AsianWeek » Are You as Smart As a Fifth Grader?

Are You as Smart As a Fifth Grader?

You have 10 minutes to compose a piano concerto and perform it on flute. A toy piano is under your seat.

People complained that Washington state’s standardized test for public school students, the Washington Assessment of Student Learning, left out the arts. So now they’ve expanded their testing racket to classroom-based assessments for every subject.

In music, fifth graders are asked to sing solo while reading sheet music. That’s by sight without hearing the tune. They are then asked to compose on a staff with Italian tempo and volume markings. Are our kids in danger of being displaced by composers from Russia or Filipina songbirds?

AnnRene Joseph at the Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction assured me that it’s been psychometrically tested, piloted, passed and supported by tens of thousands of enthusiastic students and teachers.

A gifted musician told me he could have passed this test — in 10th grade. Do you know any kids, or adults for that matter, who can sight sing and compose? Fifth grade instrument players are taught to read music, but many professional singers don’t even read sheet music. A fifth grader is doing well if he or she can sing in a choir by ear. Retired University of Washington music professor Vilem Sokol told me he didn’t think that even his most talented college music majors could have passed such a test.

Marc Tucker’s 2002 book Standards for Our Schools includes the story of two fourth graders who can barely build a Pinewood Derby car and teamed up “with a professional carpenter” to meet a high standard. They designed a bike trailer with plans and a parts list complete with cotter pins. Tucker also writes of a high school student who engineers and welds an electric car from sheet metal and a donated electric motor. They are introducing algebra to third graders because our math scores are falling behind those of students in Asia. The superintendent of schools in Bellevue, Wash., last year won an award for wanting to make college-level AP courses a requirement to earn a high school diploma.

We used to teach kids what we knew, not push them into the great unknown. This smells like the planned production quotas that resulted in planned mass starvation in Russia and China. Do we really want a 1984-ish vision of the “Supreme Asian Parent” pushing for high performing children and workers? This is not the progressive vision of everyone successful at his/her own level. Are we really such a nation of total suckers that no one will stand up to educrats and business interests and call “Higher Standards From Hell” the nonsense that it is?

The Washington Assessment of Student Learning: www.k12.wa.us/assessment/WASL/default.aspx.
Send comments to AnnRene Joseph: Annnrene.joseph@k12.wa.us.

Comments

Gosh, I sincerely doubt I could be as “smart” as a “fifth-grader.” After all, those youngsters are open to new ideas and “impossibilities.”
On the other hand, I think I may well be as “smart” as some self-styled “columnists” and “experts” in the field of “education.”
Have you ever heard of the phenomenon known as “common sense”?
Frank Eng
P.S.: And as far as “musicians” go, I think you should check on the life and career of one Franz Schubert, who was a child prodigy and who died far too early in his early ’30s?, but who composed some of the most divine and “impossible” scores extant in “western” music.

–Frank Eng on Jan 15, 2008
The sad reality is I’m not an expert, but I have enough common sense to recognize utter nonsense when I see it. It is the so-called experts who are producing math textbooks with absolutely no math instruction, reading books with no reading instruction, and science books with no science instruction and the un-washed parents who are outraged when kids are given tests and tasks that most adults can’t do. Maybe you’re happy with a government that thinks its job is to transform society into a high-performance-based utopia, but I say all that crazy stuff like 1984 and brave new world that we laughed at in the 1970s, they’re DOING IT now, and we still haven’t learned from the disasters of Mao and Stalin in what happens when the #1 job of government is to increase industrial development even if it hurts. Just substitute “student learning” for “industrial development” and the draconian new education standards make perfect sense. People asked what would happen if we shifted from building bombers to putting more money in schools - the result is that we now have an “education arms race” which makes even less sense.

–Arthur Hu on Jan 16, 2008

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