Now is a perfect time for the change. Let’s just stop. Let’s opt out of state testing on a national basis and shift to benchmark testing to track student progress. We can use NAEP testing to track state progress over time. If legislatures will not rein in those tests, parents should step up and keep their children home on test days. Why not bake a seven-layer cake while wearing pajamas and then binge watch a new family favorite? I suggest we create happy memories instead of forcing our children to run one more punishing, academic gauntlet.

Currently, in some districts, schools are ending up with 29 weeks or fewer of available instructional time after testing, test practice, and test preparation. That’s completely bonkers.

Let’s just stop. Because, as it stands, bit by bit, piece by piece, we are chewing up some kids — and to what end? We keep re-documenting “facts” we have already determined, facts we have known forever. In rare instances, when schools post surprises, those results often come back late or even past the end of the school year. Our happy or sad surprises tend to simply disappear in the deluge of data, never to inform instructional decisions.

Political and educational leaders keep trying to do an end run around what they know to be true: School funding should be reformed so ALL students can be given the supports they require to learn — not just those lucky kids whose parents can afford to live in moneyed zip codes.

P.S. This blog is about to make a shift in direction. I no longer believe that we can trust politicians to rein in the test monster. Even the Biden administration did not provide a respite from testing. Parents may be our last, best hope, Opting Out, family by family, may be the only way to get the message across: it’s time to stop sacrificing children to numbers we hardly ever even use.

A post about putting teeth into time management:

As you lay in bed, if you find yourself saying, “Now I have the hand-outs and the extra chalk. I finished that Google Doc and I sent the spreadsheet to Maria. I have set up tomorrow’s online activity on volcanoes and I think Renata’s mom has figured out how to find the links…” Etc. STOP!

Try online guided meditations. Visualize a favorite ocean beach. Read a book. I find books written in Spanish or French to be especially effective. I enjoy myself but the mental effort puts me to sleep fairly quickly. If necessary, to break the mood, get out of bed and make yourself some cocoa or tea.

It’s 2021, and the cost of being zonked has potentially increased by an order of magnitude, especially for the unvaccinated who are in classrooms. Feeling exhausted right now is not a good plan. Ducking haphazard attacks by a new microbe requires alertness. You need to be aware of masks, distances, hand sanitizer and trickier tells, such as flushed faces in quiet bodies.

If you are not done preparing the dinosaur WebQuest or preparing the latest spreadsheet for Dr. X, put the world down anyway. Simply put it down. Be done. Watch Netflix and defog your brain. Bake a cake with the kids. Watch the basketball game with your spouse in peace. Paint a watercolor pterodactyl. Whatever. As long as what you are doing refreshes you.

Too many teachers are living too zonked as we try to do it all. We have gotten used to hitting difficult and even irrational targets. We adapt, adapt, adapt.

“What?! I need to prepare 18 spreadsheets covering the last three years’ tests by Friday?! Dammit. I guess I’ll have to skip lunch. I can pick up Chinese for dinner on the way home.”

Then we fill the DVR with all the programs we can’t watch and start working.

Eduhonesty: Readers, for many of you, if you keep going until you are done, you will never rest — because you will never be done. Your family relationships will be strained, along with your own mental health. If you have thirty hours of work to do in your eighteen waking hours, IT’S TIME TO TRIAGE. Dump the less important items first, but don’t feel compelled to stop there. At the end of the day, you should only have to skip those movies, cakes, and basketball games for emergencies.

And your whole life should not be an emergency.

This post comes from the far side of the moon where I lived during my last year of teaching before retirement. I made a few mistakes that year. One was cutting sleep. Another was trying to fulfill a plethora of irrational demands. Can’t do it all?

Again: Set a deliberate stopping point. Otherwise it’s too easy to fall into that trap where we decide to do just one more thing, because there’s always one more thing — and then another and another and another.

P.S. Yes, sometimes genuine emergencies do arise. That comes with teaching, especially in these times. But somethings wrong when all these emergencies begin to seem normal.

The groan you hear is the creaking doors of a widening achievement gap. Districts have played tech catch-up since the ’90s. While District A ‘s been 1:1 for years, District B sent kids to the “computer lab” a few times a week. District B lost the online game before it began.

Let’s just own this thing for a change. Property-tax based school funding is inherently discriminatory. I live in a district that once asked its PTO to stop raising money because they did not know what to do with what they had. My girls had flat screen TVs to watch in their high school lounge. My students didn’t even have a lounge.

