Education Week writer Jane Ehrenfield uses George Orwell's essay "Such, Such Were the Joys..." as a springboard for bemoaning the preponderance of standardized tests in schools today:
[From Orwell's essay] "This business of making a gifted boy's career depend on a competitive examination, taken when he is only 12 or 13, is an evil thing at best. ... At Crossgates the whole process was frankly a preparation for a sort of confidence trick. Your job was to learn exactly those things that would give an examiner the impression that you knew more than you did know, and as far as possible to avoid burdening your brain with anything else."
[Ms. Ehrenfield's response] Reading this earlier this spring, my mind immediately jumped to all of the upper-elementary-school teachers I knew who were struggling then, as they do every spring, to get their students ready for their states' standardized exams...The information on the test—in language arts, for example, main idea, context clues, subjects and predicates, rhyme scheme—is important to know, but it certainly does not cover the range of skills and knowledge that good teachers want their students to learn and modern pedagogy advises them to teach.
Ms. Ehrenfield goes on to praise teachers who do not "teach to the test", which is fine, but I find her complaint about the narrowing of the curriculums somewhat naive:
There are other parallels to be drawn between the test-driven curriculum to which Orwell was subjected and the test-driven curriculum to which students in struggling schools are subjected now. Since students are usually only held accountable for passing the language arts and math sections of the test, science and social studies have been severely neglected by the schools and by the curriculum departments of urban districts. It's not that teachers such as Mr. Holden don't want to teach these subjects, it's just that in a short day, with the fate of the school and the students resting on a single test, these subjects often lose out to time spent on language arts and math.
Sad, but true - and not by coincidence. The logic behind this is that, while most would agree that a broad curriculum which includes science and social studies is best, if kids can't read at all, then those additional classes won't do them much good. The purpose of the NCLB act was not really to force schools to narrow the curriculum, but to force them to teach children to read before doing anything else. Unfortunately, many schools don't manage to do even that, and so any additional classes in science might well be wasted.
In an ideal world, schools would use reading programs that were effective and would get most kids on track by first or second grade. Unfortunately, our world is not ideal, and, for a whole host of reasons, schools continue to use programs that don't work (such as whole language programs that don't include any phonics-based instruction). One article from 1996 claims that 30% - almost one-third - of high-school graduates can't read their diplomas. According to a survey from the National Society of Collegiate Scholars, illiteracy in the US remains a big problem:
Forty percent of adults have trouble reading and writing even simple things. For example, they cannot fill out job applications, read traffic signs, read prescriptions on medicine bottles, understand bus schedules or read a story to a child. Forty million adults are functionally illiterate in the US. Functional illiteracy is the inability to read above the third grade level...
Forty percent of U.S. children have some difficulty reading – more than a third of all fourth graders read below grade level. About a third of American children enter kindergarten unable to recognize letters of the alphabet...
NSCS thinks the problem is "poor role models" at home, which means that schools must now work that much harder than before to counteract an illiterate home environment. For some schools, the old model of a well-rounded education might not be the most appropriate, because these kids need damage control first and foremost.