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
No comments:
Post a Comment