For all of you out there who hate standardized tests because they don’t really measure your kids’ successes, participants at a recent Ottawa education conference hear your pain. They don’t think the tests tell the whole story, either. They don’t want to abolish them, though. Instead, they want to monitor other areas of your kids’ lives, too, to make sure schools are doing the proper job. In fact, they want to make sure the schools are doing your job.
These educators have decided that a true measure of the success of the school system comes from producing students who don’t get pregnant and don’t contract STD’s; who exercise regularly and aren’t obese; who grow up to vote, volunteer, stay off drugs and stay off welfare; who don’t smoke and don’t drink; who do graduate; and, oh yeah, who maybe know some math. To monitor whether a school is successful, then, standardized tests aren’t enough. What if all our brilliant kids were fat and didn’t brush their teeth?
Today, if a study shows that something will benefit kids—even if it’s standing on their heads for twenty minutes a day while whistling “On Top of Old Smokey”—we all declare, in one loud voice, “The schools have to do something about that!” We certainly can’t rely on parents, the thought goes, because then kids who have neglectful parents will miss out on some vital lessons.
A school’s primary function was once to teach academics. Today it’s to teach attitudes and behaviours. The Ontario government is now insisting that high schoolers can’t graduate unless they complete their forty hours of community service. A few years ago, though, they issued a waiver to allow students to don their caps and gowns even if they don’t pass the grade 10 literacy test. We would rather have volunteers than workers.
Volunteering, of course, is vital to society, as are most of these other lessons the school now teaches. But can a school really do in six hours a day (4 if you take out lunch and recess) what parents can’t do in the other 18? The school system, no matter how well intentioned, can’t make up for inadequate parenting. Take the latest push to overcome obesity. Many educators feel that we need to give kids more gym classes with more aerobics. But according to the Canadian Pediatric Society, the best way to lower obesity rates is to get kids to turn off the television and to stop eating junk food. The schools can’t do this, no matter how hard they try. The parents hold the keys, as they do to so many other things.
Yet not only are we asking schools to do the impossible; we’re also asking them to take valuable teaching time to do what, for many kids, is simply unnecessary. One of my friends teaches grade three, and she told me about a weekly visit they had from the Ministry to teach kids to socialize better. As anyone who has ever set foot in an elementary school classroom knows, you can’t teach 25 kids if even one child is running around the classroom banging kids’ heads together, yelling, or throwing scissors (it happens). You have to address these behavioural issues first. But in this case, they took teaching time away from 24 kids who didn’t need it to reach the one who did. Interestingly, the whole class wasn’t forced to sit through a remedial reading lesson that may have benefited three or four, but they were asked to sit through a remedial behavioural lesson that benefited one.
Kids without proper parenting need guidance, and the schools do seem like the only solution. As a society, we certainly need them to try. But I have very little confidence that they can truly succeed in raising kids with healthy behaviours and attitudes if parents aren’t on side. And in the meantime, teachers are exhausted because there’s too much on their plates, and the government is frustrated because test scores are so low. And those kids who do have good parenting lose out on valuable class time while teachers tell them how to reduce STD’s, avoid pregnancy, sympathize with those from other cultures, and use deodorant. I can do all those things better at home. I’d rather my kids learn to multiply. How about you?
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