Numerous tipsters and friends pointed out the New York Post story about how the New York City Department of Education had banned words like "dinosaur" and "birthday" and "Halloween" from tests. I was quite ready to unload on the Department — in fact, I was discussing a contest to see who could use all of the words in one test question — when I was struck with a sudden and overpowering sense of skepticism, and ground to a halt.
Sometimes these stories are based on snippets of truth taken out of context, or misreported. Am I, I asked myself (not aloud, because that's pretentious), being taken in by a story that plays into my predisposition to see the education bureaucracy as witlessly politically correct?
So, though it pained me, I tried to find the original source for the story. None of the news reports or blog posts about it posted the Department of Education document allegedly containing the dinosaur's-birthday ban. From a reference in one of the stories I figured that the language came from the Department's notice seeking bids from test providers — an RFP, to those who bid on government contracts — and located it here. But the Department's site doesn't let you access the RFPs unless you have a vendor account. Fortunately there's a Popehat reader who has one. I think he does work for the Department carting off dead bodies or catering mixed drinks to the rubber room or something; I didn't ask. Thanks to this intrepid reader, I had it — the Appendix to RFP #R0911, the Periodic Assessment Program. A delay followed, as I spent much of the weekend coughing up muppet-colored gunk. But then I read it.
And yes, contrary to my concerns, it's just about as bad as was reported.
The Appendix shows a list of topics for test questions "that would probably cause a selection to be deemed unacceptable by the New York City Department of Education." The Department explains:
In general, a topic might be unacceptable for any of the following reasons:
The topic could evoke unpleasant emotions in the students that might hamper their ability to take the remainder of the test in the optimal frame of mind.
The topic is controversial among the adult population and might not be acceptable in a state-mandated testing situation.
The topic has been ―done to death‖ in standardized tests or textbooks and is thus overly familiar and/or boring to students.
The topic will appear biased against (or toward) some group of people.
Now, it might be perfectly reasonable for the Department to avoid tests with obscene content, or content celebrating criminal activity, like the pimping-or-crack-dealing math test that the occasional "creative" teacher devises. But the Department's list of disfavored subjects is incomprehensibly broad and, in many instances, stubbornly irrational. Here it is, with the occasional comment from me:
Abuse
Alcohol (beer and liquor), tobacco, or drugs (No questions about Prohibition? No questions about colonial tobacco trade?)
Birthdays (no "Ronnie got six presents on her birthday. She gave four away.")
Bodily functions (Presumably they mean no traditionally private bodily functions. Otherwise this is going to be a very abstract test.)
Cancer (and other diseases) (Nothing about Jonas Salk. Gotcha.)
Catastrophes/disasters (tsunamis and hurricanes)
Children dealing with serious issues (Not even children dealing with a fundamentally broken educational system run by twits?)
Computers in the home (acceptable in a school or public library setting) (Really? Because — kids would feel deprived? Really?)
Creatures from outer space
Dancing (ballet is acceptable) (What. The. FUCK.)
Death and disease (So — just avoid discussing any war, then.)
Dinosaurs and prehistoric times
Divorce
Geological history
Evolution
Expensive gifts, vacations, and prizes
Gambling
Halloween
Holidays
Homes with swimming pools
In-depth discussions of sports that require prior knowledge
Junk food
Loss of employment
Movies
Nuclear weapons
Parapsychology
Politics
Pornography
Poverty
Rap music
Religion
Religious holidays
Rock-and-Roll music
Running away
Sex
Slavery
Terrorism
Vermin (rats and roaches)
Violence
War and bloodshed
Weapons (guns, knives, etc.)
Witchcraft, sorcery, etc.
But that's not all. Now that the Department has gotten a topic/word list out of its system, it's time to move on to more amorphous concepts:
Avoid anything that may be interpreted as:
Anthropomorphism (attribution of human characteristics to inanimate objects, animals, or natural phenomena) (Anthropomorphism is allowed in retellings of fables.)
Biased towards or against any particular form or system of government (So. Democracy? Meh. Take it or leave it.)
Dangerous for children (alone at home, swimming without adult supervision, etc.) (No children-overcoming-adversity stories.)
Demeaning to any group (Not counting, presumably, demeaning to the children taking the resulting insipid tests)
Disrespectful to authority or authority figures (no questioning authority! No American Revolution stuff, please.)
