navigation

The Invisible "Standardized Student"

"My fondest hope is that my grandchildren will have teachers who know that the truly valuable elements of a public education cannot be measured by machine-scored tests, and that their value as human beings cannot be reduced to those test scores." -Education Week Aug 10, 2011 “Community Comment of the Day”

"We spend millions developing and administering a test, we prep kids for it, and we still hear from businesses that kids don’t have the job skills because what they learned was how to take a test." -Ed Amundsen, Special Education Teacher, Sacramento, CA

"The farther away from the children in the classroom, the more unlrealistic the 'fix' ideas become. Those of us in classrooms know any reform is slow, and painstaking." -sek1949, Comment of the Day, Education Week, September 13, 2011

When children have the opportunity and equal access to whole-child balanced education, which includes music and arts, they develop a sense of fulfillment and real pride, leading them to a life-long love of learning and successful lives. Balance not only improves test results but far-more importantly, massive accumulation of research data indicates that the arts help grow personal individuality, self expression and social skills, self esteem, discipline, independent thinking, analytical, global, collaborative, conceptual and visual thinking, memory, focus, concentration, patience, stress release and anger management, entrepreneurship, healthy competitiveness, cooperation, self control, initiative, persistence, team spirit, attention to detail, handling of pressure, alertness, conquering challenges, problem solving, hand-eye coordination, character, confidence, creativity, ingenuity, innovation, resourcefulness, imagination, enthusiasm, leadership and combining all of the above when students become complete human beings capable of leading successful and productive lives in a free society.

These are attributes and characteristics that stifling high-stakes* standardized testing does not build, but equal access to music and arts does, particularly when started from the earliest ages and continued through middle and high school. If educators make classroom-curriculum challenging but creative at the same time, education will be fun and encourage personal growth of students’ individualities, and create truly visible students for life, in all subjects and challenges in life. The opposite is true for students bombarded with teaching-to-the-test boredom and remedial / double-dosing punishment from the demands of ever-higher test results, while being deprived of balanced classroom curriculum and opportunities to develop into full individual potentials.

10 years of experience and research data continue to demonstrate that dumb-downed curriculum from high-stakes standardized testing is one of the primary causes of the decline in public K-12 American education, today. The tragedy of the misguided grand-federal experiment known as “No Child Left Behind” law, and most recently unfair “Race to the Top” federal competition, continues to marginalize, standardize and invisibilize students, especially the economically and academically disadvantaged, thereby denying them of the individuality and leadership abilities that they will need to survive and thrive ahead of the pack in the 21st century.

Johnny Thompson, on behalf of
Parents for Music and Arts (PMA)
Vision for students - Voice for parents
http://www.allartsallkids.org


*The term high-stakes means that children and their teachers, principals and superintendents are judged, punished and rewarded solely by federal and state student standardized test results, as teachers are forced to “teach to the test,” and “what gets tested gets taught.”