NO REALITY HERE MODERN EDUCATION: JUST TAKE THE TEST AND SHUT UP.

Byline: Davy McClay LOCAL VIEW

MY story starts out innocently enough - maybe that is why it is so worrisome.

It begins when we fourth-grade teachers were given the writing prompt that would be part of an end-of-unit test battery in Open Court, our tightly scripted language-arts series. That should not be anything out of the ordinary. In fact, I was really feeling receptive to this new idea - beginning this year - of including a writing assignment in each end-of-unit test battery. This addition would provide an opportunity to put more meaning to the barrage of isolated test-preparation skills we have been giving our students lately.

True, I would like to have the students' writing be more spontaneous, wherein they learn to rely more on their own brains to put the story together from beginning to end, rather than on someone else's. But at least they would now be macro-utilizing those micro skills. (Amazing how jargon can make anything sound good!)

We were told that the students would be doing expository (i.e., nonfiction) writing for this unit test. Now I was really feeling receptive! In the past, when instruction was not so tightly scripted toward test preparation, my students had many great experiences with expository writing about the California Indians, the missions, the Gold Rush and other pertinent topics to the grade level. So I thought, ``Hey, this won't be so bad.''

But then I read the prompt. After being explicitly instructed in the nuances of expository writing throughout the unit, the students were told to write an expository essay about an imaginary class fund-raiser for an imaginary class field trip.

I was dumbfounded. This plainly communicated that all our instruction about expository, nonfiction writing was a facade. All we really want to do is to have another assessment for them, one that is a far cry (a make-believe story) from what we said it would be (expository writing). How can we expect students to take us teachers, or the education process, seriously?

Being a professional, I derived a solution: We would actually do the fund-raiser, and then our writing would be truly nonfiction. The students loved the idea and voted to do a carwash, garage sale and lemonade stand at our neighborhood Albertsons on a Saturday in December. The store manager and the parents also responded favorably. We were on our way!

Several weeks beforehand, I gave my principal written notification of our plans. She gave me the go-ahead. I was thrilled and kind of proud that I had found a way to work within the system without compromising personal convictions. This would be a true win-win situation, the biggest winners being my students.

I was unable to do much more preparation until the Sunday before the event. That night, I prepared fliers and advance tickets to distribute to the students on Monday. I called all the parents at home that night, asking them to come to the school at 8 a.m. Monday for a short meeting to organize everything for the following Saturday. Everything appeared positive (if we could just get the cooperation of the weather person!).

Here's the bombshell: Late Monday, my principal informed me that we could not do the activity. There were too many insurmountable legal issues. I reminded her that we had discussed this activity two weeks earlier. My principal is not the culprit here. She apologized, but couldn't back down. I had to call the parents again to make certain that the children did not bring garage-sale items to school the next day.

In their we-gotta-assess-these-kids-more! mentality, school leaders mandated that children respond to a prompt that is untrue to the alleged genre. They ordered the children to make up a nonfiction story. But if that were not enough, this fictional ``nonfiction'' story was supposed to be about an activity that could not have been done in the first place.

To those who say, ``What's the big deal about a little test? It is just preparing students for the real thing!'' I respond, better to use reality and authenticity to genuinely prepare them for reality. But what really scares me is that, like us teachers, our students are also subtly adapting. This experience adds to what many teachers have been trying to tell everybody - namely, that students are now being socialized to a new primary role: test taker.