Highly controversial (Meaning, whatever the Department wants it to mean)
Middle-class amenities that may be unfamiliar to some children (Decently written tests administered in decent schools, for instance)
Regionalism
Smug, moralistic, preachy (That invades the province of the Department's administrators)
Stereotyping of any group
Stridently feminist or chauvinistic
Avoid using trade names.
In short: I'm glad that I took the time to locate and read the source document. It makes the story worse, not better. \
New Yorkers' tax dollars went to drafting this list — to sitting in rooms and coming up with lists of concepts and topics that might possibly upset someone somewhere, and thus must be avoided in the modern Wiffle School.
Tell me: do you think the time spend devising this list, and devising compliant bids, and policing bids for compliance, contributed anything positive or useful to the education of children?
Last 5 posts by Ken White
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Absolutely. It's preparing students for life. Because in the real world nothing would ever "evoke unpleasant emotions" "that might hamper their ability" to perform tasks "in the optimal frame of mind." Wait. No. Never mind.
Sooooo, how are they going to compile science or history tests now?
Idiots.
I can envisage that this is to stop tewsts that might actually show that knowledge of one form or another has not been learnt. The Bell curve will be ummm a verticle line.
Example multiple choice question:
Blah?
a: Blah
b: Blah blah
c: bLAH
d: all of the above
They left out Slavery? How in the world are they going to continue to put out the message that old dead white men are the root of all evil, of they can't talk about slavery?
The thing is, the New City Dept. of Education is merely responding to the whims of the tax payers who come in and complain about every little thing that annoys them. My wife volunteers at school and ran the PTA for a while and it was a "bang your head against the wall" series of frustrations watching parents.
If you grabbed a big group of parents and showed them individual items from this list, 95-99% of them would find that any given item was okay to use under the right conditions. (The "don't be an idiot" proviso.)
But there will always be a few who, for any given topic, will freak out and say that under no circumstances should the school ever discuss topic X. And New Yorkers, despite their reputation for a calm, rational demeanor, no doubt get in school administrators collective faces about these sorts of things.
So you get the situation Ford Prefect described, "They care, we don't, they win."
@anarchic teapot – Judging by California standardized tests, only math and English are critical topics. History? Sorry, no sale. And science… well, I should be happy it isn't emphasized I suppose, after my daughter came home asking how far above sea level we live, because she had be told, as fact, that global warming was going to make the sea rise 100 feet in the next 50 years. (I told her we were just high enough that we would be living at the beach in 50 years. Go us!)
"do you think the time spend devising this list, and devising compliant bids, and policing bids for compliance, contributed anything positive or useful to the education of children?"
Abso-fraggin-lutely it did!
The people who came up with these lists are on the Department of Education payroll. If they weren't sitting in offices and committee meetings doing things like coming up with these inane lists, they might be employed in a far more dangerous capacity, which would put them in contact with actual children, and thereby harm those children's educational prospects irreparably.
Sort of like the rubber room, except the price of admission isn't incompetence, addiction, or sexual deviancy, but rather an incurable bureaucratic temperament.
NYC Geology Curriculum Test, 2012
Student Name:
Have you learned geology?: [Yes|No]
Please use any remaining time to go back over your answers.
# # #
"Homes with swimming pools"? Is this really something that children in New York City are traumatized by the lack of? Hell, I grew up in Miami, and we didn't have a swimming pool. If we wanted to swim, my father had to buy a big plastic and aluminum thing, set it up, and leave the hose going in it all day to fill it up. Or just go to the beach. They tell me someday the bitter feelings from having to suffer the white sands, balmy breezes, warm waves, and palm trees on Key Biscayne instead of having my very own chlorine-filled concrete pit to play it will fade.
Argh. "To play IN." I blame the trauma.
This post is potentially offensive to Muppets.
Also: I hope you're getting better, but if you're coughing up Elmo-colored gunk, please please please rush yourself to the morgue.
When I posted on this topic back on the 31st on your "In Which I Dare Connecticut To Come Get Me. COME AT ME, BRO." thread I forgot you might not have access to the NYC Dept. of Education vendors system. I do, sorry for not providing to you then as I should have provided a bit more around the attestation. Hope you feel better soon.
