Torturing Children at Public Schools

The Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program is often referred to as the TCAP test. My son says that stands for “torturing children at public schools.” Every year these achievement tests cause anxiety among students, parents, and faculty. Okay, students and faculty shared more anxiety than the parents. This the last day of school many parents started to feel similar anxiety. The notifications came late in the evening that their high achieving students could be repeating the third grade. The TCAP showed their reading comprehension was not up to par. What options are available? Retest, appeal the results, or summer school. Some students did not get an option to retest or appeal.

Assessing Children

This new way of disallowing some children to pass the third grade was put into law last Summer during a special “education” session of the state legislature. It was sandwiched between making vouchers easier, getting charter schools easier, and making local school board elections partisan. Basically, the laws made it easier to give public school money away to corporations. Most activists  focused on charter schools and vouchers. But teachers warned us about the third grade retention law. It sounded evil. It became evil. If we were assessing the achievement levels of children so that we could more effectively invest in our schools, there would be no problem.

Third grade is the first grade any student takes the TCAP. The State punishes the children for not being test ready. I carefully explained this to one of our state representatives who did nothing.

Churches Are Silent

The majority of church leaders are silent on this issue. Part of the reason is to do so is the fear of accusations of being political or partisan. Why? Jesus was accused of being Beelzebub. The idea that churches should take no sides in matters of justice is cowardice. All pastors have felt they were behaving cowardly at one time or another. Likely, we were. But Peter having denied Jesus three times found it in himself to proclaim Christ. We need not be silent because of who might get upset. Children will remember who stood up for them and with them. The people who “might” get upset are merely waiting for an excuse to be mad.

Jesus welcomes children in the gospels. And he uses them as examples of faith with joy. We cannot allow rigid standardized testing to crush their spirit. The students need our help. What can we do?

Doing for Children

Here are some ideas. Church leaders can advocate for the students in local schools. We can promote literacy at the churches. We can speak to our legislators about these issues. Church leaders can preach on the importance of education as it helps people overcome poverty. The health of our churches and the surrounding communities requires that we stop being silent on educational quality. We can encourage parents to take a more active role in educating their children. It may be time for some of us to turn Sunday school back into school on Sunday.