Eduhonesty: I understand why Chicago is frantic to open school doors. Friends who work in Chicago complain about students who simply are not bothering to log in. Other students are logging in but not participating. You can prepare the most brilliant lesson ever designed, but it doesn’t matter if Brent and Ginger don’t log in, or if they wander away to get a snack in the middle of that lesson,

It’s been clear for a long time that a greater percentage of kids in traditionally college-bound districts are logging in. More of them overall are completing homework. The achievement gap will continue to widen as this occurs.

THIS IS WHY ALL AREAS SHOULD FOLLOW PRESIDENT BIDEN’S LEAD. VACCINATE THE TEACHERS. Biden says teachers should move up in priority to receive Covid-19 vaccine – CNN Do we want those schools open? VACCINATE THE TEACHERS.

I have worked in those old schools. I don’t believe that all of them can be properly ventilated. I don’t trust kids to follow all the rules about distancing and masks. (Anyone who does probably never had kids.) I know how crowded halls and cafeterias are. If we put everybody back in the same school that was overcrowded for the last decade, that school will still be overcrowded.

Those teachers across the country who are fighting openings? Why don’t we try listening to them for a change? Based on what they have heard and read, many teachers are uncomfortable going into the classrooms they know. They have seen what the hallways of their schools look like. They have a pretty good idea of what to expect if schools open. Dismissing teachers’ rational concerns is likely to become one more nail in the coffin as some of America’s teachers weigh whether or not to continue teaching in the future.

Merriam Webster’s definition of first responders: a person who is among those responsible for going immediately to the scene of an accident or emergency to provide assistance. Teachers are their own version of first responders. I guarantee readers an academic emergency has been underway since last spring.

Let’s rescue the best and sometimes only people in position to step in and mitigate our learning losses. While we dig our way out of the learning hole that COVID has dug through the heart of our neighborhoods, let’s support teachers. Reader, are you in a state that has not bumped teachers into the current vaccination pool? When you have a free moment, please contact your legislative leaders to let them know you support vaccinating teachers now.

In practical terms, those shots may shut down most or all of today’s fights about opening schools.

A last observation: Please see my previous post, though, for a take on why not all children should be obliged to walk through those school doors. Privilege and School Re-openings | Notes from the Educational Trenches (eduhonesty.com)

One takeaway from a webinar yesterday on COVID-19’s effects on education: This epidemic’s face shifts from community to community. In some neighborhoods, families may not favor live instruction even though their school boards, mayors and governors are pushing hard for that instruction. COVID-19 looks scarier in poor neighborhoods, disproportionately neighborhoods of color. That’s because the illness and death rates in those areas are running higher, sometimes much higher, than state averages.

My thought: At least some mandated openings smack of presumptuousness and privilege. We are open where I live and I see the busses driving around my block. But many parents here are working from home. I documented a few numbers in a previous post showing how the ability to work from home increases with income. In this land of home ownership with three and four-bedroom houses, the snow plows come to clear driveways regularly. Whole Foods and other providers drop off food. Amazon trucks criss-cross the streets, carrying art supplies, and who knows what other items of interest. Cardboard spills out of recycle cans. In less snowy times, children are outside throwing basketballs through the hoops in their driveways. School superintendents live in this suburb.

I bet CDC officials often live in similar places.

Is it safe to open schools? Perhaps it has become safe enough, at least here in Illinois. We are vaccinating teachers as part of the second wave of shots.* But I am not sure that people who live in my suburb should be making decisions for families in poor and urban neighborhoods. However benevolently wielded, that use of power seems presumptuous.

Eduhonesty: Perceptions matter. If a kid is afraid to jump off the high dive, most responsible adults gauge that fear before trying to force that kid off the end of the board. I would encourage a nervous kid, provide more reassurance and support to a frightened counterpart — and I would let a genuinely terrified kid off the hook. High dives can always wait.

Maybe in-person instruction should wait where parents in a neighborhood do not favor that instruction. I hate to burden teachers, but I suggest we employ a model that opens schools with an option for remote learning. I also suggest we provide enough support to teachers so that the 2020/21 school year does not burn them out en masse.

No one should be forced off the high dive. At the same time, many financially struggling parents do need the childcare that school provides. No easy fixes exist for parents living in multigenerational homes who must go out to work.

Disturbingly, though, I am struck by the realization that school opening choices are being made for people based on “what’s good for them.” Who decides that? Using what criteria? Opening decisions may mean well and probably express true concern for children’s learning, but I cannot avoid a cynical fear that potential test score declines, in and of themselves, may be affecting opening decisions.

