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).

Je Suis Charlie

The murderous terrorist attack on the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo’s offices that left twelve persons dead and others injured demonstrated, again, the fragility of free expression. Observant criticism, whether sober or satirical, often provokes strong, emotional reactions. Among extremists, particularly religious and ideological radicals whose ardent fanaticism is rooted in delusional beliefs that admit no contradiction, the reaction can be far out of proportion to the perceived offense.

Most rational people shrug off criticism as insulting but not life-threatening. Criticism based on untruths is countered, sometimes with legal action claiming defamation, libel, or slander. The legal tests are rigorous, particularly in the United States because our Constitution values freedom of expression as articulated in the First Amendment. Extreme beliefs, however, can and often do lead to extreme actions. The Paris massacre is merely the latest example.

U.S. education “reform” initiatives, which have come wave after destructive wave over several decades now, have consistently neglected to emphasize civic education. Such neglect has resulted in an electorate that is ill-informed about governance matters—from what the Constitution says and means to how legislative acts actually affect people’s lives—and largely disengaged from the governance process. As witness there are the abysmally consistent low numbers of citizens who vote. Indeed, voter turnout in the 2014 U.S. general election was the lowest since World War II. Scarcely more than a third of eligible voters cast ballots.

Extremism is an assault on civitas, the idea that civil society is bound in law, which conveys both responsibilities and rights of citizenship. Whether in France, the United States, or elsewhere, fanaticism endangers not only the individual targets of extremism but also the society as a whole. The purpose of civic education, therefore, is not simply to help young people to understand how government functions but to understand how they as citizens can and must participate meaningfully in civil society.

In a free society freedom of expression is a value of considerable worth. Such freedom should not be merely tolerated but prized. But even criticism must be grounded in truth. Satire, such as the Charlie Hebdo cartoons, points up untruths and misinformation and pokes fun at lapses of judgment and delusions. In the United States the satirical Daily Show offers a complementary forum. Part of the charge of civic education is to teach critical discernment, which is the root of satire.

The far more insidious assault on freedom of expression is the promulgation of misinformation as truth or “news.” Effective civic education would help young people become discerning consumers of media, better able to distinguish news from propaganda. As it is, for example, a significant proportion of U.S. citizens takes at face value propaganda purveyed as truth—“news”—by organizations such as Fox News, despite fact-checking which shows that a majority of Fox’s “news” is misleading or blatantly false.

Facts do not change the minds of fanatics. Extremism is impervious to truth, which is why most extremist groups oppose education in favor of indoctrination. If the United States wants to improve education—to enact actual, forward-looking “reform”—then more effective civic education should be a high priority. Comprehensive civic education would help young people become informed citizens less likely in future to be radicalized by mistruths and more likely to be positively engaged in the maintenance of a free civil society.

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

Regressive Policy, Brutal Honesty

Virulently regressive, rightwing education policy is attempting to turn back the clock, handicapping all of our children, whose lives move forward not backward.

In American society writ large, recent events involving unarmed black citizens confronted, in some cases without cause, by white police officers that have ended in the gun deaths of the black citizens have turned a national spotlight on institutionalized racism. The election of a black president, far from signaling a post-racist era, has revealed deep and pervasive racism at all levels of society. At the very top, it has exposed the naked, deep-seated racism inherent in American conservatism, particularly among its extreme elements. For example, the association between the Ku Klux Klan and Tea Party radicals has become fixed in American culture, and the Republican Party has not distanced itself from its most regressive bedfellows. Indeed, the opposite often has been the case. In true trickle-down fashion, this regressive radicalism is reflected at state and local levels in increasing blatant ways.

Embedded racist, anti-intellectual, anti-democratic policies in schools are leaving the true public out of public education. Textbook dishonesty is approved policy in states such as Texas, where Moses has been morphed into a Founding Father and the Texas Board of Education has tried to pretend slavery never happened. While Texas frequently is the most egregious example of dishonest education, ideologically driven curricula that depart from fact are common is many states in which rightwing conservatives exert power over education policy. Democratic principles, civic education, science, and racial equality are among the radical taboos.

The brutality of the war being waged in American public education must be met with brutal honesty by educators, parents, and thinking citizens if there is to be any hope of reclaiming American democracy. Blatant, brutal racist actions in recent weeks have turned back the clock on race relations to the civil rights era of the 1960s, and people are responding now as they did then by taking to the streets. A similar activism is now needed to preserve public education, and the pro-education activists will need to be prepared to combat a brutal, no-holds-barred regressive response.

Thoreau reminds us: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.” Nowhere is this more true than in public education, where we all must mount a vigorous campaign to reclaim our schools for the children they serve, rather than the ideologues who would pervert the course of education for their own selfish ends.

Keep Calm and Carry On

The phrase and its cognates, ironic and otherwise, embody essentially what thinking parents, educators, and concerned citizens must do now that rightwing conservatives have enlarged their stranglehold on the body politic: Keep calm and carry on. This is not the time to slacken efforts to educate not only students in school but also the general public. Centrists and left-leaning liberals have been failing on both counts, and the failure cannot be laid entirely at the feet of the right. Public education is being co-opted, but those who believe in public education as a cornerstone of American democracy have yet to mount a successful resistance.

