Reflecting upon International Women's Day last month, I thought to remember Mary Harris "Mother" Jones. Mother Jones who lived from 1837 to 1930 was an Irish-American schoolteacher once known as "the most dangerous woman in America " by then-President Theodore Roosevelt.
Roosevelt's reasoning?
In 1903, dismayed by the continued prevalence of child labor in America, Jones organized a children's march from Philadelphia to Roosevelt's home in New York City. The march brought to the forefront the critical issues of child labor in America.
Jones' activism, and subsequent popularity, grew because children were ultimately being used as pawns in adults' overarching schemes for profit. It is happening again in our children's classrooms. We, like Jones, must make a stand.
Our obsession with standardized testing has overtaken the instruction in our classrooms. Anyone who is remotely affiliated with schools will tell you that the new Common Core, the most current example of the so called "reform movement," pushes all classroom endeavors toward the sole purpose of children passing a test.
High-stakes tests are not scientifically based and fail to follow the U.S. government's own data on learning (http://www.fairtest.org). They foster test-driven instruction that is not meeting the individual and intellectual needs of our children.
When scores on a high-stakes test become the objective of the teaching process, the test loses its value as an indicator of educational status and distorts the educational process.
Research from the Education Policy Analysis Archives also points to an additional consequence showing that "high-stakes testing has little or no relationship to reading achievement, and a weak to moderate relationship to math, especially in fourth grade."
These findings were derived by using the Accountability Pressure Index, which uses a series of correlation analyses to explore relationships between high-stakes testing accountability pressure and student achievement.
Student achievement is measured utilizing results from the National Assessment for Education Progress in reading and math. This particular study has quantifiable results that assert that standardized tests have little to no impact on reading achievement and actually have a slightly negative impact on math achievement.
This runs contrary to everything we have heard about high stakes testing from the mainstream media. If we know high stakes tests make classrooms oppressive and do not positively correlate with reading and math achievement, why do we spend billions of taxpayer dollars to fund this movement?
This next bit may surprise you.
Here is a brief excerpt from Pearson's 2012 report to its investors. Pearson, the world's largest education company, has a stranglehold on many of the contracts needed to implement the Common Core. Forty-five states have signed on to pay the billions needed to implement this "reform." New York is one of them.
"We continued to produce strong growth in secure online testing, an important market for the future. We increased online testing volumes by more than 10 percent, delivering 6.5 million state accountability tests, 4.5 million constructed response items and 21 million spoken tests," the report said.
Education is big business. Last year alone, Pearson had a profit close to $1 billion.
Don't get me wrong. I appreciate entrepreneurial spirit, but not on the backs of our children.
We, as parents, must find our inner Mother Jones. To the testing companies and CEOs that now run our schools, we need to become the most dangerous parents in America.
Our kids' lives depend on it.
Tommy Carroll lives in Troy.