posted
In Georgia, students are required to take a writing test. It is stupid in and of itself and as a method to teach better writing.
I, along with several others, have contributed to writing an essay pointing out exactly what is wrong with the test and why it reflects the gaping flaws of Georgia's education system in general. We are planning to print off five dozen copies and will slip them under teachers' doors tomorrow morning, the morning of the test. I have checked the student handbook, and no rules specify this sort of thing is not allowed.
My brother has now warned me schools reserve the right to add rules freely at their will and use those to punish some one who broke the rule before its conception. I just need to know if this is true, and what is my best move, legally speaking.
By the way: I know I will have the support of quite a few teachers, and it is their doors to which many of these essays will be delivered. I also have the probable support of the IB coordinator at my school. Is this a point in my favor?
Posts: 550 | Registered: Jan 2004
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posted
What's with the cowardly slipping-under-the-door approach? If there's something wrong with the program, take it up with the head, give him the essay saying that 'we have outlined our main points in writing', and take credit for being a constructive student participating in debate on how best to run the school.
Posts: 10645 | Registered: Jul 2004
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posted
The essence of civil disobedience is the willingness to bear the costs of your infraction. So you shouldn't be worrying about this. Besides, if the teachers can't change the law, why give them the essay? Without a punishment that will make the news, no one with the ability to change things will ever hear about this.
posted
Why would you slip the letter under the teacher's doors? Why not just deliver them to the teacher's mailbox or email them to your teachers? Better yet, you should get the letter published in all the school papers and local papers.
Send the letter to members of the school board, your state and federal legislature representatives, PTA groups, and teacher associations.
The teachers at your school have little power to change state policy. You have to think bigger.
P.S. I don't know if schools can add rules, but I do know they can interpret rules against you. Perhaps your letters can be considered a form of solication or littering, which I'm sure is against school rules. I'm not saying such broad interpretation will hold up in court (or even during a school board meeting), but just FYI.
Posts: 1592 | Registered: May 2000
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posted
Anthro, find out if the test is truly required. Though they have state tests for writing, math, reading, and are adding new ones in coming years for Science and I think History, they are not *required* in the State of Washington. They don't tell you that unless you ask -- and I did. I opted my son out of them for the 4th grade version, writing a letter of objection. I kept him home the week they did the tests since that's all they were doing. It was not counted against his attendance, since I'd discussed it with his teachers and principal directly.
(These tests, btw, will be required for 10th graders starting in 2010, though, if the law isn't reversed before then.)
Posts: 5948 | Registered: Jun 2001
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posted
I don't see where slipping it under their doors does anything constructive. The teachers may well agree with every point in your paper and be powerless to do a thing about it.
Mail it to the local paper, or media outlets. Send it to the State board of Education, or whoever it was that made this test mandatory
Posts: 14428 | Registered: Aug 2001
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posted
If I recall correctly, it is in fact required in Georgia. I took it. It's hopelessly, ridiculously easy.
Posts: 4077 | Registered: Jun 2003
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posted
We are doing that (mailing to the newspaper, etc). And BTW, our school system has an interesting policy: they will not, and this is written down, will not listen to any issue brought to them by a student. And yes, we are also mailing this to parents.
We are slipping this under the doors because that is the most efficient way to get it to teachers. And it will be signed, make no mistake, so it is not an action of cowardice. This is what I asked about because this is what I am most concerned about: because by going through the school directly, I beleive this is where the most authority would be able to act against us.
And of course, yes, civil disobedience. But this is not a matter of freedom of speech, it is a matter of the format of education. Our overall motive is not so much to change this on grand scales, though that is what we do aspire to, but to remind the teachers that even with all the training they got over the past summer telling them to teach exactly to this test, their career is one of education, an honorable one, to our minds, and they should do whatever they can to serve that even within the system.
And yes, I am pompous. Meh. __|__
Posts: 550 | Registered: Jan 2004
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posted
I agree that you need to take it to the administrators or the school board. Try discussing your concerns with the principal. I actually had a lot of success my junior year in high school with a petition (I think a fifth of the school signed it, so that sorta helped...) to stop a switch to a different schedule. The thing is, it sounds like this writing test is a state-mandated sort of thing, so really, you need to talk to the state legislators and the voters.
Most people like to see "reforms" in education because they believe the education system is failing. Lots of times they don't want to actually pay for the reforms, but that's another thread. If you can convince your community that the testing is unncessary, you may be able to change things a few years down the road. Things move slowly, so you will not benefit personally from what you are doing.
I don't see how this can possibly get you in trouble. I was a pretty outspoken dissenter on the schedule thing. All they did was ask me to help them work out a good compromise schedule for the next year.
