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Jan. 17, 2008
Discrimination pays us a visit
UPDATE 1/23: I'm not the only one who saw the inclusion of evolution in testing as discrimination. Last weekend my mother happened to be talking to an attorney who heads a prominent Christian law firm here in California. She mentioned this situation to him and he told her if questions on evolution ever negatively impacted our scores, to let him know and he would take our case.
Last night as I was resting with Alyssa before she fell asleep, she asked me some questions that came back to haunt me this morning at 3 AM. The more I've thought about them, the more they bother me. I don't know why this took me by surprise but I just never gave it a thought until now.
The homeschool program we joined this year offers us the opportunity to have the children tested by a couple different methods each year. This week Alyssa and Brendan are taking a test made by the Scantron corporation. I've known of Scantron for as long as I can remember as they made the answer sheets we used on all Standardized Testing I took growing up. When their name surfaced as the publisher of this testing, it struck me as a little odd so I did some research.
Scantron is still in the business of making answer sheets but they have also developed testing of their own. It is internet based diagnostic type testing and it intrigued me. Everyone starts at basically the same place, the tests are not different for each grade level as I understand it. The test progresses with increasingly harder questions until the student no longer answers the questions correctly and then the test adjust alternating easier and harder questions until it finds the highest level at which the student is able to function. It pinpoints strengths and weaknesses along the way. It is not timed and the student can take the test in as many sittings as desired as the test can be stopped and started again from any point.
The tests can be taken at home but the homeschool program recommended we use the services of their computer lab as it is a more ideal testing environment. The test has 4 components: Math, Reading, Language, and Science/Social Science. Brendan, as a 3rd grader, only takes the first 3 while Alyssa takes all 4. Yesterday Alyssa completed the Reading and Science portions and last night was obviously still dwelling on some of the questions.
The questions she asked me were on evolution. She is plenty familiar with the concept of evolution and she recognized immediately what these questions were. Though she knows we believe evolution to be false, she did her best to apply logic to the questions and get them correct. When asked to name the animal from which the frog evolved, she reasoned fish was the best answer. When asked to date the earliest turtles, she gave the best answer from her experience though it was certainly not what they wanted. The choices were 3000 years, 30,000 years, 300,000 years, 300 million years. She went with 3000 which, of the choices, is certainly the closest to what we teach. The answer they were looking for was the opposite extreme of course.
Why didn't it occur to me that my children would be tested on evolution? I suppose because in my experience, I don't recall evolution ever appearing on standardized testing. Having grown up in Christian schools, perhaps the curriculum publishers from which we obtained all our testing materials made sure they used versions that were sanitized to suit us. I don't recall evolution appearing on the SAT or ACT tests I took in high school. Maybe I've just forgotten or perhaps 20+ years ago, they didn't test on evolution.
Last year Alyssa took the Iowa Test of Basic Skills. If evolution appeared on that, she didn't mention it. We obtained this test from Bob Jones so perhaps they have managed to find testing without evolution.
It is interesting to note that when I checked the California Education Code content standards for science, evolution does not appear until grade 7. The testing we are taking is supposed to match content standards. It seems Alyssa may have made her way up to 7th grade science questions but I kind of doubt it. More likely, the people who wrote the test know very well that children are exposed to evolution in school long before junior high.
Why does this bother me so much? Because America was born of the sacrifice of Christians who believed that people were endowed by their CREATOR with certain rights. Because the educational system now requires that we replace that CREATOR with a system of unprovable scientific theory and it discriminates against those who refuse to do so by relegating them to lower test scores. Because my daughter wasted her mental energy and the logical mind God gave her trying to sift through answers she knew weren't true to questions that weren't relevant and should never have been asked. Because this is probably the first of many times this scenario will happen to my children.
I could decline to have them take the science test in the future. I could decline all the tests. I could choose to have them do the science test at home where I can help level the playing field on the questions I don't want them to answer. But I shouldn't have to do any of these things because I should live in a country with an educational system tolerant enough to make room for the beliefs of the people who founded it; open minded enough to see that something that can't be proven should at best be relegated to the realm of possibility and not force fed to everyone as the one and only absolute fact.
The supposedly tolerant, open minded, non-discriminatory educational system that claims to make room for all in reality has no place for people like me. This is one of the big reasons I homeschool. I make the sacrifices necessary to make sure my children get the facts the way I believe them to be and it really irks me to be blind sided by the educational system I try so hard to avoid.
This concludes my rambling rant for today. |
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My Blog
A few years ago, when our oldest was 4 and her two brothers were both in diapers, my in-laws were a few days into a visit from their home 3000 miles away when my father-in-law noticed that the rug under the dining room table was in serious need of vacuuming. He is not prone to domestic duties (his wife is a great housekeeper) but seeing the need, he decided to try his hand with the Hoover. As soon as 'Grandpa' declared his intention to get out the vacuum, four little feet ran for the toy box to get vacuums of their own. We had one toy vacuum and we improvised a second from a 'popper' push toy. The baby, who was not yet walking, was right in the thick of things on all fours, never one to be left out. Grandpa, trying to maneuver the self-propelled 'Wind-tunnel' around the 10 foot rug while avoiding the table legs and dodging his three little helpers, remarked in exasperation, "I just wanted to clean the rug, I wasn't looking to start a three ring circus." Welcome to my life!
About Me
My name is Tiffany. I am a 39 year old mother of 4. My husband, John, and I planned to homeschool even before we married 17 years ago but it would be several years before our oldest would be ready to start on this journey. We had our children in alphabetical order, quite by accident at first, but once we got started, we figured we had to keep it going. They are Alyssa 10, Brendan 8, Chase 6, and Emily 3. Our 4th baby, D, miscarried at 13 weeks. We have no intention of making it to Z.
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Jan. 25, 2008 - Whoa! Thanks for the warning...