Posted on 07/17/2004 7:56:18 PM PDT by steplock
THE JOURNAL NEWS
By FREDREKA SCHOUTEN AND MERYL HYMAN HARRIS
In the world of standardized tests, Christmas never comes. No one celebrates Halloween or birthdays. Kids rarely encounter a french fry. And no one dies. Ever.
The tests taken by millions of schoolchildren are scrubbed clean of topics that might reflect ethnic, cultural or regional biases. Yonkers students shouldn't be expected to have a vast knowledge of corn production, and Florida 10-year-olds shouldn't be expected to compose essays about blizzards.
Subjects viewed as inappropriate or potentially upsetting to children, such as death, violence, drugs or sex, are out of the question.
"I would never have a story about kids who thought they were ugly or being bullied at school," said Kathleen Oberley, who has been writing questions for the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills for about 30 years.
But other test taboos might surprise you: When pets appear on exams, they can't bear names like Madison or Pete. That's to make sure your fourth-grader doesn't confront a pet gerbil with his name on an exam.
There are other reasons to avoid pets. Mentions of dogs, for example, might trouble Muslim students because the animals are considered unclean in Islamic culture.
Birthdays are forbidden because they are not observed by some religions. Also forbidden: Halloween costumes, pumpkins, Harry Potter, anything that smacks of the occult.
Even dinosaurs — the objects of ardent student devotion — are off-limits on most tests for fear they promote the idea of evolution.
"The tests are overly sanitized. Now they are reduced to weather reports," said Deborah Rapaport of Scarsdale's State Tests Opposed by Parents, which organized a boycott of the tests in 2001.
Gary Tutty, Putnam Valley superintendent, said public education is under attack, and the sanitizing of tests is just one symptom.
"Of course you don't want to offend people. However, it gets to the point where you make the test pretty much useless," he said. "There are good people making a point, but we take offense to just about everything now — and that promotes private school, where everyone can compartmentalize themselves again, be just with their own people."
State education officials and testing companies say these policies are sound.
"Testing is a stressful enough experience for kids. We want to make sure there is nothing that would cause the child to stumble," said John Tanner, vice president of testing services for Harcourt publishers.
But education historian Diane Ravitch argues that anti-bias policies make the tests boring.
"The United States is obviously a country of many, many cultures," said Ravitch, a New York University professor and author of "The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn."
"If we accommodate everyone's taboos, then we don't have the kind of zone where we can say, 'This is reality, and it's OK to learn about it.' "
The banned words and topics outlined by test publishers and states aren't the only restrictions. Once questions are written, they undergo field testing to weed out questions that are too easy, too hard and those that just stump particular groups of students.
In most states, test items that survive the statistical scrutiny still face teams of reviewers — teachers, PTA members, math professors, home-schooling activists, administrators of all races and ethnic groups — who generally work on a freelance basis to scour questions for bias.
But not in New York.
"To ensure that our tests are fair, and not biased towards any group, we give extensive training to the individuals who are responsible for selecting items that appear on the tests. They are instructed to select only items that are aligned with the state curriculum and that are age- and grade-level appropriate," said Jonathan Burman of the state Education Department. "We also do a statistical assessment of the items, once they have been field-tested, to make sure that the results don't indicate that the item may have been biased in some way."
It's been a touchy subject since parents and educators complained to the Board of Regents on learning that literary excerpts from the likes of Anton Chekhov and Judy Blume were routinely changed on state tests to avoid anything that anyone might consider offensive. "God" was removed from a passage by Elie Wiesel.
Since then, the state has discontinued the practice and disbanded its Sensitivity Review Committee, which was charged with policing "highly controversial themes," "gratuitous or overly graphic speech" and material that assumed "values not shared by all test takers."
But educator Hugh Scott of New Rochelle warns that all tests are to some degree biased, and that the search for common ground must continue, now and into the future when different groups come to the United States.
"Diversity implies you have to make fundamental decisions about what people perceive," said Scott, retired dean of education of Hunter College in New York. "Words mean different things to different people." For some, "french fry" is a problem, but Scott wonders what a Spanish speaker imagines the first time he encounters the term "hot dog."
Racial bias is easy to spot, he said. Cultural differences aren't.
"Anything that complex has to produce some reasonable compromise, and you keep at it till you come up with something," he said. "Too often, testing tests people on what they haven't experienced."
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I bet the words "mother" and "father" are forbidden too.
In FL the Florida Teacher's Association has started advertising to build up their credibility. In FL the teacher's union controlls the democrat party.
We can't have that, now, can we?
Islam regards dogs as unclean? Another reason to wonder about that religion.
What if someone has KIDS named Rover or Fluffy or Spot?
That would create a problem,wouldn't it?
In Judaism, unclean pretty much just means you can't EAT it, right? That doesn't mean Jewish kids can't stand to see the word "lobster" in print. Is it any different in Islam?
And not being able to even mention dinosaurs to avoid offending the creationists doesn't cause you to wonder?
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