Bringing a flamethrower to the campfire

Today I overstepped my bounds in my own son's school. I attempted to collect data on school culture and safety, not for the purposes of implicating teachers or administration but to get some numbers--since apparently words alone don't do the job when dealing with education administrators--and work with the PTO/PSCC and teachers and admins to craft solutions to the issues of school culture.

My son attends one of the historically "good" neighborhood schools in the district. For years this school has had a great record for minimal, if any, safety concerns, as well as test scores that reflect the fact that the school is comprised of about 50% students who are financially eligible for free and reduced lunch.

Yes, I linked those two items on purpose.

For the past few years, there has been an increase in discipline issues and an increase in the number of students who seem to feel both unhealthy and unsafe in the school. The principal has been there for a few years as well. Of course, she wants the best for our children and wants everyone to be safe, and she understands that all children, not just the ones who are scoring well on the tests, deserve to be educated and need to be nurtured. But she, and everyone else, seem to be asking the wrong questions.

We are treating the symptoms instead of curing the disease.

We are asking, as a parent group and as teachers and administrators, how we can convince these children to behave appropriately in order to suffer through about a month's worth of testing per year. Not counting preparation exercises for the format of the test. We are asking how teachers can get control over classes of 33 kids. We are asking how to get students to behave for substitute teachers when an entire grade level is out of the building for data and testing in-services. We're asking that their backgrounds and level of preparedness for school should be discounted and ignored for the sake of keeping everyone on the same page.  And then we're asking why they're frustrated with learning.

Here's the problem:

The curriculum is developmentally inappropriate in kindergarten. Many kids come to first grade feeling like they're behind because kindergarten calls for so much for which they aren't developmentally ready. The testing format is visually difficult for children. Just because they will have to take standardized tests such as the SAT, ACT, or GRE or GMAT, LSAT or MCAT or whatever else does not mean that they need to do it with such frequency when they are 8 years old.

Time spent on testing is time not spent learning. If you measure your child's growth every day, it won't do anything to help him grow taller (I'm REALLY hoping my oldest is 48" tall this summer so that we can go on the big slides at Sandcastle together, but I haven't measured him in awhile).

Children need to move. Children need exercise and fresh air. I'm sure that part of the problem in the school can be attributed to the horribly cold winter that we had this year. There has also been construction on the playground that couldn't be completed until it was warm enough outside, so outdoor time has been very limited.

It is high time for our school district and its administrators to wake up and realize that we have been chasing the wrong dreams and asking the wrong questions. We need the Play-doh and coloring back in kindergarten, not because we don't want them to learn, but because that IS how they learn. We need the creativity back in third grade, not because we don't want them to work hard, but because third grade is a crucial year where they transition from learning to read into reading to learn. Consequently, we need to take some of the "rigor" out of the primary grades, not because we don't have high expectations, but because grades K-2 are where they need to get those tools for learning and, developmentally, not every child acquires them at the same time or in the same order.

Until we fix the problem, which is that we have to stop living and dying by the numbers on these tests, the symptoms of declining school culture are not going to get better.