You've already heard the world view of ABC News, the ACLU, and the National Education Association. Now, tune in for the other world view. This is Generations with Kevin Swanson. Welcome to Generations. My name is Kevin Swanson. I'm executive director of Christian Home Educators. I'm a pastor, but the reason I'm here today, I'm a father of five. and raising my children on the plains of Colorado. We homeschool out here. And a homeschool student got a perfect score on the ACT, Dave. Dave is another homeschool dad, father of five as well. Dave produces this fine program. And Dave, this gal got a 36 on the ACT. She's one out of 23 out of the 378,000 who took the test. Lillian Johnson has eight brothers and sisters. I don't know how she could concentrate on studying with all those little guys and gals running around. She got a perfect score on the ACT? Must have been an accident. Well, it just shows that she wasn't socialized right, because all the other kids are getting bad scores. Yeah. And in other news folks, products from the Clorox company arrived at Coal Creek Elementary in Golden, Colorado with instructions to hand them out to parents. Golden is close to where we are broadcasting from this morning. But instead of giving them to parents, the school officials gave them out to the kindergartners. And so the kindergartners put them in their backpacks, and then they went ahead and opened these Clorox cleanup disinfecting cleaners. And then, according to one parent, they were using the wet wipes on their face. So they're pretty upset with the school right now. A lot of parents up in arms over this one. A new pay-for-performance program for Florida's teachers will tie raises and bonuses directly to pupils' standardized test scores beginning next year. Now this has been the dream of every Republican governor since the standardized tests became popular in the last decade or so. The effort now being adopted by local districts is viewed as a landmark in the movement to restructure American schools by having them face the same kind of competitive pressures placed on private enterprise advocates say it could serve as a national model to replace traditional teacher pay plans. Anyway, Jeb Bush is doing this thing. where he attaches the merit pay increases to the improvements that these teachers register on the test scores. So this is a huge deal and schools are holding elaborate pep rallies for students before the test. At a North Twin Lakes Elementary School, they dress in t-shirts that said, We Can Do It! And the children sing to the tune of Lou Bega's hit, Mambo No. 5. It goes something like this. They put a little F-C-A-T in my life. A little bit of reading on my side. A little bit of writing is all I need. I'm doing good on the F-C-A-T. Yes, I am. Yes, I am. Ladies and gentlemen at home, please don't try that. Kevin is a professional. Yes. So, Pep rallies and they're just trying to do everything they can to get these kids to pass these tests. You know why? Because... I need the 10%. Give me the 10%, you know. This is $5,000 for me, kids. This means $5,000 for me and my family. My family's going to starve unless you kids get, you know, 423 on this test. You all hear me now? $5,000. This means $5,000 for me. Make it happen, guys. Make it happen. How would that be? Would I be motivating? That would be honest. But if Jeb Bush really wants to introduce market forces and competition, this is my suggestion. Forget the teachers union, forget pay for performance on test scores. Stop funding the public schools, let them compete on an even field with say private schools and then parents would be able to choose where they wanted to send their kids if they wanted to send them at all. That would introduce market forces and competition and excellence in education. Oh now you're talking real competition, Dave. You're talking dissolving the monopoly. No way, dude. The monopoly that of course is foisted upon the taxpayers, a monopoly that really doesn't require any competition whatsoever. Now Kevin, who gets to make up these tests anyway? The other problem is that these tests, the ACT, the SAT, in Colorado we have our own particular version. What gets on the test should be as controversial as the fact that it is the metric, because if you're going to have a metric, the metric should measure something, and what you're going to measure is at least as important as if you're measuring it. And education is turning into testing, Dave. It's all about testing now. My brother's a teacher in the public schools in the Denver area, and he tells me all the time, it's all about testing. The whole year is geared towards that big test. And you know what? There are all kinds of motivations now for kids to take these tests so they'll max their scores and contribute to the merit pay of their teacher. But here's some examples. At Ridge Park Elementary in Montgomery County, where would that be? Alabama? I know, somewhere. Educators are passing out peppermints. For consumption, during the school assessment in math and reading, which is given in schools this week, a study by psychology professors at the University of Cincinnati found whiffs of peppermint boost alertness and performance. At Fitzpatrick Elementary in Northeast Philadelphia, they're handing out sugar-free gum. which used to be banned in schools, but it turns out the Japanese have found that chewing could stimulate the memory. In the Upper Darby