It’s that time of year again when my daughter, Sweetness, starts panicking about MEAP. MEAP, the Michigan Educational Assessment Program, is the State’s testing response to Bush’s “No Child Left Behind”. And every year my daughter and her friends go through intermittent anxiety attacks about their ability to “pass” these two weeks worth of testing on math, science, reading, and writing. You would think that a group of kids, nearly all of whom have been on the honor roll since kindergarten, but no. It is as if they were preparing for the SATs and all is lost should they get below a certain score. I find the whole thing to be ridiculous and make every attempt short of psychotropics to get my daughter to calm down until this year. This year, I got what my daughter has been trying to tell me since 3rd grade – the hallmark of this century is that there is no room for any level of failure, screw ups, or faults. In other words, have it together (not get it together) otherwise there is no redemption (except with G-d, but with some orthodoxy even that is in doubt). It isn’t “No Child Left Behind” but “Here the Ones That Are (Permanently?) Behind”. This is because we don’t do anything about those who score low or in the borderline range. The first year she took the test, I didn’t even get her scores until the end of the school year and I had to go up to the school and ask for them. Other years, I never got them at all. Parents of kids who knew their kids were having problems didn’t get a notice informing them of tutoring opportunities or options for special education. “Why?” you ask. Because everyone in the school knows “who is who”-who the smart kids are and who the smart kids aren’t. MEAP and “No Child Left Behind” is not about identifying the struggling kids (ask any teacher in a school for s/he can answer that question even for the kids in grades they don’t teach) or coming up with innovative education programs to help those having difficulty with math and reading move forward and nor are the various mass testing programs across the country about helping improve the quality of high school graduates entering universities, colleges or the work force (business and school still complain that young adults are woefully inadequate thinkers). “No Child Left Behind” has simply given bean counters an organism-plenty of numbers to crunch and coerce for whatever political lover is that moment’s purpose. It is another way to spend little money but look like we are doing something.
Yet, with my daughter’s generation and the one shortly before it we are seeing the unintended consequences of these efforts. The smart kids are getting the wrong message. They are worried well beyond where they need to be. In their minds, the world is a place where there is no room for “having a bad day”, “sowing wild oats”, or “a temporary lapse of reason”. If you don’t do it right the first time, the chances for an opportunity to reverse yourself or your actions are slim if just plain nonexistent. The smallest mistake or honest omission brings fears of a barrage of accusations and recriminations. And it is not just the priority issues but everyone’s priority list. One ends up serving so many masters that you are left wondering if the thunder strike outside your house is because you missed one of G-d’s emails. Meanwhile, the kids who need the help are further labeled (for they got the wrong message too), maligned, and left alienated from the society making them drawn to the world of crime (which is probably the only place they can get hired as adults) or mental illness.
What about the kids in the middle? They remain just as stagnate as the rest. The smart kids have their inventiveness stymied as they chase the magical bureaucratic beans, the troubled kids drop out all together, and the middle sway along with the wind. This is a prescription will destroy the very capitalism our conservative sisters and brother so heartily promote. Capitalism grows when you have smart kids who take chances and dream, struggling kids who hope and the middle who industrialize and buy spots in the future for their (hopefully) smarter children.
But I guess this is what happens when we allow a struggling child become president.
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