Send in your questions. We've got some answers.

Q.  Teaching a class of immature third graders who can’t sit still convinces me we need these Common Core standards. I have never seen eight-year-olds who act so childish.


A. We would remind you that it is the right of children to be childish.


Q. In a world going to the dogs, I say that it is imperative to expect more from our students. If the Common Core national standards can do this, then bring them on!  And also the national tests that will give them teeth.

A.  Although you didn't ask a question, we have the answer. Some years back, Esquire magazine contacted prominent lawyers, doctors, writers, and other people acknowledged as leaders in their field and asked them if they'd take the SAT exam again--and make their scores public. All refused, some indicating how loony they considered the suggestion. Being an adult means you don't have to be humiliated by exams. Should being a child mean you do?

Q. The  National Governors Association offers plenty of evidence for the need of national common core standards. What evidence do you have against this?

A.  Think about ice cream standards: Ice cream is a frozen food made from a mixture of dairy products, containing at least 10% milkfat. Vanilla is always the number one flavor, but onion during the summer of 1994, people who visited the Vidalia restaurant in Washington, D. C. consumed ten gallons of onion ice cream. And now we have flavor fusion: Sweet Corn, Wasabi Ginger, Black Licorice, and Mushroom-Pumpkin.  Some flavors--Chunky Bacon, for example--seem to push the ice cream envelope but so be it. We've known plenty of kids who push the envelope, too, and we want to be sure that there is a place for their success in our classrooms.


Q.      I realize that standardized tests may be problematic for children  of poverty and children who don’t speak
           English, but my child comes from a solid middle-class family and I want to be sure his skills measure up to those
           of similar  children across the country.

A. Oh, puleeze.       If a pediatrician can’t measure your child’s height accurately,
                               you suppose the chances are of a standardized test measuring his
                               reading skill accurately?
                                       The New York Times reported on a study finding that only
                               30 percent of height measurements taken in primary care practices
                               were accurate. (John O'Neil, Evaluations: Measuring the Squirming
                               Baby," New York Times, 2004-05-11)

Q.      Whenever I ask my child’s teacher about my son’s  writing skills, she talks about how creative he is. I want some evidence  that he’s  making steady  progress in acquiring the skills necessary for college  success.

A.             Buy your child's teacher a dozen roses.  At the same time we are obsessed with measuring our children’s so-called skills  from age five to eighteen, we ignore the skills of parents, policemen, politicians, media pundits, and bankers. Are you willing to take a test to see how you measure up with other parents around the country? How about posting your SAT scores on your office door,

             The worth of any assessment is in the eye of the perpetrator, and no standardized assessment reveals as much about students as daily observations of parents and teachers. New York Times editorials to the contrary, the data derived from the way an 8-year-old fills in the bubbles on a standardized test are in no way equivalent to the ability to see greatness in small things one might achieve in, say,  in observing a Japanese tea ceremony. Or in carefully watching a child working at something that interests him.
              As the great philosopher of science David Hawkins observed in his powerful essay "The Bird in The Window":

              [W]hen children were engaged in a considerable diversity of activities, I had no trouble at all remembering what they were doing and no trouble recalling information about their behavior and what it probably signified. Whereas when they were all doing the same set piece I'd have to go around and make records all the time in order to keep up with them.  In fact, I think the familiar phenomenon called "The Test" is largely a crutch to replace all the good means of evaluation we have when we don't suppress children's capacity for choice. Children simply distinguish themselves individually when they're working at different tasks in different ways.

                 

Q.  Can we hope that national standards will obliterate Halloween in the schools? I’m not objecting on the grounds that this is a pagan holiday that encourages the worship of witches. I object on the grounds that schools can’t afford to waste time on such frivolity.

 

A.  Not even the federal government will be able to do away with Halloween. After all, adults love it at least as much as children. In the real world Halloween books can cards are outsold only by Christmas items. We predict that Halloween, the celebration connecting summer and the eating season, is here to stay. A teacher may wish to maintain her decorum by agreeing to dress up in silly gear only on October 1, but that doesn’t prevent her from reading Halloween poems and stories aloud for the preceding thirty days.

 
 
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