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Katha Pollitt and Sam Tanenhaus

the breakfast table
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from: Katha Pollitt

Test Results

Posted Wednesday, June 2, 1999, at 1:02 PM ET

Good morning, Sam. It seems that in addition to agreeing that school prayer and guns are bad and people problematical, we are both parents of young daughters. So I am wondering what you think about New York State's new fourth-grade reading and writing test, and the recently reported abysmal results thereof. About two-thirds of New York City kids failed; state results were a little better--as you might expect, since due to a longstanding political fiddle, NYC schools get about $1,000 less per child than schools in the rest of the state. When I think what my daughter's school (Delta Program, Booker T Washington Middle School) could do with that money!

I didn't see the test itself, but what I heard made it sound pretty difficult: Spelling counted, for example, which would have been most unfortunate for my daughter, who luckily for her is in sixth grade and is a year or two ahead of the Giuliani-ish wave of sternness (constant testing, uniforms, etc.) that is sweeping over city schools. I'm not a total defender of progressive education, but here's a fascinating fact. The school that did the best in the whole city was Sophie's elementary school, Lower Lab! The whole time she was there I kept wondering if the curriculum was too nontraditional, the teachers too laid back, the accent too heavily placed on process, not enough on content, praise too easily given, and when were they going to get to work on Sophie's spelling? What makes the Lab School's triumph interesting is that the testing movement is often part of an attack on progressive ed in favor of "the basics," "discipline," "standards," etc. So if the top-scoring school in the city is one of the more progressive in philosophy ... well, I guess that's a poke in the eye for Ron K. Unz, the right-wing California multimillionaire who recently inveighed against "educational fads" in, I'm very sorry to say, The Nation.

What did you think about the test, the results, the schools?

Cheers,
Katha

the breakfast table
entries
123456789101112
from: Katha Pollitt

Test Results

Posted Wednesday, June 2, 1999, at 1:02 PM ET
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Katha Pollitt is a columnist for The Nation and the author of Reasonable Creatures: Essays on Women and Feminism (click here to buy the book). Sam Tanenhaus is the author of Whittaker Chambers: A Biography (click here to buy the book) and a contributing editor to Vanity Fair.
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