Few decision makers opening those school districts live in poor neighborhoods. Our mayors, superintendents and governors mostly have excellent insurance. Grandma may be living with them, but if any of those grandmas live near me, I have never met them. More often, grandma is living in her own home with a Life Alert button and visiting caregivers or even full-time help. She may be in an assisted living facility, one that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars upfront for those lucky enough to secure a place.

As I listened to my webinar, I thought how parents in many neighborhoods did not WANT to send children into crowded classrooms. School openings have been slowed or stymied by students who simply did not arrive. From an article in “The New Yorker” (What’s at Stake in the Fight Over Reopening Schools | The New Yorker): “According to one recent study, only eighteen per cent of Black parents and twenty-two per cent of Latinx parents would prefer to send their children back to in-person schooling full time, compared with forty-five per cent of white parents. Over fifty per cent of Black and Latinx parents prefer to keep their children in remote learning.”

These re-openings drip privilege somehow, whether they are meant as well-intended rescues or not.

*About half of U.S. states have not prioritized teacher vaccinations, however.

The Pre-K topic mostly flitted past my radar recently. I subbed in a Pre-K classroom near my home after I retired so I do know a little about Pre-K. On-line Pre-K classes? You’d have much better luck teaching deep sea diving at home. Pre-K kids learn by doing. They learn by sitting down and tracing their letters, sometimes with a guiding hand. They learn by getting their cup of crackers and carton of milk. They learn by taking the paintbrush and building their Batman. They learn by throwing the ball, jumping on the trampoline, and riding the tricycle. They learn by singing and dancing to YouTube, hopefully with friends but the friends are somewhat optional. They learn by playing games and putting on costumes.

Can a child do some of this through online learning? Of course, and many are trying to learn online right now.

But what’s the point? Why not cut our parents loose with a simple set of requests: Teach Jay his letters and numbers, up to twenty if possible. He will benefit by knowing the names of a few shapes such as circles, triangles, squares and rectangles. We can add helpful suggestions: Talk about the shapes in the bag of peas and carrots. Discuss the steps in your process as you make the cookie dough, A list of helpful YouTube videos should be provided.

Then I’d cut those parents loose with a warning about the problems that too much screen time can create. Social skills cannot be truly taught online. You have to be in a shared space competing for the same truck, building blocks or paintbrushes. Creativity can be taught online as skills develop, but at four years of age, Lego, wood blocks, crayons, paper, an easel and a paint brush will work dramatically better than pictures on a screen.

Eduhonesty: Screens are not hands-on learning when you are three or four years of age. At worst, they are close to useless. Preschoolers can’t keyboard. It’s too early for them to be taught that skill. (Yes, rudimentary keyboarding might be doable for some but they will learn the keys much faster in a few years — and they will have a much better sense of what they are doing and WHY they are doing it.)

To make Pre-K learning work online, a dedicated parent or guardian is required — otherwise known as “the person to manage the keyboard and follow the directions.” I’d call this a waste of time. It’s also a highly prejudicial situation, favoring those kids lucky enough to have someone free to manage that keyboard — plan # 23,956 to widen the achievement gap, I’d say. Can online Pre-K learning be done? Yes, without doubt.

BUT WHY MAKE LIFE SO HARD? Why not give parents a list of things you want their kids to know, like those numbers, then cut them loose with helpful websites and useful construction toys? And let them bake cakes and paint pictures in coloring books while counting the beans going into the cooking pot? All the items in that Pre-K learning curriculum? A parent or guardian can get you most or all of the way there WITHOUT having to be online at a certain time in a certain program along with everyone else.

We are adding unnecessary layers of complexity to Pre-K, burdening parents who are often already lost trying to keep up with the demands for their older elementary and middle school children. If we add to household stress, who do we honestly help? As dad, grandma or whoever is minding the house gets snappier and less patient, how does learning benefit? We are probably teaching some colorful language as confused adults try to figure out where the latest lost link went.

Risk vs. reward — realistically, what are online Pre-K’s rewards? I see few that can’t be easily accomplished WITHOUT online Pre-K. At least one huge risk glares out at me: online Pre-K helps weld children to their electronic devices harder and sooner — the exact opposite of what I would choose for America’s children today.

A post to support union efforts to open schools AFTER VACCINATION.

