A Breath of Fresh Air A Guide to Lowering Test Scores Submitted by Ashley Creviston, Protect Education Suppose for one moment that you are living on a planet where everything is the opposite of what we experience here on earth. On this other planet, your elected representatives, instead of wanting you to raise test scores, are demanding that you lower them. Here are some winning tactics: 1. Make it too hot (or too cold), too humid (or too dry), too noisy (don’t forget to avoid day lighting). 2. Fill the air with fumes from idling buses, too much CO2, mold or other allergens, chemicals and pesticides that can affect occupants’ nervous systems. 3. To make sure that indoor air pollutants concentrate in each classroom, install a poorly operating ventilation system that can’t provide enough outside air exchange and is difficult to maintain. If you have no ventilation system at all, then nail most of the windows shut. 4. In case their allergies and asthma, sinusitis and coughs aren’t sufficiently distracting, put allergic students and teachers on medications that make them either drowsy or agitated. 5. Allow mold, allergens and other pollutants to accumulate long enough for some teachers and students to get sick and have to miss school or feel they need to take extra days off while recuperating from other illnesses. (This accomplishes two purposes, since it also reduces your ADA funding.) 6. To prevent conditions from improving, cut your maintenance budget, and don’t forget to cut your
custodial budget and then arrange the classrooms in a way that makes it difficult for the few remaining custodians to clean. Then fail to educate school occupants about the way that many of their own activities might contribute to indoor air problems. 7. Prevent good communication between district-level staff, principals and school occupants so work orders don’t get processed, or instead the occupants believe that the district is unresponsive even when the work’s been done. 8. Develop a poor relationship with parents and the community so they think you’re wasting money and won’t give you any more. Allow this poor relationship to fester so that when a problem arises, your staff are so busy trying to calm down parents, teachers and news reporters that you can’t get any real work done. 9. Close the school because of health concerns, guaranteeing that everyone falls behind in their studies. 10.Finally, do not take the very simple steps that could correct many of the problems above. Would such strategies reduce test scores? Well, that’s the way to bet, anyway. [The EPA's website] outlines studies that support what should be obvious. Excerpt from A Guide to Lowering Test Scores by Shelly Rosenblum and Barbara Spark, Leadership magazine vol. 32, no. 1, Sept. 2002
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