recovering from the holidays...

True to form, my youngest daughter, class of 2009 if she makes it, the class that holds the honor of the first to be fully oppressed by our county educational factory, came to our holiday "break" armed with a thick wad of worksheets and homework to be completed in the week they had "off."

The two of them, her senior sister replete with the requisite school-induced viral invasion, a complimentary feature of every vacation we have known, dissappeared into their bedrooms for hour after hour of lost and deprived sleep and emerged regularly to eat and hammer away at the academic prison walls...

I am resigned to the way the senior will finish off her year; nothing is going to change soon enough for her situation to improve before she is on to bigger and better, and DEFINITLY PRIVATE--an institution of higher learning...

Perhaps I can convince her to skip the exams (for the FIVE AP classes she is taking) once she is accepted at a school she is happy with and the "senior fever" takes over her rigorous devotions to her studies.

It's her sister's situation that has me preoccupied because she has the burden of these next years to contend with and for her sake, I am worried. I can already see the effects on her psyche as she struggles to remain an ambitious student while she is buried in deadlines and tension.

She just turned 14. She is quite bright, quite ambitious, and like her sister, has quite an array of interests she would like to pursue. But, because of her homework, and the relentless schedule of tests and worksheets demanded perpetually, she has barely enough time to sleep and no time for anything else but schoolwork.

Both girls participate in Band, since it is still an option as an elective, but the extra rehersals, competitions and concerts really strain their limits. And although both would gratefully accept offers to participate in more music programs, they fell that they can not afford the time. Neither has time to practise their instrument as it is and both feel guilty about that.

Both interested in Art, I have them in classes outside of school but both feel the pressure and it weighs on them heavily when they are so burdened by schoolwork facing them on days when an hour or two is subtracted from homework time. And the younger worries about finding the time to train for her fitness aspirations; time just doesn't exist for the many plans she has for her 14 year old life.

Friends are fit in combined with homework and sleep deprivation often cancels out the best made social and extra-curricular plans.

Maybe it is partially because her sister is so excited about the fact that her "childhood is ending" as she continually levels that fact on our dinner table discussions, but I look at my younger daughter's tension and fatigue and agony and feel so very sad about the quality of her life as we face more of the same, and worse, in the next few years for her at school.

I can not understand how any parent is missing the results of the changes in our schools over the last several years and the toll it takes on their children. And I can not understand how our school leadership intends to continue to comply as this horrid act grows more invasive.

I am driven to whittle away at the misinformed and uninformed and I do not intend to hand another child over without a fight.

Here's another nightmare...


Jo Rupert Behm: Exit exams unfair to students

Jo Rupert Behm
Marin Independent Journal

THE JOY and excitement high school seniors normally share over their last major holiday has been marred for many by the worst example of failed public education policy to ever befall the state of California and metastasizing over the nation.
The California High School Exit Exam legislation, written and passed at warp speed in 1999 as last-ditch, school reform to meet former Gov. Gray Davis' campaign promises.

Backfiring, high-stakes testing usually reserved for graduate school or law/medical school admissions or professional licensing exams, has now been adopted to keep high school students from ever graduating, beginning with the class of 2006. Even though they will meet or exceed all other requirements amassed over 12,000 hours, 2,000 days, and 13 years in K-12 classrooms, students who fail the exam will not receive high school diplomas.

Even undergraduate colleges, graduate and professional schools do not base graduation entirely on a single test. Diplomas in higher education never rely on one antiquated pencil/paper multiple choice test and a cold-turkey, surprise topic essay written longhand under stress, without any modern technology, drafts, edits, or reference materials.

Such a set-up is grossly unjust and intolerable public policy that works to sabotage life prospects for post-secondary education, lucrative trades, public sector jobs, scholarships, financial aid, and access to sustainable living wages for students of color and with disabilities.

With our affluence, Marin County is in better shape than most, but still 256 Marin seniors in the class of 2006 started this senior year needing to pass one or both sections of the exam.

Eighty-four of these students are seniors with disabilities (mild disabilities, enabling them to be on track to graduate) and 130 are socio-economically disadvantaged, overlapping with 114 English-language learners.

Students who returned for senior year are persevering - some taking the exit exam the fourth, fifth or sixth time this year so the 220 to 230 credits they acquire of English, math, science, social studies, economics, geography, history, performing/visual arts, computers, and electives will not be in vain.

Ironically, required courses include passing about 14 semesters of math and English courses based on the identical rigorous academic standards as the exam. Furthermore, these courses have distinct and preferred advantage over snap-shot tests because courses employ multiple measures, such as projects, presentations, research, reports, and exams, to measure academic achievement. Multiple measures also provide evidence of vital non-testable virtues (i.e., work ethic, determination, public speaking, teamwork, task management, computer skills) that are far more essential and more reliable for predicting success in the real world.

Statewide, 116,496 seniors started this school year still needing to pass the math exam and 113,038 needing to pass the English language arts. A staggering 139,104 seniors (if they bothered to return senior year) still need to pass one or both sections to receive a diploma in June. Between drop-outs and anticipated low pass rates for seniors repeating the exam only about half of the original 522,116 freshmen who started high school together in 2002-03 will walk across graduation stages in California next June and be handed a real diploma.

Many districts are warning seniors who have not passed the exam that they are not welcome at graduation or any senior events. They won't even be allowed to pretend to graduate in front of camera-toting parents, grandparents and younger siblings.

With just 22 weeks of school left, this looming graduation crisis and 11th-hour funding is a public policy spectacle. This month, $44.7 million will be distributed to all 120 special education programs throughout the state with priority to help seniors with disabilities pass the exam.

Three pieces of legislation that would have helped disadvantaged subgroups work around the punitive exit exam requirement and restore confidence in the integrity of teachers and local school officials who know their seniors best got all the way to the governor's desk. But the state ssuperintendent, as author and unrelenting owner of the exit exam legislation, persuaded the governor to veto all three bills.

This supremacist testing policy illustrates woeful disregard for the diversity of California students and callous willingness of education top brass to punish students with life-limiting, irreparable consequences. This, in spite of California's rock-bottom educational infrastructure over which individual students have no control.

There should be no California courtroom left behind if this cruel testing policy is not overturned. Email jobehm@behmer.us for information on two class-action lawsuits now underway.



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Jo Rupert Behm of Novato is a consulant on state and federal health and education policy and is a past president of the Learning Disabilities Association of California.

http://www.marinij.com/marinvoice/ci_3373835