While waiting for a Whole Foods pick-up, I read an article about white people receiving a disproportionate number of the available COVID-19 vaccinations. Chicago has tried very hard to get those vaccines into communities of color. Other municipalities throughout the country are working on that as well; yet statistics show non-Asian people of color are getting shots at lower rates than white people. Despite best efforts, environmental racism has slipped again into the American picture.

In Los Angeles County, only 7% of Black residents age 65 and over have received their first vaccination, less than half the figure for white senior residents. “About 9% of Native American seniors and 14% of Latino seniors have received at least one dose.” (L.A. Latino, Black seniors fall behind in COVID-19 vaccine access compared with whites (msn.com) Some 17% of whites and 18% of Asian Americans have gotten at least one shot. Northern California mirrors this set-up in which blacks and Latinos have fallen noticeably behind whites and Asians in getting vaccinated.

From Racial Disparity in COVID-19 Shots | The Portland Observer (February 1): “An early look at the 17 states and two cities that have released racial breakdowns through Jan. 25 found that Black people in all places are getting inoculated at levels below their share of the general population, in some cases significantly below.”

Eduhonesty: Urban teachers and other teachers who work in poor areas — disproportionately areas of color — will not be surprised by these findings. I have watched the craziness associated with those shots unfolding, and I have known that the families of the kids I taught were going to get hammered by the COVID vaccination process. Nothing else was possible.

How do you get that shot?

Almost without exception, you go online. You go to the Walgreens queue, the CVS queue, or your county queue. You add sites for favorites, some with names like Service Dashboard (mhealthcheckin.com). And then you go back, over and over again until you happen to get lucky. You may post on neighborhood apps like Nextdoor to get tips. Who is getting shots? How are they doing this? You add yourself to random lists for clinics. Phone numbers exist on some of these sites but you have to get to the site to find the phone number.

My ninety-some-year-old parents took that computer offline maybe five years ago. It sits upstairs gathering dust, too complicated to manage now. My Episcopalian church has many members who have fallen out of worship services this year. They don’t do Zoom meetings. Some don’t have the technology necessary to do those meetings.

The students in my 99% poverty school did not normally have computers. Online activity happened on cell phones that only some students possessed. Parents’ phones could fill in gaps, but easy internet access simply was not there. Sometimes NO internet access existed outside of school or fast-food restaurants. And across America, many schools are empty or lightly populated, while students with school-issued technology sometimes sit in fast food parking lots. You can do the COVID shot search on a phone, but that search requires its own basket of background knowledge — one some parents may not possess if they grew up in that techno desert.

My school is 60% Hispanic, 30% Black, 5% two or more races, and 99% poor. That demographic background forms its own whammy in terms of getting vaccinated. Many parents in my district work multiple jobs, trying to get enough of a low wage to support themselves. They can’t easily haunt vaccine information sites. While Spanish language translations are generally available, not all immigrants are strong readers, especially if they come from rural areas of impoverished countries.

As to our Black families …

“’It’s frustrating and challenging,’ said Dr. Michelle Fiscus, who runs Tennessee’s vaccination program, which is doubling the doses sent to some hard-hit rural counties but is meeting with deep-rooted mistrust among some Black Tennesseans.” (Racial Disparity in COVID-19 Shots | The Portland Observer)

The ghosts of “The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male” are with us still and will be with us forever. That experiment spanned forty years. People have not forgotten that untreated subjects were allowed to die.

Let’s throw in another few facts:

Poor families often have transportation challenges. How many afternoons did I stand with students in cold hallways in the Illinois winter as students tried to find some way home? They had stayed to study and did not feel up to a long walk in subzero temperatures. For liability reasons, the district did not want teachers driving students. We did not have an activity bus for stragglers. Some families remained without transportation for long periods, waiting to make enough money to fix a car that had been sitting idle for weeks or even months.

Uber and Walgreens are working together to offer free rides to vaccination sites for members of communities of color. (Walgreens and Uber team up to make sure underserved communities have access to COVID-19 vaccines – CBS News) Efforts like this can help solve the transportation crisis — and crisis it is likely to be. Unfortunately, people can’t simply drop into Walgreens for their COVID-19 vaccination. These shots are often being delivered en masse at special sites. Friends have travelled over thirty miles to get their shots. Some are even putting a 50 mile range into their searches. I can speak for the fact that Illinois has excellent public transportation between suburbs and Chicago (That transportation requires people to use trains and busses in COVID times, of course.), but moving between suburbs is much more complicated. Sometimes you have to go into Chicago to go out again, hopping from trains to busses and back again. It was 7 degrees outside when I went to get my groceries today.