If this kind of censorious nonesense keeps up, Ken likel won't be feeling better anytime soon. Nor will I. Sick just sick.
basically they've banned everything that you would have to know to navigate through and succeed in the world.
Well done, New York City Department of Education.
next they'll be banning sentence capitalization.
Not to mention it looks like they didn't even bother to proofread the list. They put "holidays" in, yet further down they add "religious holidays", and they also include "halloween," which, last I checked, can also be filed under "holidays". They list "Cancer (and other diseases)," when it makes more logical sense to just list it as "Diseases," and yet they also included "Death and disease" which should just be deleted for redundancy. These logical errors are indicative of the level of thought and oversight they put into the whole project.
Oh I'm sure they tried. That, as they say, is the scary thing.
New York: no rednecks – Arizonian or otherwise – are going to out stupid us! Have a nice fucking day.
This is done with the idea of reducing distractions during tests?
These poor kids are going to have nothing but distractions when they get a job… Unless they go work for the DMV, and have to take a 5 minute break between customers, as they got so overwhelmed.
To Christph's reply on March 3rd @3:18pm about Puncuation!
Period
For what it's worth, I looked at the original PDF and the dancing one (the craziest of the bunch) doesn't seem to be there any more.
Oops, here I go again, Christoph's comment on April 3!
So kids in New York will learn to be sensitive to diverse beliefs by being kept completely ignorant that they exist?
I'd like to know how eating meat escaped this list? Especially since vegetarians are prohibited from discussing junk food, religion, violence, vermin, and cancer — only the pro-meat processor point of view can be expressed, apparently.
I'm still floored by the idea that you can't talk about dancing, except ballet. Ballet! Makes me wish they'd done this with every topic. "No discussion of wars (the Boer War is acceptable). No discussion of movies (Transformers:Dark of the Moon is acceptable). No discussion of disease (Dating a Kardashian is acceptable)."
Ha ha, Diana. Well done.
i see what you did there
Thanks for actually getting the primary source! I read the Appendix hoping for a minor dose of smug pseudo-outrage, but I'm with Arcturus and am actually sympathetic to the DoE on this one.
Before the list of topics to avoid they even say that these topics are probably find for use in class. But if they're on a statewide test, they are pretty sure to rile some clown up and cause a lawsuit, stupid news headlines and the like. So perhaps the investment in coming up with it saved money.
More disturbing to me is the fine style detail for stuff that any adult, much less a teacher, ought already to know: how to write "3:00 AM" for example (and even this example has a case of aggrivation-avoidance, in requiring "ce" and "bce" instead of "AD" and "BC").
My takeaway is that those kids' parents should not be allowed near my kid's teachers!
Linus, you start to bring up an interesting point. I can see these idiots at some point thinking “hey we better DEFINE” these words so everyone will “clearly” understand our pea brained attempts to obfuscate.
I can just see it now.
Dinosaur:
a A group of reptiles that existed as long as 230 million years ago
b. A mythical creature – after all creationists know there’s no such thing as a Dinosaur
c. An old geezer who doesn’t understand what an iPad is
Disease:
a. An abnormal condition affecting the body of an organism
b. An abnormal person affecting a group of people (ex. a politician)
c. Crystal Cox
Mr. Jacobs said it best on a different thread when I posted about they never learn anything to which Scott replied “why start now”.
What concerns me about this is not the issue of the list itself, but how people have reacted to it, without looking very deeply at all. I -may- be misunderstanding, and if so I'm quite prepared to stand corrected, but are these guidelines (and if you read the document in the link above they -are- guidelines, the word "ban" is not only incorrect but inflammatory, possibly intentionally so), not aimed purely at ELA testing? If so, why is it a bad thing to advise question-setters to avoid subjects that may distract -some- kids, and not others, thus skewing any valid assessment of their reading and comprehension abilities? There are arguments for and against what they've done, but reactions like "how are they going to compile science or history tests now?" are clearly ill-informed reaction to something that has -not- been proposed. I'm not defending the list, it's not my business, I'm not even in the US, let alone NYC…. but what I find most disturbing is how people have reacted so strongly, in complete ignorance of what the document -actually- said, and to make matters worse the DOE has done a U-turn and dropped the proposal as a result. This seems to me to be a case of media reporting half the story, with over-dramatic language, and people failing to look at what was -actually- proposed, and the volume of yelling that ensued resulted in a change in policy. That's a bad omen for society in general.