School District in Delaware, elementary teachers are playing Mozart symphonies, and in one Camden County, this is New Jersey, one Camden County teacher is taken to donning a general's helmet and declaring war on New Jersey's Ask 3 test this week, while his young test-taker soldiers sport camouflage visors. There's really no specific research on that one, says Bart White, but Students enjoy the role-playing and motivation is half the battle. So anyway, lots of efforts here to really make the testing work. Kevin, when I went to high school, they did something even more radical, even more unthinkable. I know this goes back a few years, but they assigned, you ready? They assigned homework in order to prepare us for tests. No way. It's hard to believe, but that's how they used to do it. I thought you were going to say they assigned some kind of mind-altering drug. I guess that's what the other guys were. That was just in the teacher's lounge. Okay. Ladies and gentlemen, today, testing. Testing. Why should we test our children? What is this standardized testing thing? Homeschoolers are required to do it. We're required to do it in the third, fifth, seventh, ninth, and eleventh grades in our homeschool, and we don't like it. We're going to be back in just a moment to talk about testing and how it contributes or doesn't to a good education. My name is Kevin Swanson. The program is Generations. Ladies and gentlemen, we are back. This is Kevin Swanson, the program is Generations. We want to talk about testing today, but one more story. Just came across the news desk here. A girl was missing for 10 years. They just found her. She was locked in a room for 10 years, but here's the real story. She was in school. At 14 years of age, she was in school and the security guard nabbed her, put her in her closet, his closet for 10 years. Now, I thought the security guard was supposed to be keeping the school safe. Well, I guess he did keep her safe for 10 years. She was protected. She was sheltered. Now, this is a public school socialization story. She was public school. And she was put in a closet for 10 years. Now, you know, I think I take an issue with this, don't you, Dave? I mean, I think sheltering is good, but you can take it a little too far. I'm thinking when you hire a security guard, that probably should help the safety, but you know, the safer they make the public schools, the more dangerous they become. Yeah, this was out in Pennsylvania. Tonya Nicole Koch, now 24 years of age, finally turns up as somebody locked in the room of a security guard of a public school. Does the story say how well she did on her ACT? No, it doesn't. But back to the ACT's and back to the testing issue. You know, the testing issue ties in quite a bit to the principle of individuality because here's the problem. The problem is that God did not make all children completely equal. He didn't make all people just like me and I think there's probably a sigh of relief going on right now even as we speak. But in his infinite wisdom, he decided to make every little one different. And because he makes every little one different, you have a different mix of students in every classroom and every year. I think a teacher who is worth his or her salt is going to tell you that, Dave, you don't get the same group of kids every year, especially if you teach sixth grade every year. Some years you're going to have a good, you know, strong academic performance in the classroom, on average, and some years you're not going to have the strongest academic performance. You're going to get a mix, not just in the individuals, but in the collective group as well, just depending on where the classroom is, what kind of families are being educated in that classroom, and the sorts of children, the background, the social background, the academic preparation that came beforehand, and lots and lots of factors play into this sort of thing. Well, Kevin, you just said the key word, the collective. See, the problem is if you start treating each child as different, then it breaks the whole assembly line mentality of just putting the wheels on at one station and putting the engine in at the other station. If you do that, pretty soon you're going to have to bust the whole grade system up and you're going to have to treat each child individually. How in the world are you going to have a child training collective factory if you do that? We have not been treating these children as individuals for a hundred years, Dave. We've been standardizing and centralizing the system since the 1880s. And it's because, you know, we don't see a little eight-year-old as an eight-year-old. We see him as a third-grade student. We say, if you're not in third grade in math, geography, English, etc., there is something wrong with you. We don't see them as a creature created in the image of God. Rather, we see them as a station on the conveyor belt on the assembly line. Right. And if these children are tested to the third grade level in math, English, geography, etc., and expected to be at that level, and yet they find out they are not at that level, the end result is a child that is incredibly discouraged, Or in some cases, children are a little bored with the material because it's going way too slow for them. But you've got a system that is boxing up these children, and the product is awful. It's absolutely terrible. I was in manufacturing for a number