WCS: Where Children Succeed

So today was my first day back at Wilson Central School, a tiny public high school in the middle-of-nowhere part of Western New York. People bring cowbells to graduation and ring them when their son or daughter walks across the stage; no one is embarrassed by this.

We've been ranked the top school in the county a number of times in a row, based upon our scores on standardized tests. To reiterate: "based upon our scores on standardized tests." It's beautiful, in a sick sort of way. Every year, I am filled with the same mixture of awe and disgust that I get when one of my friends talks about his "system" for choosing horses at the OTB. Our principal has found a way to break the school ranking system, discovered the magic formula to produce the highest test scores without sacrificing the sports budget. The man is a genius, really.

The goal high schools are supposed to work towards, according to No Child Left Behind, the whole sick state/federal funding scheme, and independent rankings is high test scores on NYS Regent's exams. This is the end goal, the logical conclusion of the groundwork laid by state and federal agencies. Most schools still like to pretend that "education," "personal growth," "achievement," and so forth are the desired results of a public high school education. WCS has the balls not to waste everyone's time on such a ridiculous assumption.

Most schools have advanced classes. Pretty standard fare. Honors, AP, maybe even IB... The assumption here is that it's best for everyone if the brightest, most well-motivated students are able to challenge themselves academically and perhaps earn college credit in the process. It's a fairly self-evident, intuitive assumption to make. But in the whole NCLB scheme, the exact opposite is true. If your funding is based upon the scores your students earn on standardized tests, the absolute worst thing you could do, financially speaking, is to segregate out your brightest students from the pool of students who will be taking said tests.

You want gifted students to be trapped in Regents level courses -- which are set up as Regents test prep classes -- because they will inevitably score very well on the Regents exams, padding out the scores of the less talented students. Everyone takes the same classes, everyone takes the exam, and by averaging out the scores of the people who need to be in a Regents level course and those who would otherwise be in advanced classes, you outscore schools who place their gifted students in courses that focus on actually teaching the topic at hand as opposed to preparing for the state examination.

It's like our principal's favorite aphorism: "If you do what you are supposed to do, when you are supposed to do it, the way it is supposed to be done, to the best of your ability, and you do it that way every time, you will succeed." Success is measured in terms of doing what it is that you are supposed to do towards a goal defined by someone else, not what is most fulfilling, desirable, or indeed beneficial. Dance, monkeys, dance.

And yes, in case you were wondering, this IS just a frustrated, probably mostly juevenille rant. Some highlights from my day...

Precalc
The teacher hands out an eight problem worksheet as a review. The eight problems involve the addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division of simple fractions. "7/8 + 4/15"... that sort of thing. She gives us ten minutes to solve the problems. The vast majority of the class does not succeed in completing more than one problem, and discovers that the problem it did complete was incorrect. We will be discussing this topic in depth tomorrow, because apparently we were all absent that day of fifth grade when we were taught this the first time around.

Economics
The teacher has a fake tan and goes on a long rant about lazy people who wind up living in their parents' basements. This is both a direct reference to the students in the class and a thinly-veiled reference to poor people in general, who all would have succeeded at life if only they had worked hard earlier in their lives. The class looks like it will be an introduction to neoclassical bullshit with a good deal of inane paperwork.

English
The teacher is a unabashedly condescending man. He spells out words as he speaks them to us.... "The theme is the moral of the story... that's 'moral' without an 'e' at the end, or else that would be something different... Characters are affected by the plot... that's affected with an 'a,' or else that would be something different..." However, I don't know whether it's fair to characterize him as condescending, as many people around me were, in fact, correcting their spelling.

Physics
According to our syllabus, the entire first quarter of the year will be devoted to a review of measurments and middle-school level equations from eighth grade science.

Independant Reading
This class has literally three people in it. Our teacher asked us what we were going to read. I said I was going to read The Human Stain by Philip Roth, and she had not heard of him. She is reading something by Stephen King.

I sort of feel like an asshole for going on like this. It's quite an elitist rant. But at the same time, it's such a frustrating situation to be in that I don't know quite how else to react. I'm sure I'll get acclimated to high school again, but goddammit, I almost don't want to. I came home today and started reading a microeconomics book I picked up at the Cornell Store just so I could feel as though I've actually learned something today.

Bah, bad times.