are in middle school, and they did so mainly because they could not bear the heavy pressure of the test-oriented education system.”**

Increasingly, worried and angry parents are demanding an end to the overuse and misuse of standardized tests because toxic test anxiety is traumatizing their children. Such abuse needs to stop before PTTD becomes an actual disability designation.

*Quoted in Edelstein, D. (2000, July 12). “Tests + Stress = Problems for Students.” Brain Connection. http://brainconnection.brainhq.com/2000/07/12/tests-stress-problems-for-students/

**Zhao, X. (2014, May 14). “China’s School Tests Blamed for Suicides.” China Daily. http://www.chinadailyasia.com/news/2014-05/14/content_15135133.html

The Erosion of Common Ground

A hive of intellectual curiosity and pursuit. That was my impression as I looked up from the new Alexander McCall Smith novel I was sampling in the New Books section of our public library. Before me, spread throughout the spacious, well-appointed library, were patrons of all ages, even college students in spite of the fact that the university nearby has several extensive libraries as well. The public library is a citizens’ space: common ground for the common good. Ours is heavily patronized by readers young and old across the economic strata. Yes, a number of homeless individuals take shelter there, reading the day away or using the pubic computers, avoiding the bitter chill of the Indiana winter. Why should they not? They are as entitled to the pursuit of knowledge or the pleasure of a good read as anyone.

Although the Digital Revolution has brought about changes in how we can engage in literate pursuits, those changes—the Internet, ebooks—have provided new options, rather than substitutes for volumes on shelves. I will gladly confess that in the course of writing five or six books since 2000, I have not darkened the door of traditional library to do the research necessary for them. The Internet has provided me with access to libraries, collections, and various media worldwide. But that does not mean that I consider traditional libraries obsolete. Far from it. Public libraries offer both traditional resources and access to digital resources, especially for those who don’t have computer media ready to hand. The emerging Digital Age is enlarging the role of public libraries, not reducing it.

That is not what those heavily invested in the Industrial/Corporate Age would have us believe. Corporate oligarchs are grasping at every possible means to extend the Corporate Age past its sell-by date, which was about the turn of the century. Much of this grasping is taking the form of attacking common ground: public places, spaces, and endeavors whose democratic mission is to foster and support the common good. The graspers are largely conservative, though not exclusively, and focused on elitist privilege, often corporate. The Digital Age is increasingly about individuation and diverse community, not about corporate personhood.

Public libraries, public schools, public—read “democratic”—anything is suspect in the eyes of corporate oligarchy, in which monied elites are focused on controlled parochialism. Gerrymandering electoral districts to ensure that candidates backed by corporate money win offices and become puppet legislators; undermining public confidence in public schools by unfounded criticism, underfunding, and the shunting of public money into corporate pockets through contracts for ever more testing, vouchers, and charter schools; widening the wealth gap between rich and poor through regressive taxes and tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy—all of these are the self-serving actions of those heavily invested in a dying age, the Industrial/Corporate Age.

The Digital Age, sparked by two key Digital Revolution developments, the computer and the Internet, is not an extension of the Industrial/Corporate Age. It is a revolution-worthy new era. Too many people already understand this. Maybe they read newspapers or see the information on Facebook. Maybe they come to the public library. However, they gain their understanding of the radical changes that are marking out a new cultural era, it’s scaring the bejezus out of conservatives hoping to preserve the dying Industrial/Corporate age. But beware. Those who are afraid are always dangerous. Those of us ready to embrace the Digital Age would do well to remember Gandhi’s words: “The enemy is fear. We think it is hate; but, it is fear.”

*This essay is cross-posted on two blogs: Advancing Learning and Democracy (http://advancinglearning.blogspot.com) and Arts in View (http://artsinview.blogspot.com).