Tested: One American School Struggles to Make the Grade - Hardcover

Perlstein, Linda

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0805080821 ISBN 13: 9780805080827

Publisher: Henry Holt and Co., 2007

Synopsis

The pressure is on at schools across America. In recent years, reforms such as No Child Left Behind have created a new vision of education that emphasizes provable results, uniformity, and greater attention for floundering students. Schools are expected to behave more like businesses and judged almost solely on the bottom line: test scores.

To see if this world is producing better students, Linda Perlstein immersed herself in a suburban Maryland elementary school. The resulting portrait -- detailed, human, and truly thought-provoking -- is marked by the same narrative gifts and expertise that made Not Much Just Chillin' so illuminating.

The school, once deemed a failure, is now held up as an example of reform done right. Perlstein explores the rewards and costs of that transformation, through the experiences of the people who lived it. Nine-year-olds meditate to activate their brains before exams and kindergartners write paragraphs. Teachers attempt to address diverse needs at the same time they are expected to follow daily scripts, and feel compelled to focus on topics that will be tested at the expense of those that won't. The principal attempts to keep it all together, in the face of immense challenges.

Perlstein provides the first detailed view of how new education policies are modified by human realities. Tested will be talked about, thought about, written about -- and will almost certainly play an important role in the national debate as the federal education law come up for renewal.

About this title

About the Author

Linda Perlstein spent six years covering education for The Washington
Post and is the author of the acclaimed Not Much Just Chillin': The Hidden Lives of Middle Schoolers. She speaks nationwide to educators and parents. She grew up in Milwaukee and now lives with her husband in Baltimore and western Virginia.

Reviews

Though the jury is still out regarding the controversial 2001 education act known as "No Child Left Behind," it's safe to call it a mixed blessing for at-risk "Title 1" schools who rely on federal funding to pay teachers and support staff: under the new policy, federal funding can be taken away if schools fail to make "adequate yearly progress," as measured by country-wide standardized testing. Education reporter and author Perlstein (Not Much Just Chillin') uses an engaging, up-close-and-personal style to examine one such school, suburban Maryland's Tyler Heights Elementary-a failing institution destined for a big turnaround-to discover the positives and negatives of the "school accountability movement" in which "No Child" is rooted; in particular, Perlstein wants to know, "What were the test scores about?" Tales of third graders prepping for an exam prove genuinely, surprisingly dramatic; Perlstein crafts a gripping narrative out of the day-to-day business of education through solid reporting, taking into consideration the politics, goals, interests and architects of the program ("Lobbyists for testing and school improvement businesses had a far greater role in the law's creation than... actual educators"). The faces of children, teachers and administrators emerge vividly, and Perlstein largely avoids taking sides in favor of an honest, enlightening look at the complex reality of this much-debated policy.
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The predominately minority and low-income students at Tyler Heights Elementary School in Annapolis, Maryland, showed huge improvement in their state standardized tests, securing the future of their teachers and principal and pleasing parents until the next round of tests the following year. Could they sustain the level of improvement when so many children came to school hungry, abused, or poisoned by lead paint? The state looked at overall improvement year to year rather than the progress of individual students. Could the teachers and principal Tina McKnight continue to perform under the pressure? Perlstein (Not Much, Just Chillin', 2003) details how McKnight and the teachers at the once-failing elementary school spend much of their day strategizing about the test, under scrutiny by the local board of education. Perlstein brings telling details, engagement, and perception to her investigation of how a single school coped with the high stakes attached to standardized tests. As educators and lawmakers ponder the renewal of No Child Left Behind, this book offers some piercing insight into the reality of reliance on standardized tests to measure a school's effectiveness. Bush, Vanessa

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Prologue

 

Ain’t No Stopping Us Now

 

You could not tell by looking that Tina McKnight was in pain. Her hair was perfectly curled and she sat up straight in her desk chair, underneath a series of watercolors of Taxco, the Mexican town she loved to visit. That morning Tina had chosen a pantsuit of salmon pink and pinned a matching silk flower to her lapel, as if she could will good news through cheerful attire. Her back throbbed, sore from hours of bending over the toilet, possibly from food poisoning but more likely from stress. It was a week and a half before the end of the school year, and McKnight, the principal of Tyler Heights Elementary School in Annapolis, Maryland, had a lot on her mind.

 

She was worried about her sick mother, whom she could not care for the day before because she’d been stuck babysitting strangers who had appropriated the playground for an illicit soccer tournament. (Corona bottles and Pampers had been scattered all over the grass until Tina appeared with trash bags; god knows what was still left.) Today drops of water plopped rhythmically into strategically placed trash cans on the fifth-grade hall—trouble with the air conditioning, one more thing that needed to be fixed.

