Note: This is the second in a series of articles on the consequences of the authoritarian standards & high-stakes testing sham.

Anxious teachers, sobbing children was the title of an opinion article published in the Atlanta newspaper last Sunday.  The article, written by Stephanie Jones, professor of education at the University of Georgia, asks “What’s the low morale and crying about in education these days?  Mandatory dehumanization and emotional policy-making  — that’s what.”

Policy makers, acting on emotion and little to no data, have dehumanized schooling by implementing authoritarian standards in a one-size-fits-all system of education.  We’ve enabled a layer of the educational system (U.S. Department of Education and the state departments of education) to implement the NCLB act, and high-stakes tests, and use data from these tests to determine the fate of school districts, teachers and students.  One of the outcomes of this policy is the debilitating effects on the mental and physical health of students, teachers and administrators.

If you don’t believe that, here is a quote from Professor Jones’ article:

I’ve witnessed sobbing children in school, tears streaking cheeks. When children hold it together at school, they often fall apart at home. Yelling, slamming doors, wetting the bed, having bad dreams, begging parents not to send them back to school.

More parents than ever feel pressured to medicate their children so they can make it through school days. Others make the gut-wrenching decision to pull their children from public schools to protect their dignity, sanity and souls. Desperate parents choose routes they had never thought they’d consider: home schooling, co-op schooling, or, when they can afford it, private schooling. But most parents suffer in silence, managing constant family conflict.

The emotional and behavioral disorders that youth experience have only been amplified by the NCLB act.
In research by Ginicola and Saccoccio, entitled Good Intentions, Unintended Consequences: The Impact of NCLB on Children’s Mental Health, they report that NCLB is indirectly damaging children by disproportionately stressing childhood education and blatantly disregarding other areas of child development.  Their research on NCLB is enlightening and also disturbing.  According to these researchers, NCLB in its current form:

• Fails to recognize the importance of social and emotional functioning in children
• Contributes to increased stress for children
• Causes stress in teachers that ultimately produces negative effects on children
• Impairs the teacher – student relation­ship
• Damages school climate
• Counter productively causes specific children to be left behind
• Takes time, energy, and money away from programs that promote positive mental health development in children.

As the authors point out, policy makers, because they have “only focused on achievement scores rather the social-emotional development of children, are not really helping the children that really need the most support.”  How can we possibly think that testing does not affect the social-emotional development of students.

In their book, The Paradoxes of High Stakes Testing, Madaus, Russell and Higgins of Boston College, report that in Bibb County, Georgia, a state or national exam is given to elementary, middle or high-school students in 70 of 180 school days!  They tell us that in Maryland, 55 days are devoted to teaching, Texas, 51 days, Michigan 50 days.  And they point out that these numbers do not include NAEP, SAT, ACT, Advance Placement exam days.

The testing season is underway in Georgia and every other state.  Fulton County, one of Georgia’s largest school districts, for example, has the following dates for elementary testing: January 17 – February 24, March 7, March 19 -30, April 11 – 18.  Middle school testing dates are similar.  But for high- school, the testing schedule looks more like the NFL or MBL playoff schedule:

• January 17-Feb. 24, 2012 ACCESS for ELLs Grades 9-12
• February 29, 2012 Georgia High School Writing Retest (GHSWT) Grades 11 and 12
• March 19-23, 2012 Georgia High School Graduation Test (GHSGT)* Grade 11
• March 26-30, 2012 State-Required Remedial Testing Grades 9 and 10
• April, 2012 Work Ready Assessment*** Grade 12
• April 30-May 4, 2012 Georgia End-of-Course Tests (EOCT) Grades 9-12
• May 7-18, 2012 Advanced Placement (AP) Exams AP students

Iatrogenics

In medicine, the term iatrogenic refers to doctor induced illness—that is a negative unanticipated effect on the patient of a well-intended treatment by the physician. What about in the field of education?

Peiragenics

In educational testing, the term peiragenics  refers to the negative, unanticipated effects on students, teachers and schools of well-intended testing policies.

Many researchers have documented these unanticipated effects, and include some of the following: narrowing the curriculum, decreasing attention on non-tested subjects, changing preschool and kindergarten curricula,narrow test preparation,corruption of test results,cheating, triaging “bubble” students, retaining students in grade, increased dropout rates, and increasing student stress and anxiety.

Yet, even when we claim that high-stakes testing is well-intentioned by education policy makers, it simply does not make any sense in light of social well-being of students.  The overwhelming effect of high-stakes testing is negative.  No matter how you look at it, we put teachers, administrators, students and their families through misery with these tests.

Policy makers need to realize that they have produced an dehumanized system of education.  As Professor Jones put it in her Atlanta Journal article,

Punitive policies forcing the impossible combination of rigidity and test-based accountability are produced out of fear, anger, distrust and arrogance. They are written in an irrational effort to control the people in schools. But policymakers don’t have to endure the physical and psychological effects of their policies — those of us in schools do.

What do you think are the unintended consequences of high-stakes testing?