Beginning in the 1980s the right has consistently coupled denigration of public education with the promotion of nothing less than an ideology of ignorance. As I have suggested in earlier writing, the denigration had its foundation in falsehood, the vastly flawed and deceptive A Nation At Risk report, which set forth a wholly misleading notion that the public schools were—and are—failing. This label of failure has stuck, largely because of repetition in the face of evidence to the contrary. Lies repeated often enough begin to sound like truth, regardless how preposterous. A great many educators, parents, and members of the public, including elected officials, who ought to know better have been lured into the lie and subsequent actions to "fix" the public schools, all of which have resulted in the current state of chaos.

Maintenance of democracy depends on an educated public, and so it follows that it is necessary in order to move the United States toward its current governance status as a corporate oligarchy that the right, those duped by or in the pay of the oligarchs, must foster an ideology of ignorance. Rejection of science—climate change, evolution—is a manifestation. Mass propaganda, often touted as legitimate news, lifts a page from the playbook of every anti-democratic movement in history. Lie to people using words they want to hear and they will do the oligarchs' bidding, no matter how contrary it may be to their self-interest. 

The goal of the ideology of ignorance ultimately is to destroy public education, to sufficiently undermine the people's faith in the people's schools that they will eagerly embrace a balkanized system that resegregates the schools and ensures that socioeconomic status will continue to be the basic determinant of educational success or failure. Increasing wealth disparity in which the rich get richer and the poor get poorer is maintained in part by ensuring that schools continue to sort rather than educate, a process that is strengthened by the overuse and misuse of standardized tests. Such testing does not, and never will, improve education. It does, however, strengthen a class system of haves and have nots in which "have not" means "never will have."

What to do? Keep calm and carry on is a start, but it's not enough. Here are a couple of ideas. First, let's stop teaching to the test. It merely creates students who are good at taking tests but haven't really learned anything except to hate school. Everyone is better served by a rich curriculum from which satisfactory test scores are a natural outcome. Teaching a rich curriculum is even more essential in the face of limited resources caused by politicians siphoning off public funds to line the corporate pockets of test purveyors and charter school managers, both of which have demonstrably abused the public trust.

Second, let's work harder to educate our citizenry about the necessity for public education that raises people up rather than keeping them down. Public schools should strive to equalize opportunity, not merely provide a source of cheap labor for the corporate grist mills. The absence of this truly public education effort perpetuates the ideology of ignorance and ensures the dominance of the corporate oligarchy as effectively as gerrymandering, voter suppression, and big-money political campaigns.

It's all well and good to sit back with the view that the oligarchs have sown the seeds of their own destruction, and eventually the downtrodden will rise up, a la the French Revolution, and start whacking off a few of the economic aristocrats' heads. (Ironically, the right has ensured through lax gun laws that the downtrodden will be well armed.) But I for one would rather we prove that education, which we claim can be a powerful force for democracy, actually can be used to that end.

Professor Media*

From the broadsheets and banned theater of America’s founding era to TV news, Twitter, and sitcoms today, media have been our professors, teaching us about our world and shaping how we think about and respond to important issues. Mass media are more directly educative for most adults than any type of formal schooling. Increasingly, as the current mania for standardized testing narrows the school curriculum, media also are surpassing classroom teachers as our children’s most influential educators.

This media-education interconnection is complex and often problematic. While media have helped to shape progress on some issues of importance to American democracy, they also have contributed to ignorance and misunderstanding. The First Amendment protects freedom of expression, but it does not ensure truth. Societally reflective sitcoms, for example, have paved the way for progress on social issues, from civil rights to marriage equality. But biased political advertising and propagandistic “news” have contributed to political stagnation and the growing gap between rich and poor.

Media are seductive. We spend hours on “screen time.” Those who control the media well understand that what is portrayed and how it is framed shapes socially shared knowledge. The rise of corporate oligarchy in the United States has been achieved, in part, through concerted propaganda passed off as truth. What this means is that, if we are to reclaim American democracy, greater attention needs to be paid to the educative power of media—and not merely to the traditional forms (movies, radio, television) but to new media that we carry with us in our mobile phones and tablet computers. According to a Pew study last year, one in three Americans gets news through Facebook.** And two-thirds of adult Americans use Facebook.

For media consumers—which means everyone, children and adults—it has never been more important to exercise effective credibility strategies, such as critically examining claims of “truth.” A quote attributed to American economist Thomas Sowell is apt: “If people in the media cannot decide whether they are in the business of reporting news or manufacturing propaganda, it is all the more important that the public understand that difference, and choose their news sources accordingly.” However, such understanding must be taught, not just in schools but through the media themselves.

Principles of journalism must cross all platforms, from sitcoms to news reports. Are “facts” accurate, credible, verifiable, contextually appropriate, and unbiased? Whether the purveyor is a talking head or a comic character, how is “truth” situated? If we subscribe to the biblical admonition that the “truth will set you free,” then we also must invoke the first part of that quotation about “knowing the truth,” which is the real challenge, regardless of the context.

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

** http://www.journalism.org/2013/10/24/the-role-of-news-on-facebook/