Internet connections, transportation, and vaccine hesitancy all work against communities of color. Criteria for receiving shots matter as well. Many workers under 65 do not realize they might qualify for a shot due to the nature of their work. Others do not qualify. Restaurant workers and construction workers are category 1C in many areas, and do not yet qualify. For a broad update: Tracking the covid vaccine: Doses, people vaccinated by state – Washington Post

Eduhonesty: Meanwhile, an update on teachers from Covid-19 Vaccine Rollout: State by State – The New York Times (nytimes.com) shows teachers are now able to get vaccines (if they can find them!) in about half of our states. (Updated Feb 8)

This county-by-county free-for-all is going as fast as it can. I’d like to take a moment to thank those men and women who are working all day, jabbing shots into shoulders as quickly as circumstances allow. So many people have been working so hard to help us get ahead of this plague.

But I want to double back now to teacher safety and make an observation I have not seen specifically highlighted elsewhere. Chicago has been locked in a dispute with teachers about reopening classrooms. Other urban districts are fighting the same fight. One important fact about that fight out should be put out front and center:

Unvaccinated teachers with students living in multigenerational, unvaccinated households will be at highest risk — and Chicago, Detroit, New York and other areas still have many unvaccinated teachers working with these high-risk populations. The CDC observes that the rate of infection in school children is tiny, but that data cannot be trusted. We are not testing asymptomatic and sometimes even sick kids. We know that children can be asymptomatic carriers. Until we conduct robust tests for asymptomatic COVID within the school population, we will not have reliable data on student and teacher risk profiles.

Vaccinations are moving quickly now. How much will we gain academically by forcing teachers and students back into that classroom prematurely? This is especially true since many families don’t seem to WANT their children to go back. I talk to friends whose schools are open but operating at about 40% capacity or less, many of those absences not due to any district plan. Less affluent students often live in multigenerational households with parents who know that they and the kids are likely to be fine if COVID comes home from school, but grandma might be another story entirely.

One last thought: The stress level is incredible out there right now, with many teachers debating whether or not to finish out their contracts. “Should I stay or should I go?” The many social media threads say. What can get lost in reading those threads is that once that question is asked, departure will remain on the table for the future. What about next year? The year following? The subs pretty much vanished this last year, as I predicted. I expect in the next few years, many teachers will go as well. At some point, going back to school to become an ultrasound technician may seem a smart move, despite the costs of more college loans. I now follow a group specifically dedicated to helping teachers get out of teaching.

P.S. Meanwhile, readers living this modern version of the Old West, who have been lucky enough to get that shot or who are waiting for the County Sheriff to rescue you, may I ask if you can think of an elderly neighbor who might need your help? My brother managed to get appointments for my parents, but many of the elderly living on their own are simply lost right now. Do you know a friend or neighbor who can no longer navigate cyberspace?

Can you help?

What are we building? What have we built? In this time of Adderall, Concerta, Strattera (atomoxetine), Focalin XR, Guanfacine, Clonidine, Tenex, CBD oil, methylphenidate, caffeine, melatonin, Vyvanse etc., what is happening to our students? Where do they spend their time? For the most part, our kids are in school and or at home.

What have we done to school? I’ve described my last school year before retirement elsewhere, but let me boil it down fast: Testing for over 20% of the year, mandatory tests and quizzes based on Common Core standards that were sometimes a full six years above where students were testing. I was a bilingual teacher, so I had seventh grade students testing in early elementary math and English. The special education teacher across from me had to give the same tests and quizzes. She took to going over the Friday test with her students on Friday and then giving them the test on Monday. When I observed this was making me look bad, since sped was sometimes outscoring bilingual, she said, “They don’t remember it anyway.” I didn’t protest and I didn’t get mad. The whole thing was so crazy it hardly mattered. They couldn’t READ these required tests that were sucking up my entire year.

The administration told students and teachers that grades were to be based entirely on tests and quizzes, no doubt to motivate everyone. At that point, of course, my students pretty much all felt FUCKED. And they felt that way for the entire year. So did I, of course. This was a no-win scenario.

To make sure students did their best, all parties and field trips were cancelled until after the spring PARCC test, which came in two batches that year, ensuring almost no recreation ever until the end of the year. I vividly remember how nervous another bilingual teacher in my grade felt because we quickly allowed a gift exchange right before winter break. Fortunately, when the Principal popped in that day, they were all slaving over worksheets.