Posts: 3546 | Registered: Jul 2002
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posted
Your school board darn well better listen to comments by students, particularly those who are over 18.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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posted
That's what I was thinking, fugu. Any school board that refuses to listen to student's issues deserves to be shot. Or something like that.
Posts: 1466 | Registered: Jan 2003
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posted
When you're over 18, you usually no longer qualify as a student, unless you've been held back once or twice.
Allow me to explain: our school board in its younger days formed a student council that would bring issues to them: they formed a group made up out of students in the hopes that they would be able to bring them problems that really did concern those who were on the receiving end of the school board's policies.
Only problem is, they actually did bring issues to them. Which, naturally, mounted up, because they were entirely ignored. And so the school board made it a policy that a student could not approach the board.
As I said: we are not concerned with changing the statewide. We are concerned with awaking in teachers disgusted and disenfranchised by careerist political policies that which first motivated them to teach. And hopefully, by doing so, they will gain heart to continue to give it their all.
Posts: 550 | Registered: Jan 2004
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posted
Uh, I've known of plenty of people who've turned 18 in their senior year in high school. Its pretty common.
A policy that a student cannot approach the board is almost certainly illegal. I would complain to your state legislators.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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posted
Here's the rough essay, if anyone would care to comment. I get pompous, certainly, and this is what I'm trying to remedy. I'd like to keep this to one page for purposes of accessability, though, so adding whole paragraphs isn't an option.
The Georgia State Writing Test is inherently flawed and structured to detract from our state’s educational progress; what makes this far worse is that it is hardly atypical of the Georgia’s many recent educational reforms. Policies forged in good intentions are cracking like the Liberty Bell.
To clarify: The Georgia State Writing Test requires that students write by a set guideline, in which topic sentences, conclusions, and details are set firmly in a concrete position and purpose that leaves no room for skillful writing. The sort of bludgeoning of the reader with fact, fact, fact, the same facts repeated over and over with each step of their connections outlined to a level makes “Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood” appear complex and impenetrable. And yet it is the very foundation of the test. This is hardly teaching students good writing: rather, it has usually been considered a hallmark of a well written essay that it conveys its message simply; that it allows the reader to understand connections without highlighting them in fifty-foot neon letters which, for their massive unavoidability, entirely obscure any hope of an underlying message.
Some may argue that it is a foundation for teachers to build on, but it precisely inhibits any efforts by the teachers themselves to do their jobs. Because how well a student has been taught to write is judged by their performance in the test, teachers must adhere to a strict and entirely asinine formula if their superiors are to believe students are being taught at all. We are playing merry havoc with our education system and enforcing the ideals that are denounced by every “education-minded” politician: teaching the test. The problem does not, as many imply, lie with teachers who are lazy or under-qualified (teachers, for the most part, are dedicated individuals who do their best with the resources they get). No, teachers teach to a test because that’s what their disconnected superiors require of them, while at the same time these quintessentially honest employers preach it is the teaching to the test that is killing the system. Those who have experience in the field and know firsthand individual students aren’t allowed to work from that basis, but instead must subscribe to foolish mandates imposed by the far less informed and, at the state’s higher political levels, those who may not have even set foot in a classroom since their own graduation.
But it’s better than what we’d have otherwise!
What? Since when has the purpose of education been to choose between two faces of the same coin, ignorance and maladroit? The purpose is to teach students, not to rush them through an arbitrary and hardly well designed sufficiency level so that they can be tossed out into the world to give better statistics to the school board (and they’re hardly good as they are). These kids should be learning writing, not writing tests, just as they should be educated, not given answers and formulas and facts by rote that will scrape them through the end of course tests. Of course it’s our culture centered on numerical results and grades that gives birth to these tendencies, but very few states have put them into action in such, frankly, stupid manners as Georgia has. In our desperate efforts to catch up to the rest of the nation’s test scores, we are pushing ourselves farther and farther behind.
Yes, by God, by Rousseau, and by Scarlett O’Hara, we will make our children numerically adequate!—what a stirring battle cry!
And so I come to a plea, that I fear will fall on too many deaf ears where it is needed: return our schools to those who know its halls and its children: the teachers. If you will put funding in programs that helps teachers to teach writing, real writing, you will see a rise in scores—that I may guarantee. And you will find most of these teachers already know it so well, and only await the opportunity to do so, the opportunity gradually deprived from them by wave after wave of ill-thought-out, politically motivated educational reforms, when all that they needed was to be allowed to do that which was already intuition.
Or our education system may degenerate like a body that takes poison as medicine in hopes of defeating a weak and vulnerable virus, while those who could truly heal it are bound where they may do nothing to help.
Posts: 550 | Registered: Jan 2004
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posted
"Your school board darn well better listen to comments by students, particularly those who are over 18."
Michael Moore ran for his school board when he turned 18. He won and attributes his success to the "stoner" vote.
Posts: 1592 | Registered: May 2000
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