of years, and we would manufacture widgets or whatever, and it would come through a process, and they would be processed exactly alike. But that was because the raw material coming in was exactly alike. I was a quality engineer so if the raw material was not exactly like in form and in Consistency in the shape etc if the raw material coming into process wasn't exactly like guess what you would get out the other end Junk you get nothing but junk because the process is designed for a Uniform product a uniform product coming in and a uniform product coming out, but God didn't create a human beings that way. He created us unique. Okay, so we start out with the wrong assumption about people. But as a quality control engineer in QC, if you were getting results, you test the product at the end to see if it functions and has a certain quality level that you expect it's designed in the process. As a quality control engineer, if you're getting the kind of results on the finished end that we're getting out of public schools, What do you do? Do you change the process or do you say, well, we just need to do more of it? Well, you've got to change the process. You've got to change the whole method by which you're doing processing these children or the product. And in the case of children, we've got to change the process and bring the principle of individuality back to bear on the education of these children. And the other issue is relationships, because you know what? Studies have shown that teachers are most effective if they have the same students for four years in a row. They get those same students and they work with them through third, fourth, fifth, sixth grade. Don't even use the grades. They just work with them for four years. What we find is these teachers are much, much, much, much more successful, but they're not successful in year one. They're not real successful in year two. But as they have that child for a longer period of time, they're much more successful. That's because they get to know these children. Children are human beings. They learn. They're discipled. They're mentored in relationship. Are you sure it's not because after four years they finally got the student to fill in the little circles with their number two pencil, right? That's ridiculous, you know, it's ridiculous. But the principle of relationships is entirely ignored. Dave, think about it. These kids are swapping teachers every year, in some cases every hour. That teacher doesn't even have a prayer to show any level of improvement. Because he doesn't get the same students every year. So he's not going to show improvement. That's a joke. That's an absolute joke that teachers should be expected to show improvement if he doesn't have the same students year in and year out. The other thing is if you attach merit pay to how well students do on tests, you have this hardcore connection between merit pay and how well the students are doing on the testing in April or May, it's going to discourage teachers from sticking around in one particular school. So it's actually going to discourage teachers from hanging in there and being consistent in one particular school and the end result is just going to be catastrophic. Well they do something like this in Japan and as you know Japan has a really bad problem with child suicide because in Japan there is a collective mentality where if somebody scores lower than everyone else in the class it makes the whole class look bad. Now imagine a teacher whose pay is tied to performance and he's got a poorly performing child and he doesn't seem to be able to motivate that child to a better test score. What is he going to do? He's going to do everything in his power to improve the average by getting rid of the student. Yeah. Yeah. There goes your special needs program. There goes education. Yeah. Yeah. Ladies and gentlemen, today testing, and Dave, you know that we are required to give our children standardized tests. You know, some of my children do very well on standardized tests. They get up in the 99th percentile. And of course, I wish they had the decimal point, because if they had the decimal point, we would know whether or not our children were doing 99.999. We would see some improvement, but we don't see improvement because they're 99th percentile. It's a little humid from the homeschool perspective. A little humor, very little humor from the homeschooling. Again, don't try this at home. He is a professional. But Rebecca Joy, she doesn't do as well in standardized tests. Just doesn't do that well. But you know what, Rebecca Joy, when she does her math tests, she has these beautiful little drawings that she includes on the margins of the tests. They're just great. She has beautiful drawings. But you know when you send those tests in to be graded by the standardized testing board or whoever does it, they never test what she has done on the margins. They don't check that. It doesn't show up on the Scantron automated computerized printout. In fact, lest I recall, there was no standardized test for creativity, for artisticness. No, no. In fact, Dave, the standardized tests test a very narrow, very narrow slice of human learning and existence. They're practically useless. I remember one time my wife came up to me and I was gloating over Daniel's 99th percentile. Right, Daniel does pretty well. And I'm thinking to myself, he's doing better than 99% of American