STRUCTURE SUFFICES:

Back to School: Could teachers become the new lawyers? (Ann Hulbert, Aug. 30, 2007, Slate)

It's back-to-school season, and students aren't alone in suffering from a case of nerves. Linda Perlstein, a former Washington Post reporter who spent 2005-06 embedded in Tyler Heights Elementary School in Annapolis, Md., opens Testing: One American School Struggles To Make the Grade with a snapshot of its anxiety-ridden principal. "You could not tell by looking that Tina McKnight was in pain," Perlstein writes of the woman desperate to make her all-minority school a success in the No Child Left Behind era. "Her back throbbed, sore from hours of bending over the toilet, possibly from food poisoning but more likely from stress." At the opposite end of the spectrum, Alec Klein spent the 2006 spring term in New York City's most selective public high school, Stuyvesant. In A Class Apart: Prodigies, Pressure, and Passion Inside One of America's Best High Schools, he introduces a principal equally wracked with tension. "Shaggy-haired, bearded, emaciated, and incredibly tired," Stanley Teitel "buries his head in his hands, uttering, 'God, I'm not going to get through these weeks.' "

Enter a schoolhouse door these days with a journalist or a screenwriter, and you'll find the grown-ups within looking like masochistic martyrs. The Hollywood glow of the educator-as-hero, a figure familiar from stump speeches and pop entertainment, has faded. Don't go to HBO's The Wire, set last season in the Baltimore public school system, for a dose of idealism. The much-praised independent film Half-Nelson is grim, too, with Ryan Gosling starring as a drug-addicted maverick trying—and failing—to teach history his own way in a New York City middle school. The Sundance Channel's documentary The Education of Ms. Groves, which aired this week, unsparingly exposes a new teacher's naive optimism, according to the New York Times. Freedom Writers is the exception: To watch Hilary Swank single-handedly create an oasis of harmony in a gang-ridden L.A. high school seems a throwback to a simpler narrative arc.

In the eclipse of the saintly teacher image by the hard-boiled scene in recent insider accounts, are we seeing yet another cause for educational alarm? The picture of beleaguered teams of educators, as doubt-plagued as they are driven, isn't pretty. Yet the new profile of teachers and administrators outlined in Perlstein's and Klein's books may, oddly enough, give a useful boost to the prestige of a profession in urgent need of cultural cachet. [...]

Strangely, perhaps, the spectacle of obsessive administrators and anxious teachers in the trenches presented by both Perlstein and Klein just might help buttress a field that could use some defeminizing. High-pressured and punishing—of such macho qualities is social cachet often built in the world of work. Nowhere in Tyler Heights or Stuyvesant, in Perlstein's and Klein's portrayals, do you hear anyone touting the familiar (female- and family-friendly) perks of the profession: the long summer months off, the seasonal breaks, the 3 o'clock dismissals, the heartwarming kids. Teachers' unions never get mentioned, nor do bonuses. The scene is more reminiscent of, say, the Union army, beset by struggles and squabbles within the ranks, yet striving to make slow headway on divisive home ground.

'No Child Left Behind' should really be called 'No Test Left Behind.' (Edward Humes, July 29, 2007, LA Times)

The conceit of Perlstein's book is simple: to reveal up close the effects on one elementary school, and, by extension, all public schools, of the testing and accountability culture mandated by the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act, President Bush's signature education initiative.

Statistical studies of this law abound, but an examination of its human effects is long overdue. "Tested" succeeds in filling this void on several levels, providing descriptions that, for many readers, will seem a stunning indictment of No Child Left Behind and the state and local policies it has engendered. The endless regimen of testing, drilling, report filing, student bribing and student berating that Perlstein describes could only have been conceived by politicians and ideologues who rarely set foot in actual public schools (and would never subject their own children to the Frankenstein classrooms their policies have created).

Perlstein chose Tyler Heights Elementary School in suburban Annapolis, Md., a campus of mostly poor and minority students surrounded by schools with far more affluent and academically prepared student bodies. But unlike troubled inner-city schools, suburban Tyler has considerable financial resources at its disposal with which to close the "achievement gap."

She begins with the announcement in May 2005 that, after years of poor scoring, Tyler Heights has dramatically improved its performance on the Maryland School Assessment, the annual testing mandated by No Child Left Behind. These questions set up the drama of the following school year depicted in "Tested": Was this a fluke, and Tyler a one-hit wonder? Or did the scripted lessons and ruthless teaching-to-the-test payoff, a worthy model for other schools? Or had the state lowered the bar so far on its tests that even failing students appeared to shine? Finally, there is the question that most haunts Tyler's principal and teachers throughout the book: Can we do it again?

In charting the answers to those questions, Perlstein depicts a school obsessed not so much with educating as with measuring education, and with doling out a kind of pallid simulation of knowledge. Stories, for example, are always analyzed for their structure, almost never for their actual content. Creative writing is discouraged in favor of repetitive paragraphs called "Brief Constructed Responses," or BCRs -- an acronym Tyler kids hear endlessly.

"They're learning to do the formula," one teacher laments midway through the school year, "and forgetting how to think."

The goal, Perlstein shows, is to limit teaching to ideas, skills and knowledge...

Thankfully, this moves us away from the inane egalitarian notion that everyone is creative and can produce content worth considering and back towards providing just the basic skills that everyone can learn, no matter how little use they'll be to most.

Posted by Orrin Judd at August 30, 2007 7:11 PM