The whole state just finished their Standardized Tests. If you’re a parent you know that the entire school year has been hijacked by making sure kids pass these tests. It’s legislation called No Child Left Behind and was the major education reformation of George II.

The test had a number of consequences — some good, some bad. The good part was that it created a national tracking system that allowed us to get some idea of who was learning what. Prior to No Child Left Behind schools and districts were using their own tracking system or no tracking system at all.

The bad part is that it took a lot of creativity out of the classroom, substituted rote memorization for actual learning and put a ton of pressure on school boards, principals, teachers, parents and students.

In other words, the Standardized Test became the central focus of education. Which robbed our kids of the experience of actual learning through creativity; substituted artificial learning for an organic, authentic education. It made kids conform to a “cookie cutter” education.

It also increased Title 1 participation, because if your kid diagnosed with autism, ADD, dyslexia or whatever their issue is, their test scores are counted, but they get special tutors, services and accommodations in order to ensure that their test scores improve. If you’re a parent, you want your kid to have the best education and performance possible, and if you’re on the faculty you NEED these kids to perform well. In other words, it is likely that the increased number of kids with a diagnosis is, in part, a result of Standardized Testing.

Another downside is that it really isn’t appropriate for schools and the public education system to bear the burden of making sure kids learn well when it is obvious that there are other factors at play. Time Magazine’s article Why It’s Time to Replace No Child Left Behind points out that there actually are children left behind and they are the same children that were being left behind before this supposed magical reform of America’s education. While middle-class and upper-class kids have improved their scores and do well, poor minority children still lag behind.

Part of this is the way we fund education in this country. If you live in a rich community there are dollars to spare for education through higher property taxes or at least property taxes on more expensive homes, which equates to more education money. Money buys better technology, safer classrooms and halls, better faculty, better and more extra-curricular activities, more educational resources — in other words, a far better education. If you live in a poor one — you’re screwed. Education isn’t equal in this country and it never will be unless we reform how we fund the education of our students. One solution is to distribute dollars equally through gambling or lotteries as Nevada and a few other states do. Another is to fund education entirely by the state, property taxes which fund education dollars go to the state school board, as opposed to the local one, and the state distribute funds equitably regardless of the income of certain neighborhoods and parts of town. For obvious reasons upper- to middle-class communities will likely oppose this, because hey, their kids’ get a great education.

But, money is not the major issue here, as New Jersey schools show quite clearly. New Jersey spends far more per student than average and they have far more than average failing schools and failing students.

Yes, yes, fire the sucky teachers, sucky administration, etc. You’ve heard it all before as the big solution to education’s problem. God bless the teachers who are willing to go into these failing schools, stick their feet into quick sand and fight the battle for these kids. Certainly, moving away from a failing school and students who don’t score well would be most prudent for their careers. Unless, of course you choose to believe that all teachers who enter these institutions couldn’t get a job elsewhere and don’t care at all about their students, only their retirement. I think that’s pretty far fetched.

What I don’t understand is why schools are being held accountable for the factors that have nothing to do with education at all: the culture of African Americans where the numbers of single mothers and absent fathers is staggering; the astronomical number of minority males who are in prison; the communities that are drug-infested nightmarish nests of violence; or the culture of certain communities whether from religious persuasion, cultural norms or just plain apathy that don’t value education at all. It seems absurd to me that we expect schools to overcome these obstacles, in fact, it’s absurd to assume that schools have any responsibility to change the consequences of these environments for these kids. It’s simply not their job.

For the most part, I haven’t had a serious problem with Standardized Testing. Probably because Ainsley performs well on them and I have no reason to believe that Zack won’t perform well too.

My problem this year was the way Standardized Testing is being delivered to students. Ainsley sobbed that she went over and over her writing essay and didn’t finish the last sentence. It was confounding to me.

I didn’t finish the last sentence, now I won’t get my candy bar and I won’t get a good score! 

You’re a better writer than most people in your class, how will they even know you planned to add one more sentence at the end? I’m sure your score will be above average. If not, it’s not a big deal. Everybody bombs a test now and then.

No, my teacher saw me not finish when she called time.

Your teacher isn’t grading the test. 

My grade is going to go down. 

This test doesn’t effect your grade at all! 

What? It’s practically my WHOLE grade. 

It’s NONE of your grade. They aren’t grading you with this test, they are grading your school, your teachers, your principal. If you don’t score high on the test then they take money away from your school. 

No it’s not. It’s a big part of our grade, the teachers said it was really, really important that we do our very best on the test. 

Yeah, because they need the money and they want to keep their jobs. Not because it effects your grade. 

Well, I don’t want my teacher to be fired either! 

People, my daughter didn’t believe me at all. My neighbor’s daughter didn’t believe her mother either. These are high-performing students who work hard and care about their grades and their performance on tests. The school bribed the children with candy bars of their choice and class parties if they showed up, finished the section and tried their mightiest to score as high as possible. They told, or at least implied, students that this test would be a major part of their grades. Good God, the emotional trauma this testing has inflicted on faculty, school boards, parents and children should be enough to motivate us to think of a better method.

As Americans we’re supposed to be innovative. This isn’t innovative at all, it reduces a real education to a factory line. We’re not going to be more effective in the global marketplace with this stunted thinking. Genius is born of creativity and the guts to make million mistakes before success. Intelligence is born of exploration. Things do not not get invented by the people who have excellent scores on Standardized Tests, things are invented and discovered by curious people who daydream a lot. The people who ask, “what if this is possible?”

Surely, we can think of something more . . . creative. Surely, we can dream a bigger dream for our kids, for our futures.

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Women Invented Language

You know how “they” always say that women weren’t allowed to be literate until like the 1800s or something ridiculous like that?

Well that’s just stupid.

One only has to compare the verbal and written communication skills of a boy toddler and a girl toddler to know what one is more naturally gifted with language than the other. Surely every Kindergarten and preschool teacher has witnessed the obvious. One only has be in a relationship to know that the idea that men felt the strongest desire to communicate is a down-right absurdity.

Women invented language. They formed words and wrote them down and then taught those skills to men, finding a way to force them to communicate.

At some point in history men got intimidated and wanted to flex their muscles and burned, destroyed and otherwise silenced women to gain power. Destroying a vast amount of world history in the process. Which is a tragedy.

It’s true. I would prove it, except they destroyed all the evidence.

Equal Pay Is A Dumb Idea

We’ve been begging congress to give women equal pay since 1963. They don’t want to. If they did, we’d have accomplished this by now. It’s not because they are sexist (well, maybe it is), but it’s mostly because they are capitalists and men derive pleasure from competition. It’s the merit system.

Equal pay as a law was probably a good idea in 1963 when men held all the power and ran all the companies and women were just barely entering college in mass.

But, in 2012 it’s a low, low bar. We shouldn’t rob ourselves and our sisters the opportunity to out-earn their male counterparts after 2,000 years of economic oppression. That would be short-sighted and wrong.

Women are attaining higher degrees than men. In large cities young professional women are out-earning and out-advancing their male counterparts.

Most important, women are starting more businesses than men. THIS is how we’ll achieve equal pay — if such a low bar is to be achieved. Women CEOs will decide whether they choose to reward gender, merit or pay a flat rate for each employee in a certain job. It will be interesting to see what we choose when we hold the power in our own hands.

Smart Women Don’t Run For Office

We always say we want more female representation in political office. Well, mostly liberal women say that. Of course, they don’t mean they want more female representation, what they really mean is we want more pro-life Democratic female representation. Republican pro-life women are to be publicly tarred and feathered.

Personally, I think a more feminine Republican party benefits everyone. If only because it’s getting stale looking at those smug stubborn grey-haired men’s faces. Women are more creative. A good maternal Republican woman would slash the hell out of extras in the budget and lock those smug men in a room with generic bags of cold cereal and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches until they could agree on budgets and bills.

Still, that would be the only fun part. The rest of it sounds like a lot of crap that no woman in her right mind would want to deal with. I mean, what’s great about the job? First you have to spend all your money in the ridiculously junior high school popularity contest they call campaigns, you have to put up with rude, disrespectful and insulting questions from journalists and tabloid writers calling themselves journalists, people dig in your garbage to find scraps of paper with something incriminating on them, they hack into your email, you have to make your taxes public, half the world hates your guts and wants to see you dead, they drag out all your old boyfriends and lovers to say something bad about you, they Photoshop your face on naked people and have porn stars pretend to be you in ironically titled adult films, they rake your religion over the coals, they harass your children, they criticize your every parenting choice and the neighbors tattle about the time you yelled out the door “Get your butt in here and clean up your room or you will face DIRE CONSEQUENCES!”

Then, you get the job and every word, choice, haircut and lipstick color gets picked to death by the blogosphere. You can’t accomplish everything you said you would because that’s how the system was designed — but they blame you anyway. You never make enough money to make back what you spent on the campaign in the first place. Then you have to pay for an apartment in Washington and kiss people’s ass all the time.

Repeat.

Who in their right mind would want this job? Essentially it’s committing quality-of-life suicide. If you love yourself Ladies, don’t run for office.

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Time Magazine has an article about the money sucking, drastically bad investment that many college degrees are becoming in this country and it’s making me rethink my attitude about my kids getting a college education.

Our parental attitude is this: GET A COLLEGE DEGREE!!!!!

Debt Burden

My student loans are our biggest debt burden. I owe about $60,000, having originally borrowed $15,000. I made a crucial mistake — having fielded repeated, harassing calls from solicitors insisting I consolidate my student loans, I accidentally consolidated one measly $1,000 unsubsidized loan with my subsidized loans, causing them ALL to be unsubsidized at a 9.5 percent interest rate, until they finally put a cap on interest at eight percent (after the scoundrels had already racked up a good $30,000 off me) — which has cost me about $40,000 in interest over the last 15 years. It’s the single, most crucial, dumbest financial mistake of my entire life. Once again, I have to thank College Algebra for being utterly useless and wonder why they don’t require Practical Life Math in universities.

Yet, Time’s article I Owe U made me feel like a lucky freakin’ genius!

Students will take out $1 trillion in debt this year. ONE TRILLION DOLLARS! And many of these college graduates can’t get jobs. Or they are resorting to jobs in the service and hospitality industry that they could have gotten without a college degree.

The article, which obviously cited extreme cases that make for good stories, but still, real stories, mentions liberal arts majors graduating with debts of $125,000. It talks about kids who were awarded full-ride scholarships to state schools and turning them down because they got into Ivy League brand name schools, even though they were out $55,000 a year that they didn’t have and then majoring in philosophy or poetry — it reminds me of high school kids who work at McDonalds buying Gucci purses and Fendi Sunglasses. It sites one dude who got a masters degree in multi-media design for a whopping $120,000 (by the way a friend of mine has his own multi-media design shop, makes a decent living of $60,000 a year and doesn’t even have a degree, thus no college debt at all). It sites bullsh!t degrees like “specialized studies” (try selling that on a resume) for $67,000, history degrees for $50,000, and a “global studies candidate” who is about to spend $112,000 for that degree (don’t do it dude — myself, husband and brother essentially all got this degree 15 years ago and we’re all making under $70,000 after 15 years of hard work and we’re scraping by with no where near this debt burden.)

Predatory Lending & Another Bubble

What possesses a bank to loan a POETRY MAJOR $125,000? 

The same thing that possessed that same bank to loan a dental assistant and a computer technician $500,000 on a home worth $200,000.

They knew they would make more money on the penalties and interest than they ever would on a good loan that could be paid back by a solid candidate. They got greedy. They lost their moral compass. They got predatory. They capitalized on the Mythology of College being the Golden Ticket to the American Dream.

And many economists are predicting another bubble blowing up on our already struggling, shaky economy — how can it not? We have an entire generation of Liberal Arts Majors with what amounts to massive mortgages without homes they can live in or sell. Nor, because of bank lobbies and legislation, can a person ever get out from under a student loan. They are not allowed to be written off in a bankruptcy, unlike a home, which you can walk away from and cut your losses. And this is what they have to bring into their adult lives — into marriages and families, into first jobs with starting salaries. If they are lucky enough to score one, that is.

This is one major issue of the Occupy WallStreet Movement. It’s a legitimate question. It’s a legitimate issue. It’s a protest-worthy complaint.

Mythology of College being the Golden Ticket to American Dream

Maybe it’s time to reexamine the Mythology of a College Degree being the Golden Ticket to the American Dream. It used to be that college was the Golden Ticket and if you got good grades, got into a decent, reputable school and worked hard you were essentially guaranteed a good job and a career path in an upwardly mobile direction. Or at least we believed this to be true.

But, even in my generation this hasn’t turned out to be particularly true. As I’ve approached 40 and looked around, I’ve noticed that my peers without college degrees that are in sales, insurance and for a long time real estate and construction are doing far better than I with my gig as a journalist in a profession struggling to hang onto itself in the face of the digital revolution. My friends who have two-year trade degrees in medical fields are making far more money, with far more job security than I am. My friends who work in industrial fields, electricians, auto mechanics, specialized laborers, tend to get laid off more frequently (which they treat as extended vacations on workman’s compensation), but when they work they make quite a bit more money.

