Take the test

Dear Woozy,

Darn tootin’, it’s right.

Protests against the federal mandate have mostly to do with the school system and teachers grumbling that our local schools’ standardized test scores will go down as a result.

If they do, so what?

The tests’ function is only to show how much the kids know and how far away from competency they are.

The tests are not meant as a way for the school to feel good about its performance, even though "adequate yearly progress" is the jargon of success in public schools. You fail to make AYP and much bureaucratic pain ensues to the local establishment.

But making bureaucratic progress is a different creature than proof that kids are making adequate progress.

So, if some schools slide back on the hated watch list for underachievers in the state, it’s only because that’s where they should be.

Swami has always suspected that traditional ESL programs don’t do an adequate job of pushing immigrant kids into the mainstream of English literacy nearly fast enough. It seems as though the training wheels stay on too long.

The state tests for this goal have never been very good either, a truth born out by the state itself deciding the rules for measuring proficiency weren’t so hot. The reason? The flawed test currently in use doesn’t ask hard enough questions or enough of them to show a student is advancing. (If you removed all the algebra questions from the SAT, even Swami would have seemed like a genius)

In Waukegan, of course, the stakes are high. A school system that allows Spanish -language students to languish in English illiteracy only creates a sub group of permanent underperformers. They become underperforming citizens. Or even underperforming undocumented residents, if you insist.

In any case, if Waukegan schools believe they have any necessary function other than making their students speak, read and write in English, (and think in English) they are mistaken.

There is no other higher goal than making them all highly proficient in English.

But ESP programs have other inbuilt limits that thwart the higher goal - fear of stigmatizing students with failure, fear of placing too much pressure on kids already facing troubles in low income households. Or perhaps that if a school makes kids work very much harder, it implies that teachers must toil harder, too.

Because the first level of serious testing occurs in third grade, that’s where the bulge will occur in Waukegan.

But it seems to Swami that expecting a student to be fluent in English by third grade is not unreasonable, unless they just showed up in the United States a month ago. It’s only a problem if the predominant culture inside Waukegan schools is to encourage Spanish speech just as freely as English.

The fact that Waukegan school folks think they will fail a new, sterner measurement of that success says a lot about what the standard has been.

Low. Way too low and too slow.