Tested: One American School Struggles to Make the Grade | 
 enlarge | Author: Linda Perlstein
Publisher: Holt Paperbacks
Category: Book
List Price: $16.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  10 reviews
Sales Rank: 153171
Media: Paperback
Edition: Reprint
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 320
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 8.8 x 5.5 x 0.8
ISBN: 0805088024
Dewey Decimal Number: 379
EAN: 9780805088021
ASIN: 0805088024
Publication Date: July 22, 2008
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Product Description
A “vivid, unpredictable, fair, balanced and . . . very entertaining” look at how education reforms have changed one typical American elementary school over the course of a year (Jay Mathews, The Washington Post) The pressure is on at schools across America. In recent years, reforms such as No Child Left Behind have created a new vision of education that emphasizes provable results, uniformity, and greater attention for floundering students. Schools are expected to behave more like businesses and are judged almost solely on the bottom line: test scores. To see if this world is producing better students, Linda Perlstein immersed herself in a suburban Maryland elementary school, once deemed a failure, that is now held up as an example of reform done right. Perlstein explores the rewards and costs of that transformation, and the resulting portrait—detailed, human, and truly thought-provoking—provides the first detailed view of how new education policies are modified by human realities.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 5 more reviews...
 Test 'em or Leave 'em June 3, 2008
2 out of 4 found this review helpful
I love the hand-wringing the education community has been doing over No-Child-Left-Behind. My god, teachers must attend staff developments on how to "feel" about this law and its supporters. If they pledge to hate Bush, they'll get tenure; if not, not. I've been teaching for 25 years and as far as I'm concerned this has been the best thing to come down the pike in 25 years or more. From 1960 to 1985 we saw the dismantling of one of the best public school systems in the world. Earnest, hardened, hard-core battle-ax teachers, chiefly female, ran a great program for most kids of all walks of life. You never heard boo about immigrant kids in LA (or elsewhere) getting or feeling cheated. Standards were uniform. After the 60s, things began to fall apart. Step by step, everything that worked was cast aside. Major high schools like Hollywood, to take but one example, went from being the jewel in the crown of a great system to being a basket case. Everything went out the window. Curriculum? That was replaced by Robin Williams and his cast of circus clown friends who demanded the right to do their own thing. With the video recorder came film classes. At first there was a film club, then a film class, then a cinema department, and finally all the classes had their own VCRs and televisions and teachers played movies all day everyday, but especially on free-Fridays when all the administrators were out sick and on Mondays when all the administrators were downtown at staff meetings. I say "all." Of course, this is not quite true. There have always been good teachers here and there who wouldn't dream of wasting time. These types work quietly and keep their heads down. But the hustlers and "Teach for America" types, the "reformers," the administrative careerists are the first ones in line to use technology because like the big-boys in the Pentagon, power lies where the money is and the money is behind machines. During the great LA teachers strike of 1989, thousands, literally, of kids were herded into auditoriums all around LA, hundreds of thousands of children, were pushed into their seats and shown cartoons for 7 1/2 hours a day by cutting-edge educators who had nothing whatever to say to the kids other than "sit down and shut up." I heard it and saw it with my own eyes. There were principals, vice principals, deans, counselors, district superintendents, psychologists and nurses, not to mention scab-teachers, but no one had any idea what to say to the kids who had trudged to school those days and weeks, so they were shown videos. Educational videos? Ha! Even that would have required selection. No, they were shown Steven Spielberg dreck for hours on end, repeated day after day. Why? Because without accountability there is nothing anyone in this debased field can agree on. You say teach Homer, I say teach Toni Morrison, he says teach uplifting stories about gays, and another insists the stories must contain the saga of slaves and their descendants. When the dust settles, it is everyman for himself. Do your own thing. Keep the kids happy, don't hit them or if you must, don't leave any marks. If cartoons work, use them. Who's to say cartoons aren't educational. This is where we are. The Bush standards are awful, the testing is disruptive, the entire project is an insult to learning, but the alternative is what I lived and worked with: chaos.
 What Will Be the Future of Test-and-Punish? March 21, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
TESTED is an excellent book about the meaning of the test-and-punish philosophy embedded in our federal education law, the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB).
TESTED resounts the choices that the principal and teachers in one Maryland elementary school believe NCLB forces upon them. Perlstein tells the story of the entire 2005-2006 school year she spent at Tyler Heights Elementary, a school that serves very poor children and teeters on the brink of making or losing the Adequate Yearly Progress rating NCLB awards to a 'successful' school.
"Bombard, bombard, bombard those children with the kinds of questions they'll have on the test," the principal rationalizes. "You want the students at a level of automaticity with reading those test-like questions."
