Race to nowhere: Stop the insanity

New York magazine has yet another fine article this week  reiterating what early childhood experts have been saying for decades.  Standardized tests are not an adequate measure for young children, especially preschoolers. They are no more an indicator of future achievement than, say, videos of a child randomly banging on a piano at age two are an indicator of a future musical prodigy. Children’s intellectual growth is erratic at this stage, and elite schools or public gifted programs that rely on such tests are doing a disservice to the children, who may or may not achieve similar scores a few years later. Plus, the tests are developmentally inappropriate and give a huge advantage to kids whose parents are well-educated and who have the means to shell out big bucks for pricey  prep courses and guidebooks with dubious ethics.

The subhead sums it up: “Why Kindergarten Admissions Tests are Worthless.”

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’ve written about this a gazillion times. But how many times does the evidence have to be planted right in front of our noses before things change? There’s one voice in this piece that I initially found refreshing. Steve Nelson, head of the “famously progressive Calhoun School,” pooh-poohs the tests quite eloquently. Observe:

“At information meetings… I’ll often ask a room full of parents when their children started to walk.” Invariably, their replies form a perfect bell curve: a few at 9 and 10 months, most at 12 or 13, a few as late as 15 to 18. “And then I’ll ask: ‘What would you think if you were walking down the street, and you saw a parent yanking a 1-year-old child up from the sidewalk, screaming, ‘Walk, damn it?’ ” The same, he says, is true of a system that insists a child perform well on a test at 4 years of age. “Early good testers don’t make better students,” he tells me, “any more than early walkers make better runners.”

via Why Kindergarten-Admission Tests Are Worthless — New York Magazine.

Precisely. Nelson gets a lot of ink in the piece, and he says all the right things. He wants to see children who get to play with blocks, who make up stories and  “muck around.” He wants students who are daydreamers, kids who are “occasionally impulsive.” He even wants students who don’t want to answer the questions on the tests because they “are already seeing the world differently.”

He even goes so far as to suggest that he admires youngsters who are smart enough to be subversive at the age of four.

“I want kids who are cynical enough at age 4 to know that there’s really something wrong with someone asking them these things and think, ‘I’m going to screw with them in the process!’ ”

via Why Kindergarten-Admission Tests Are Worthless — New York Magazine.Yes, yes, yes! Where do I sign up?

It gets even better. Nelson also derides the tests not just because they are an inadequate measure, but because they are emotionally damaging to young children. Here you go:

“When we resort to any kind of measure of kids that’s supposed to be qualitative at a young age,” he says, “no matter how cheerfully we do it, no matter how many lollipops we hand out to de-stress the process, young children are extraordinarily discerning. They absorb their parents’ anxiety about it, they absorb the kinds of judgments people are making about them. So there’s a process of organizing kids in a hierarchy of worth, and it’s beginning at an age that’s criminal.”

via Why Kindergarten-Admission Tests Are Worthless — New York Magazine.

Yes, yes, yes! Where do I sign up? I’ll move back to New York. I’ll get a second mortgage to pay the tuition. Heck, I’ll be the janitor.

But then there’s the kicker, the ultimate deflation, the idealism shot. You see,  Calhoun requires the test as part of its admissions process. And this shows what is so insidious about the madness surrounding what’s happening in early childhood education. He knows the tests are inaccurate. He knows they predict precious little. He knows they are anxiety-inducing. And yet he continues to allow them to be used at his very own school.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be demonizing Nelson here, but for all his eloquence, he is contributing to the insanity by using the same measure he convincingly debunks. Everyone in early childhood education knows the tests are wrong. So when is someone in power, someone whose actions could be as powerful as his words, actually going to do something about it?

Nelson says he is thinking about doing away with the test next year, but next year is not soon enough. Yesterday would be better, but how about today?

If we’re starting kids on the rat race, this race to nowhere, this young, what will they be like when they reach the inherently angst-ridden years of adolescence? Funny I should ask that. Right after reading the kindergarten piece, I came across another documentary about education, with a slightly different message than “Waiting for Superman,” but a message that’s just as important. It’s called, quite simply, “Race to Nowhere,” and if it’s any indication of what’s to come for our young people, then we all ought to just go back to school and get degrees in psychotherapy, because today’s teens are going to need counseling.

“Race to Nowhere” depicts today’s high school students like rats on a treadmill, racing, racing, racing for the next AP class, the next community service activity, the next chance to edge that GPA up another decimal. The short trailer shows impassioned young students who are well aware that they are being pressured to do too much too soon. It shows teachers who lament the fact that they are being forced to teach quantity, rather than quality. It was made by a mother, Vicki H. Abeles, who is also quite accomplished in other fields. She saw what was happening to her own high school kid and wanted to make a difference.

It’s time that all of us, every parent, teacher, administrator and citizen, who knows what’s wrong with this Race to Nowhere to do something about it. Nelson can start by abolishing the standardized tests for incoming preschoolers. Otherwise, this is what lies in our future: