To Read, or Not To Read

One of the unintended consequences of No Child Left Behind has been an over-reliance on high
stakes testing and a lamentable, but somewhat predictable, outbreak of cheating on tests–not by
students, but by teachers and administrators anxious to receive praise and avoid censure.
Jonathan Grant’s new novel, Chain Gang Elementary, has its own testing issues and explores an
entirely new way to change test results. The following passage comes from Chapter Seventeen, in
the middle of the story (and doesn’t give away any of the plot).
Elementary Madness: The Standard Hightower Intellachievement Test
from Chain Gang Elementary by Jonathan Grant, copyright 2011. All rights reserved
Due to federal mandate, learning was put on hold in February. The Better Schools
initiative—or BS, as teachers called it—required high-stakes, curriculum-based testing. For
reasons known only to bureaucrats, the state examined students on their cumulative grade-level
learning with three months still to go in the school year. T…