 

Other problems obsessing McKnight: It didn’t look like she’d get the school uniform plan in place by fall, as she’d wanted to. The discipline data had stopped improving, even with all the prizes given to students as behavior incentives, so McKnight hoped another principal in the district would call to chip in for the five-thousand-dollar consultant whose book promised “discipline without stress, punishment and rewards.” Then there was the secretary whose father had suffered a stroke, the assistant whose dad was headed to the hospital for his heart, and the kindergarten class that at the moment had neither teacher nor assistant nor substitute.

 

On top of all that, something far bigger was looming.

 

It was the first Monday in June 2005, a D-day of sorts for the principals of Anne Arundel County: They were about to receive their students’ scores on Maryland’s annual standardized test. For McKnight, and educators across the nation, test score day had accrued such monumental importance that it provoked more jitters than the first day of school, more emotions than fifth-grade graduation. Since McKnight’s arrival at 6:30 a.m., she had spent much of the time intensely drumming her hands on her prized Harvard desk blotter, a gift from her son. She had dug through the mailbag and found nothing. She kept looking out the window for deliveries but saw nothing.

 

“Good morning!” McKnight called to one little boy who came into the office to sign in. She greets every child she sees coming in tardy—and at Tyler Heights there are many, particularly in the last days of school. “Running late?” she said. “We’re glad you’re here.”

 

“Why is it so quiet?” the boy asked.

 

“Because everybody’s learning,” the principal told him.

 

She signed checks, one after the other, to keep up with the school’s bills. When the phone rang but no secretary picked up, she grabbed the receiver. “Hello, Tina McKnight, Tyler Heights.” Ms. McKnight—no longer Mrs., since her divorce had become final months before—dispatched the call and greeted another latecomer. “Good morning! Running late? We’re glad you’re here.” Then a man in a ball cap and khakis appeared in the outer office, holding a manila envelope.

 

McKnight walked over to greet him, and he handed her the envelope, marked maryland school assessment.

 

“Am I going to be happy after I open these?” she said.

 

“I have no idea. I’m just the delivery man.”

 

The principal shut her office door, bracing herself for the moment she had anticipated with anxiety pretty much every day for three months, ever since her third, fourth, and fifth graders took the state reading and math exams. McKnight pulled a sheaf of papers from the envelope, columns and columns of numbers, and paged through them. What she saw just didn’t make sense—not for a school that so many middle-class parents had rejected, not for a school that mainly served the poor, not for children who had arrived in the building with so few skills and so many problems. Such was the school’s reputation that when McKnight was appointed principal five years back, colleagues had said, “Congratulations, I think.”

 

Baffled, McKnight flipped back and forth to assess the numbers. Her hand was at her chest.

 

“Oh, I have to be sure I’m digesting what I’m digesting, because I’m, like, really . . .” She couldn’t finish her sentence. She sniffed. Her brows scrunched behind her glasses, her dark brown eyes practically closed. “I don’t know if I’m really looking at the right numbers.”

 

Overall, according to the results, 86 percent of the students passed reading. Eighty percent passed math. Black fourth graders—91 percent passed reading! Hispanic third graders—100 percent passed math! McKnight compared the county numbers and the school numbers, side by side. Hers were higher in many categories. “I don’t believe this. It’s, like, what . . .”

 

Maybe, she wondered, she had been sent some other school’s results. Maybe this was a mistake.

 

Or maybe not. Definitely not.

 

McKnight screamed. The reading teacher came in, saw the numbers, and she screamed too. McKnight grabbed a compact disc from her desk and went to the PA system in the outer office. She was forbidden to officially reveal the results to teachers yet, but she couldn’t resist giving them a clue. She put the disc into the boom box and pointed the intercom mike at it. The whole building heard the song—fuzzy, but clear enough. “Ain’t no stopping us now, we’re on the move!”

 

In the classrooms, the students danced, not because they knew the song’s hidden meaning but because music, even a cheesy disco tune, meant dancing. The teachers had no problem understanding what the song signified: For them, it was a deliverance of sorts. Most came out of their rooms as McKnight raced down the hallway to high-five them, like she was finishing a marathon.

 

At the end of the hall, she let out a shocking, triumphant scream.

 

 

A person could live in Annapolis for a lifetime unaware of its poverty.

 

The city of forty thousand is best known as an exemplar of preppy, nautical affluence; it is home to the buttoned-up U.S. Naval Academy, the pristine, historic State House perched on a hill, and an array of yacht clubs. Those who visit from Washington or Baltimore, forty-five minutes away, or who head down Forest Drive to pick up a bushel of steamed crabs at the Seafood Market en route to million-dollar homes on the Chesapeake Bay, probably don’t know that tucked blocks away are rows of garden apartments that are modest at best, dilapidated at worst, and two glum housing projects known to few beyond their residents and the police.

 

Before Tina McKnight received the envelope that would tell the world that Tyler Heights Elementary School was a compelling example of educational accountability done right, it might have been possible to live in Annapolis and n...

Edition details

• Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0805080821
• ISBN 13: 9780805080827
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320