Pressed to raise Test Scores, principals are resorting to new Gross-Out Stunts
from Tuesday's Wall Street Journal (paid subscription required):
Last winter, Principal Karla Onick issued a challenge to her students at L.B. Johnson Elementary School. If each grade met its goal in a book reading contest, she would eat worms.
On May 21 , Ms. Onick stood up in the school cafeteria and ate two 8-inch night crawlers sautéed with mushrooms and onions. The children squealed. Then Assistant Principal Alberto Reyes plucked two Worms from a jar and ate them raw.
" 'I bit the first on and it squirted all over my mouth', he says,. ' so the second time I just swallowed.'
"Under state and federal programs, schools face penalties if students don't continue to improve on tests. In Texas, home to one of the strictest sets of standards in the nation, the state has already closed several charter schools for failing to show adequate progress.
Last month, Charles Brunder, the principal of Forest Meadow Junior High in Dallas, let his students clip his hair with dog shears after their test scores indicated the school would move up a notch in the state ranking system. Earlier this spring, Robert Gordon, principal of Hendrick Ranch Elementary School near Riverside, California, kissed a potbellied pig after students met a reading challenge. And in Hampton, Va., Principal David Gaston modeled a pink tutu for his students at Burbank Elementary after their state tests scores improved.
'I even had a little tiara', says Mr. Gaston
The article had some critics saying that such stunts make tests the focus of education. As someone who has experience eating worms for personal and social gain, I can tell you that it is a degrading act.
I am good at taking written tests. I passed the ASA certified technician brake test without ever doing a successful brake job. In high school, I took lots and lots of practice tests for the SAT and improved my score by more than 200 points. If I can improve my score through studying, what does the SAT really show? It shows a willingness to practice taking tests, which is even more degrading than eating worms. So I make the argument that standardized testing is degrading, forcing students and educators to jump through hoops as described above instead of living life.
I can take a step back from my argument and say that a standardized test I took once did show a clear deficiency in the part of my brain that handles spatial relations. Those 2 dimensional patterns that fold up into 3 dimensional shapes and you have to predict the resulting shape? I sucked at that section and the results showed it very clearly.
10:48:24 AM 
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