children. He's doing really good. Starting to feel that way. And my wife looks at me, you know what? They're not testing character on that one. I noticed they're not testing his diligence, his honesty, and his respect for his mom and dad. Is that anywhere on that test result? Oh, no, not really. They don't test character. And character is the essence of education, right? We talked about that on this program. We have brought it up again and again because God's book on educating a child is very little on geometry and geography, but a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot of stuff on character in the book of Proverbs, right? So here we have a test that tests a very, very narrow band of human knowledge, education, wisdom, experience. It leaves out all character. creativity, all artistic expression. It tests math and English, and then we put a label on that child and say, that child is a C student. That child is a less than average student because that child did worse than the average 50 percentile in America in math and English. It's a very narrow slice of academic achievement. And actually, at its very best, when it's testing math, it doesn't test very well, partly because it assumes a certain scope and sequence, a certain order to learning things in math. If you taught fractions when your child was in what would be the third grade, but the public schools were teaching set theory, Now, your child may have learned more, but that wasn't what they tested him on, because they assumed that he should have learned set theory while you were teaching him fractions. Ladies and gentlemen, standardized testing is screwing up education. It will screw up our children, guaranteed. I guarantee it. The standardized testing program that is brought on by largely Republicans, and I'm fairly conservative myself, but I think it's another bad, bad statist idea coming down from Washington, D.C. and our state governments. The problem, here's I think the real problem. Standardized testing forces their whole education to become even more narrow, to become even less individualized. They spend the whole year working on taking these tests. Do you know that Dave? These classrooms are focused on this very, very narrow slice of information they can cram into a one hour test. It's ridiculous. So and also the teacher can get a merit pay increase as opposed to just getting an automatic union increases, which they're trying to fight against. But, you know, Kevin. Learning to be good, as we've said, has to have some application in life. It has to be integrated. And now the application is the test score. And the reason this is so important is because your life can be defined by your SAT score. And come to find out, guess what? They're grading them wrong. Yeah, yeah, right. The SAT scores, I think something like 6,000 SATs were only partially graded, and they issued scores far lower than the students actually achieved. It's more than 12,000 now. Oh, is it? Okay. Ladies and gentlemen, testing. It's unrealistic to life. We hinge a student's achievement in life, academic performance in life, abilities in life, on a test? Testing. Unrealistic to life. It's one of the most unrealistic educational experiences you could ever give a child. And as home educators in Colorado, we're forced to give our children the standardized tests. We don't show our children the scores though, Dave. It would only make them feel bad in some cases, and the rest of the cases make them feel proud, and we don't want either one. We don't want them to feel bad. We don't want them to feel proud. We don't think it's a significant achievement. No, and you know what? I wouldn't even show your scores to public school teachers. It'll just discourage them. So if you homeschool, just keep the scores private. We just go through the motions imposed on us by the state. We file away the test results and forget about them and get on with a real education. And that's what this program is about, ladies and gentlemen. We want to give our children a real education, not the fake one that is provided by whatever the state's trying to do in 2006. Let me encourage you to get my book, Upgrade! The 10 Secrets to the Best Education for Your Child. That book can be purchased by calling 877-842-CHECK. That's Upgrade! The 10 Secrets to the Best Education for Your Child. You're going to find that 90% of the factors that bring about a good education are largely ignored by professional educators today. It's all in my book, Upgrade the Ten Secrets to the Best Education for Your Child. Get it by calling right now, 877-842-CHECK. That's 877-842-CHECK. And you can interact with this program by emailing me, kevin at check.org. That's kevin at check.org. And you can hear the program anytime, anywhere in the world at kevinswanson.com. Got some friends, family members that you want to see improve in terms of their education and the raising of their children? Have them listen to this program at kevinswanson.com. This is Kevin Swanson inviting you back again next time as we lay down a vision for the next generation. Okay, pencils up! You've been listening to Generations with Kevin Swanson, where we take a look at life through a biblical worldview and a generational focus. If you've been challenged by this program, you need to get a copy of Kevin Swanson's new book, Upgrade! The 10 Secrets to the Best Education for Your Child. Get an upgrade at kevinswanson.com.