Then we have the reality that President Obama is challenging America to produce more college graduates. But, we don’t have enough jobs, as the Time article points out, for the college graduates we currently have. The article then states that what we’re really flooded with is a bunch of unemployable Liberal Arts majors and we’re sorely lacking in Science, Technology, Information and Medical graduates and we’re forced to hire immigrants or outsource these jobs. We’re not being competitive in the right fields.

The question then becomes, why is the US Government continuing to back Liberal Arts Degrees? Evidently, having a college degree itself is a meaningless debt burden. Having a practical degree with an actual career plan and a real job available at graduation is what’s going to make a student a reasonable candidate to pay back student loans. Why is the Federal Government backing loans it can’t reasonably expect students to be able to pay back?

Reduction in Interest Rates Could Help

The Federal Housing Finance Agency  recently announced that it will allow underwater homeowners to refinance their homes, allowing them to reduce their interest rates from over 6 percent to around 4.1 percent. This could put up to $200 a month back in their pockets, which one hopes will stimulate the economy. (There is a fair bit of skepticism about this, though the idea is a good one and I intend to apply.)

The Obama Administration recently signed a student loan reform bill as part of the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act, which is supposed to help students of the future avoid some of the problems current and former students are making. But it’s not retroactive and won’t help students who have already taken out a loan, are already in repayment or are delinquent on their loans. This does nothing to help the millions of students who are now walking into their lives burdened with enormous debt, caused in part, by the government giving cart blanche access to students and subsidizing banks while they issue predatory loans to naive teenagers and young adults with no real world experience to enable them to fend of or resist these loan sharks.

The U.S government should seriously consider enacting an interest rate reduction for current loan holders, as they are in the mortgage situation. Student loans are under much stricter regulation than mortgages and can never be written off in a bankruptcy. An entire generation of college graduates are burdened by enormous debt, the likes of which this country has never seen. I can’t see how they’ll ever be able to pay it off and become upwardly mobile. And if student loans really are another economic bubble that’s about to burst, well, one has to wonder just now much our stumbling economy can bare at the moment.

A reduction in interest is the least we can do for perpetuating the myth that college was a sure thing that would ensure their futures. A dream that is quickly turning into a pretty fairytale or an ugly farce.

Tracee Sioux is a freelance writer, the creator of The Girl Revolution and author of Love Distortion: Belle, Battered Codependent and Other Love Stories. Love letters from editors and clients can be found on her Linked In page, like her on on Facebook and follow her onTwitter. 

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Every day after school my daughter runs home to get her classroom ready. After they finish their homework, the kids from the neighborhood come to play School.

You would think after an entire day of it, they’d be tired of school.

But, day after day, that’s what they come home to play. They play for hours.

Ainsley likes the role of “teacher.”

I took her to the Dollar Store and she stocked up on supplies. Real school supplies.

She has the other kids write papers, take spelling tests, do math sheets, learn about Presidents and world history. They have bins for desks with name cards on them.

When we were cleaning her room I found papers the other children had done and Ainsley had graded them harshly.

I had bought her a slide grader and she was using it.

We had to go over the fact that some of her students are in the first grade, some are in preschool, and they shouldn’t be held to third grade standards. We had to go over the fact that the other children’s parents might be upset if they found out Ainsley was give them failing grades on their after-school papers. Or the other children might feel defeated if she didn’t cut them some slack and grade compassionately.

Sometimes we have to go over the fact that other children may get tired of being bossed around.

“But, I make the lessons really fun for them Mom. I include play and interesting projects into the work. To make learning fun,” she tells me.

I suppose I shouldn’t worry too much, because day after day the other kids come back to Ainsley’s School, excited.

She may have found her calling. That is, if her American Idol dreams don’t pan out.

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New Moon Girls, the magazine written by girls for girls, has a list of 30 Great Books for Girls to help you get your daughter’s summer read on.

“We like these books especially because they’re all about girls who are smart, brave, bold, funny, and adventurous!” states New Moon Girls. The list includes classics like Charlotte’s Web and Ramona the Pest and many new one’s I’ve not had the privilege of reading.

Ainsley loves to read. We looked up the library where we are moving and were disappointed to find that they only reward 10 hours of reading all summer long.

Surely there is a competitive reading rewards program online, perhaps for home schoolers. Does anyone know of one that we can sign up for?

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