I am beginning to really worry about B again. I had to reschedule his birthday party for this weekend, because it was just a small number of boys, and half couldn’t go. Well, tomorrow, only two can really go again! I have called and tried to get the other two to come even for an hour, or for me to come and get them and bring them home if it’s hard for the parents, but this just breaks my heart. I don’t get it. I guess people make plans, get overwhelmed, but this is such bad timing for Ben.<\/p>\n
It has been such a polarized year for him. Wonderful personal growth coupled with a terrible difficulty with the high-pressure fourth grade curriculum. That sounds like a joke, but it’s totally serious and pathetically so. I am getting extremely disillusioned with my “wonderful” school system, which is turning into the pressure cooker wet dream of the highly-standardized fascist\/fetishist. What is with education today? Partly it is the economy, partly, the crazed, grasping mandates of No Child Left Behind. NCLB, the Bush-reauthorized ESEA, calls for mastery in both math and reading of all children by 2010, and most of the states in the country have designated their high-stakes exit exams to be the arbiter of mastery. This, in essence, removes most or all of the control over curriculum and graduation from local control (school boards and school committees) and gives it all to the state and federal government. Schools, then, are scared shitless that they are going to be deemed “failing” simply because certain of their populations cannot pass the state standardized exams. So now most school systems teach to the tests, drill and kill, and, in this era of tax cuts for the wealthiest and the least public funding of education in decades, they cut their “specials,” the arts, the softer subjects, the areas where alternative types like Benji may excel. All that matters, in so many school systems these days, is math and English, with maybe some science thrown in. Whatever is on the state’s test, that is what the schools will emphasize because they don’t want to be taken over by the state.<\/p>\n
I’m serious. This is what No Child Left Behind calls for, ultimately: sanctions against “failing schools.” And the standard by which they measure our schools is most often one, high-pressure exam. Such legislation rides roughshod over Individualized Education Plans, or English as as Second Language-learners, or children who do not grow up in test-prep highly educated suburbs. <\/p>\n
All in the name of preparing them for “the real world.” The soft bigotry of low expectations,<\/span><\/a> my ass. So now what we have is the harsh bigotry of insane standards. There is such an insane drive to get kids to be able to succeed in the “real world.” But the thing is, the real world is our doing. We are the adults. The real world didn’t just happen in a vacuum. (Oh wait, the universe actually did begin in kind of a vacuum…or maybe it’s just going to end in a vacuum? Something like that. )<\/p>\n
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<\/a> everything in his path, and eventually, finding nothing else left to suck, he sucks up himself, and the entire picture, until you’re into a different scene altogether.<\/p>\n