A rant about our education system in Minnesota

It has been a long time since I have posted here, I will try very hard to rectify that problem.  It has been a busy crazy time of my life culminating with the loss of my teaching position last week ostensibly due to a decline in enrollment at the charter school where I worked.  Teaching would be a great job if you just had to teach kids, the hardest part of education seems to be dealing with the other adults in the system.  It is much like a medieval world, people fighting to keep their little fiefdoms and protect their illusory world intact.

Education in Minnesota like many other places has been taken over by the requirements of standardized testing.  If there is not a test on the subject, it no longer matters.  I am/was a Social Studies teacher, which by the way was the whole reason public schools started in the United States.  Thomas Jefferson insisted that the electorate be educated so that they could understand what they were voting about.  In Minnesota however we don’t have a state mandated test on the Social Studies; so it seems that many administrators minimize the importance of such silly things as History, Geography, Economics, Government etc… because they get evaluated on the results of standardized tests and no test = no results.  You cannot blame them, their jobs are dependent on these results but how do we return the “soft” subjects to importance in our schools?

The schools are being turned into math and reading factories.  Since the high stakes testing is based in these two subjects, they have assumed a position of prominence in our education system.  Here in Minnesota we are adding Science to the group of subjects that matter by adding yet another state high stakes test.  I find myself torn by this; one side says that it is a good thing that another subject has been anointed with importance simply by giving the students yet another test.  Another side of me looks at the student’s side of this and sees just another test.  Kids take an overabundance of tests already; often the students will take the easy way out and not put any effort into the test. 

As far as my discipline, the Social Studies, I cannot imagine the State of Minnesota coming up with a test on which  the whole state would agree.  Can you imagine the people of Edina (rich suburb, many business executives) agreeing on labor history with the people from the Iron Range?   Probably not, I can also see difficulties on how Native Americans will be dealt with historically and that is just the beginning of the issues we would face, think about economics, government, politics.  I just don’t see how we be able to reach a consensus on what should be tested not to mention what answers would be selected as correct.  It boggles the mind to think of what a committee appointed by the State of Minnesota will come up with as the correct answer.  

Unfortunately, I do not have an answer here; I do know that we are turning out students who have almost no idea of our collective history or even where Botswana is located, not to mention who is the President of the United States (see Jaywalking segment of the Tonight show.)  We are in danger of having future generations that have no idea of what it means to be a citizen of our democracy.  I hope not.