Adults don’t do well without an occasional break. They don’t do well when the informal team-building activities disappear, and all the birthday cupcakes and celebratory moments vanish. As to field trips — those journeys become lifetime memories for many kids. To an adult, that bus trip may be just another visit to the aquarium. To a kid, those swimming fish can be magic. We did manage one trip to the Museum of Science and Industry after the tests were all over.

But magic doesn’t help on the annual test, and breaks take time away from drilling for that test. So mostly, my kids had a dreary, dreary year, an often incomprehensible year, as people in a now-failed consulting company on the East Coast wrote tests for them.

Eduhonesty: And now I’d like to circle back to where I started. My list of drugs isn’t complete either. What are we building? Well, the pharmaceutical industry just loves us I’m sure. Look at all those quieter kids on Adderall, Concerta, Strattera (atomoxetine), Focalin XR, Guanfacine, Clonidine, Tenex, CBD oil, methylphenidate, caffeine, melatonin, Vyvanse etc. — all the more peaceful kids who are getting help. Some hapless kids are just caroming all over the classroom in their anxiety. At worst, their doctor suggested a pharmaceutical but parents could not afford the drug’s cost.

I am not against medicating children who require help. Although I will always regard medication as a last resort, I have also watched as anxiety disorders and ADHD have been skyrocketing in America’s classrooms. I know that sometimes medications work wonders for kids who cannot sit and/or concentrate, who are falling behind and whose social lives are impacted by their hither and thither moves through friend groups. Those drugs rescue many students.

ADHD often runs hand-in-hand with anxiety disorders, and I have written before about the fact that I believe some ADHD diagnoses may be anxiety instead. But a connection is natural, regardless. If you keep forgetting to put that homework in the backpack, and you know Mr. X is likely to say something snarky since you forgot the last two assignments — well, that can make any sensitive person anxious. When ADHD stuff happens often enough, anxiety may be a natural, daily occurrence.

Meanwhile the pressure on kids is as high as it has ever been, largely as a result of excessive testing.

If readers want a reason to pull in all this testing, my list of drugs should be put out on the table. When educational leaders keep telling kids that they must take standardized tests, benchmark tests, and unit tests created by outside consulting firms, on top of regular classroom quizzes and tests — while regularly including tests with portions students sometimes cannot read or understand — those leaders keep adding stress into students’ daily lives. Those leaders keep scaring those kids, at least until the kids get tired and detach from the whole enterprise. I’ve watched this happen.

Stress affects behavior, behavior leads to interventions, and voila! Another successful Adderall XR intervention. But how many of those interventions are we making necessary by creating toxic classroom environments?

I’m not saying all of these behavioral challenges are environmental. I am ADHD. Some people are simply wired to lose their keys and ignore the many alarms that try to remind them of the latest glitch in their schedule. But environment forms a huge part of how more anxious children function. Desperate administrators trying to get students to take tests seriously often emphasize the importance of those tests, telling students certain tests will affect their ENTIRE scholastic future. Then they hand those kids tests the kids mostly cannot understand.

For decade after decade, schools were getting by with one spring test, not heavily emphasized, and with tests designed by the classroom teacher. Those tests were much fairer measuring instruments since the teacher taught the material and then TESTED CHILDREN ON MATERIAL THEY HAD ACTUALLY BEEN TAUGHT. In this set-up, many more students knew they could succeed. A student could win at these tests by studying because students knew what to study. Often the exact topics for the test were conveniently laid out in a study guide, one that might include sample problems.

We desperately need to go back in time, back to the time before children became sources of exploding data. We need to stop using data as an excuse for supporting testing that steals irreplaceable classroom minutes for little or no advantage. We need to stage a full-scale retreat.

And I suggest those exploding pharmaceutical interventions in elementary school back up my case.

P.S. From an interesting article about differences between the U.S. and Great Britain: Generation meds: the US children who grow up on prescription drugs | Health | The Guardian

“According to America’s Centers for Disease Control, 11% of four- to 17-year-olds in the US have been diagnosed with ADHD, a label for those who are disruptive in class and unable to concentrate; just over 6% are taking medication.” 

That’s over one in ten with ADHD diagnoses, with over one in twenty medicated. That medication may be helpful and entirely appropriate. Nevertheless, it’s time to actively pursue an agenda of making school a kinder place — starting with reasonable targets and decreased TESTS and TESTING time.