Stop Punishing Kids, Says Obama

Educator-in-Chief Barack Obama has announced that students and schools are being unfairly and unnecessarily punished. And what is this punishment that must be ended? Testing. After all, school isn't about the three R's, understanding of language, history, and reasoning, let alone analytical thinking. It's about in-groupness, self-esteem, going-along to get-along, and of course learning the words to "Obama--mmmm, mmmm, mmmm."

Hyper-educated Obama's opposition to standardized testing should come as no surprise. He mysteriously appeared at and graduated from Columbia Unversity (no public record of achievement). He was the editor of the Harvard Law Review (but never published a single peer-reviewed legal article of his own). And he taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago (where nobody remembers him and nobody can produce an Obama course outline). That's one of the main problems with tests. They have a habit of requiring actual knowledge and becoming permanent records. Not a good thing for future Democratic public figures.

No system is perfect, and testing is not the sole determinant of future success. But standardized tests are highly valuable and provide the one thing lacking in all other forms of evaluation--objective standards. But Obama is not satisfied with calling testing a punishment. He also believes it is boring (which is probably why there is no record of him ever taking a test). As we all know, keeping children entertained is a major goal of schooling. You'll notice I didn't use the word "education" as a major goal. That's so mid-20th Century.

Obama proposes re-writing education law, including No-Ignoramus-Left-Behind, to use tests every few years rather than every year, and to use only tests that "everybody agrees makes sense." By "everybody," I assume he means "educators" such as his good friend and neighbor, semi-retired terrorist and current University of Illinois professor William Ayers. Among those vital things that kids and schools should be judged on is attendance. I'm picturing students showing up every day for school and promptly snoozing at their desks all day, yet getting one-quarter of their evaluation based on attendance. In most urban schools, the best thing that could happen is for half the students never to show up so the other half could learn something instead of dodging bullets, trying to hear the teacher over the din of the daily riots, and fending-off drug dealers. To say nothing of hiding from the pedophile teachers protected by the union.

Obama addressed the issue before a largely Hispanic audience at a Town Hall hosted by Univision, the largest Spanish-language broadcaster north of the border. Needless to say, among the tests that Obama feels are to boring and to punitive are tests of English proficiency. Even though Ebonics has largely died a natural death, creative spelling and creative sentence structure have jumped into the void. Obama doesn't want students bored or scared by tests that might actually require the students to put coherent sentences and paragraphs together in plain English.

In another brilliant defense of his plan, Obama said "young people do well in stuff that they're interested in--they're not going to do as well if it's boring." That might explain why most of these dolts do well in sex-education, although they don't apply anything they learn into real life. Although Obama wouldn't directly endorse non-testing and non-education for illegal immigrants, he did say that he would continue to push vigorously for passage of the DREAM Act. That way it would be perfectly legal for former illegal aliens to feed at the public trough and avoid getting bored or frightened by tests. Very democratic.

Obama also threw his two daughters into the discussion. Sasha and Malia attend one of the most expensive private schools in the country, but Obama acts as if PS19 in the South Bronx provides the same sort of education. As he says: "They recently took a standardized test that didn't require advance preparation. Instead, it was just a tool to diagnose their strengths and weaknesses." Oh, brother. Sidwell Friends School (where the girls go to school) teaches a curriculum which would be familiar to any public school student who attended school during the late 1940s through the late 1950s.

We of the 50s (and early 60s) were tested three times from kindergarten through our senior year in high school simply because it was a valid assumption that basic education had been provided at each level. Constant testing was unnecessary. So of course Sasha and Malia don't need regular testing either. But in large numbers of public schools, taught by ignorant union teachers, attended by hostile and unwilling students, with grading systems based on no known objective criteria, standardized tests are essentially the only way of establishing at least one solid basis of evaluation of the students and the schools. It at least assists in determining if a high school graduate can read his own diploma.

I suppose I should expect this President to eschew standards, since he and his administration have bloody few of their own. It also makes me wonder if he asked the students in Beijing if the constant testing and discipline in their schools bored them. Perhaps such a question would help us to determine why American public schools are among the worst in the civilized world. A little boredom and fright might just be a good thing. 2 + 2 = 4 is boring, but it's always correct, and if a student answers "5" on a test, it's likely that the school or the student, or both, are deficient (or a member of the Obama administration). Only standardized tests can give us that answer.

Tomorrow I will discuss how testing in the adult world is being officially dismissed as a determinant of success by no less than the Holder Justice Department