The reader spends days stretching into months with the third-grade teaching team. We watch them collaboratively plan each day to the minute, and we listen as the children yearn for more at school---to do some science, read for fun, perform a play. Will the school raise its scores enough? Suspense mounts until the last chapter. Then the reader must weigh the benefits and costs.
Interesting and Readable Narrative of Schoolteacher Life February 5, 2008
This book describes the everyday lives of school administrators, school teachers, and students in one economically-challenged elementary school in Maryland. It provided fascinating insight into their collective struggles to deal with the No Child Left Behind program, which mandates testing of students. It's a generally even-handed and fair look at the program, acknowledging that in theory the testing is a reasonable idea, but showing how it creates myriad problems in practice. It's a very readable and cogent narrative of the course of one year, and provided real insight into the lives of these critical (and sadly, underpaid) members of the workforce.
Fascinating But Depressing January 20, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
"Tested" is a fascinating but depressing account of how the No Child Left Behind act has affected one government-run elementary school serving an overwhelmingly poor & minority population in inner city Annapolis, MD. Test scores at the school are way up, but at the price of doing little aside from drill-and-kill reading and math test prep.
Ms. Perlstein is clearly sympathetic towards the teachers and students (sometimes overly so) and antagonistic towards the hard-nosed district superintendent, state & Federal officials, and NCLB in general (again sometimes overly so). For example, she paints a rosy picture of the pre-NCLB "whole language" reading program at the school and bashes the current phonics program while glossing over the fact that the failure rate went from a whopping 80% down to 10% in 2 years after the switch. The pendulum may have swung a bit too far, but that doesn't mean it was the wrong direction.
Another example of how Ms. Perlstein lets her political agenda bias her writing is in her treatment of the children who show up to kindergarten unprepared. Instead of placing the blame where it should be (on the parents who aren't teaching their kids what they need to know), she goes off on this big propaganda for universal government-run preschool. Most of the people my age & older never attended preschool, and many in my parents' generation did not even attend kindergarten, and somehow we all did just fine. Not to mention that the existing government-run preschool programs have yet to show any lasting positive benefits.
"Tested" would've been a better book had it been written from more of an objective journalist point-of-view and less of an activist one. Still, I found it a fascinating account from the trenches of the tremendous pressures NCLB has placed on teachers.
Passionate reporting adds to the NCLB debate January 8, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
No Child Left Behind inspires passionate rhetoric from both its supporters and its critics. If you're a supporter, NCLB is a watershed law that finally pulls failing urban and rural schools into the light of day. If you're a critic, NCLB is an oppressive law that cruelly burdens teachers under siege with even more demeaning job requirements. For laymen trying to get an informed position on the law, it's very hard to find books and articles where you can familiarize yourself with the issues and come up with your own opinion. In "Tested", Perlstein provides a powerful story that shows how a successful NCLB school in Annapolis develops a laserlike focus on the tests and ends up getting the scores.
Perlstein clearly dislikes the law and strongly criticizes NCLB in every way. A teacher Perlstein admires ends up leaving the school at the end of the year after becoming overly stressed by the school's focus on test success at the expense of learing. We frequently see some of the artificial techniques that are used to help boost scores such as breathing exercises, incentive plans and even a mascot led assembly. She portrays students as losing the meaning and the life of education as they seek to become masters of BCRs, the mechancially graded Brief Constructed Response questions. And in the end, she questions whether the tests measure anything useful. In the later portions of the book, she alludes to how the test writing process is flawed and how students who struggled with basic writing ended up getting scores that surprised the adults. The third graders who teachers are convinced will fail based on their day to day experiences working with the kids often surprise their teachers with passing scores.
This book falls short of being a definitive text on No Child Left Behind. We're only looking at one school. This Annapolis Middle School is one isolated low-income school in a relatively good district and the experience probably differs in some ways from nearby schools in Washington, DC, Baltimore, or Prince George's County. Perlstein's book would be much more powerful if she provided some stories from other neighboring schools so that we could see how typical the experience in this school is. Perlstein also overlooks the argument that many NCLB supporters will make. NCLB did spur this school to attempt to reach more kids than it did before testing. Yes, the school artificially pursues scores. But NCLB has lit a fire under the administration to succeed that may only need to be better channeled.
The book ultimately succeeds because you develop a real compassion for the kids she describes, the struggles of the principal and the tough choices that the teachers make on a day to day basis. Parents who are new to understanding NCLB can really gain from the stories in this book.
There's still room for a more balanced classic book on NLCB that addresses a wider range of schools and informs and changes the opinions of both supporters and opponents of NCLB. But Tested is a good first step and will help that book get written. I hope this book does well so that publishers can see that there is an audience for well-written, accessible books that help policy makers and the concerned public understand this controversial legislation.
4 stars
--SD
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