Desire to succeed leads to questionable strategies

By LEE KUCERA

Some months ago, following a column in this space about what I perceive to be the academic feeding frenzy that has come to characterize the climate at Monta Vista High School, one of my children (who shall remain unidentified) said, "Aren't people tired of you yapping about the schools all the time?"

It's entirely possible. But outside of family, schools are the primary influence on our children's lives. And I am dismayed at what I have seen happening in them in the past decade or so. Fueled by the reality of ever-fewer available university slots in California each year, schools and parents tend to be geared to one single-minded goal: grooming kids for the Darwinian process of rising to the top of the academic heap.

The numbers are, admittedly, grim. At a recent reception in San Jose for UC-Santa Barbara applicants, the chancellor told the audience that last year the university denied admission to 11,500 fully qualified UC applicants. A 1999 article in the New York Times said that of the 17,917 applicants to Stanford the previous fall, the school offered admission to 2,688. A television segment on college admission a year ago filmed committee officers at UC-San Diego plowing through more than 30,000 applications--again, for a few thousand available openings.

Families are looking for any means of giving their kids an edge over these slim odds, and their tactics aren't pleasant. What could be sadder than seeing parents fighting over openings in "the best" preschools and kindergartens, beginning to calculate their children's college resumes in the sixth grade, encouraging community service solely because it will look good on college applications, and allowing their kids to claim school activities that they have participated in only minimally, or not at all? And, it goes without saying, punishing them either overtly or covertly for getting anything less than an A on any assignment, in any class, any time, under any circumstances.

The state of California, under pressure to improve the quality of education it delivers to a huge, transient and enormously diverse population, hasn't helped matters. Impelled, apparently, by the don't-just-stand-there-do-something philosophy of educational reform, Sacramento has become test-happy. Standardized, nationally normed, timed, multiple-choice, machine-scored tests for all students are now the end-all and be-all for assessing educational effectiveness, and they begin in the second grade.

Schools are not asked to achieve the complex task of better learning, but to report higher scores on tests which are easy to administer and quick to tally. Nobody, of course, has thought of putting teachers at the center of school reform, even though they are the ones on the front lines of what is going on in our classrooms.

In December of last year, an article in Time magazine cited teachers in New York City, Atlanta, Texas and Georgia who were handing out advance copies of exams or inflating their students' scores on standardized tests. A director at Fair Test, an organization that monitors standardized testing, was quoted as saying "The more you ratchet up the pressure on these Trivial Pursuit types of exams, the more cheating you will see."

Similarly, I hear increasing buzz (unsubstantiated, but repeated by people who ought to know, like college counselors and recent Cal graduates) that there are well-organized, semi-professional cheating rings at UC-Berkeley, and frequent incidents of students sabotaging each others' work by deliberately destroying lab results or crashing computer files. It seems an inevitable consequence of the misguided notion that we are fostering from kindergarten on: that education is about survival of the fittest.

With a child who is in the spring semester of her senior year of high school, our household is by no means immune to the college admission mania. I admit that when she decided to take Humanities rather than Advanced Placement English because the Humanities reading list just looked more interesting to her, my first, knee-jerk response was "Uh-oh." Then I regained my senses: The independence of thought that led her to that decision will serve her better in the longer run than AP designations on her transcript. More important, in spite of her environment, she's getting a glimmer of the true meaning of education. The word comes from the Latin "educatio"--drawing out of people what is already in them.

 

 

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