Getting Testy

The Gay Uncle is burning up, and it’s not simply the fact that he’s in Austin, Texas where it’s 98 degrees at 11:00 at night. He just discovered that the Mayor of his fair city has snuck a pilot program into the upcoming school-year plan allowing standardized tests to be given to kindergarten kids. He’s all for useful measurement being completed–after all, he spends a good portion of his professional life helping people like PBS make sure that their programming actually teaches kids what it claims to. But there’s a huge difference between a optional, one-off, research project intended to help a quality educational program receive federal funding; and a systematic, citywide, requisite battery of testing for five year-olds, which will be used to force them into ability tracks, and punish their schools and teachers. Wasn’t it the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution that outlawed cruel and unusual punishment (or is that another one of the ones that the Bush Administration did away with in the past few years?) Once again the G.U. repeats his mantra: young kids should be allowed to be kids. That means, early childhood education should be dedicated to open-ended materials, play, and exposure to literacy materials–not multiple choice assessment. He thinks that any funds for this kind of testing would be much better spent expanding the promise of providing UNIVERSAL PRE-K–a promise which has yet to be fulfilled, forty-plus years after it was initiated with Head Start–and which has been scientifically proven to be one of the most important factors differentiating kids who succeed in school from those that struggle. Oooh. Things like this really make the Gay Uncle ANGRY.