Hodge – you make a good point on this being guidance versus a ban. I'm not however in agreement that such guidance was either warranted or that the resulting outcry resulted in their changing the policy was a bad thing. If "some kids" are distracted by this then it would seem such testing would or should flag this up for further evaluation. We don't do our children any favors by shielding them from the real world and all the distractions it holds.
Well it's stupid guidance. These are the things you need to know in life.
The point is, oversensitivity is not what the ELA tests are supposed to assess. I think there's plenty of room within the rest of the education system to sort out that sort of stuff.
In a laboratory it's not just reasonable, it's essential, to make every attempt to minimise outside influences that will skew the results of your tests; why wouldn't it be reasonable to, in a test purely aimed at assessing reading ability and comprehension, attempt to minimise any factors that might affect -some- kids performance.
I agree that any kid who leaves school without the ability to handle any information that conflicts with the world-view with which they've been brought up has been poorly served by their school. But to expect a reading test to deal with that is nonesense.
The fact is that these guidelines only applied to ELA tests, and for the specific purpose of attempting to ensure that no child's performance was based on anything other than their ability in the area being tested.
I'd be the first to agree that there's many areas in life in which "political correctness" has gotten out of hand; I just don't see this as being one of them.
When something becomes a problem one must be careful not to see it -everywhere-. Once people lose their judgement and ability to think critically, it's all downhill from there on.
People need to read past the headlines before they start yelling.
Apologies for the double post, but I forgot to include this quote:
"Some of these topics may be perfectly acceptable in other contexts, but do not belong in a city-or statewide assessment. A basal reader may contain a story about a child dealing with death; but is such an instance, the teacher has a chance to prepare students before they read the selection, and students have the opportunity to talk through their reactions. No such opportunities are available in a testing situation, so we must be more circumspect in our topic selection."
I think that's a crucial passage that emphasises that no one is saying these topics are taboo in school, merely that a reading test is not the place to throw them at children.
Still, what's done is done, it's been dropped. Volume of yelling, not sense and reason carried the day. It's not the first time, nor will it be the last.
As Goofy would say, "Oh gorsh,thanks"!
Actually, Chrisoph, you made it easy…thanks for the set-up!
Now, if only the NYC school committee had a fraction of insight, they wouldn't be over-analyzing (sp) the complainers, self righteous, self-indulgent, me me me victims, they may have a chance to get it right!
Diana
Hodge – indeed – and that is where and why parents should be stepping in. It is both unfair and unrealistic to expect the school system to take on that responsiibility.
Looks like your crack-dealing pimp is going to have to cut the crack, but not the pimping.
Nothing about crimes like, say, murder or rape or domestic violence. You know, stuff kids don't ever see. No biggie.
I can see using the list as a starting point to create more meaningful test questions. What use is a test if the girls who do better in school do worse than the boys on standardized tests? But it could only be a starting point. You have to actually test the hypothesis that questions that create anxiety in subgroups of students are reducing the validity of the tests. (I've often wondered how the differing results between boys and girls might change if questions about trains passing each other and baseball averages were replaced by questions about doubling recipes and purchasing fabric, but I doubt that will ever get tested.)
Come back down to Earth Alpha Centauri…why are we needing the change to start with anyhow! Makes no difference if we are using catcher's Kitts or muffins. Testing is testing! If everything were perfect, wouldn't the point of testing be a mute issue!
I am all for improvement, but I just don't see how sheltering, even on a test, serves that purpose!
I hear a lot of what sounds like sheltering!
Just for the record, I read the entire issue and read everyone else's point..I agree with most!
Bye big kisses,
Disagree! This list is a reasonable, if hardly comprehensive, restriction on a organization that a) compels all people to contribute to its financing and b) effectively compels people of modest means give over control over their children! Please compare with what you'd want "off the agenda" at a (fair and balanced!) government sponsored religion (with compulsory attendance). Oh, this list is only a start!
Discussion whether to have a list and what's to be on the list is just this: what's the right way to do the wrong thing.
Government schools: bad idea, through and through.
"Biased towards or against any particular form or system of government (So. Democracy? Meh. Take it or leave it.)"
Leave it! We are a republic not a democracy which is tyranny of the voting majority. Here's an easy way to remember. Complete the following sentence: I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and ______.