Testing, Testing, 1-2-3- Testing: Standardized Tests as the Scorecard for the Institution of Education in the United States (Chapter 9 Second Post)

In Chapter 9 of Newman, we get a chance to look at social life from the top down, and look at the structure of institutions such as the educational system that influence our everyday life (Newman, p. 261).  Sir Ken Robinson’s “Changing Education Paradigms” video in our supplemental material gives us a top-down look at our country’s educational system and why it is structured as it is.  A pervasive aspect of that system as we know it is the means by which it is measured:  from the top down, standardized testing influences nearly every component of the system.  The influence of standardized tests can be seen in the organizations, groups, statuses, role expectations, cultural beliefs and institutionalized norms of this system.  You could say that the American educational system runs on standardized tests.

According to Newman,“ the massive structure of the educational system is a reality that determines life chances and choices” (Newman, p. 262).  Perhaps no aspect of that system has more impact on those chances and choices than standardized test performance.  It is how we evaluate students, teachers, principals, schools, school districts, state education departments, politicians who vote (or don’t vote) for school funding.  In addition, with globalization, standardized test performance is how we compare ourselves as a nation to other nations, as exemplified by the chart on Newman, p. 190.  

According to Newman, we start testing our school children in kindergarten, and our little kindergartners now spend more time on standardized testing and test preparation than on play. 

We continue this testing focus throughout elementary school, middle, school and high school, leading up to the mother of all standardized tests:  the college entrance examinations, better known as the SAT and the ACT.  It doesn’t stop there, however, as many of us are now acutely aware.  To get into many graduate and professional programs, it is not enough “just” to have achieved a good, or even a great undergraduate record.  In order to enter the next level of the educational system, you also need to subject yourself, once again, to even more #2 lead pencil and fingerprint and photo ID mass testing experiences such as the GRE, LSAT, MCAT, or some other standardized test, and, of course, achieve an acceptably impressive score.

Preparing our nation’s school children and young adults for standardized tests seems to have become the primary focus of our educational system.  As Newman says, it starts in kindergarten.  Many of the standardized tests are required by law, either by federal or state governments. The appeal is that standardized tests give us an objective standard that makes comparisons possible at all levels of the system, from nations at the top to students at the bottom. With No Child Left Behind, for example, school quality is judged by students’ performance on standardized tests throughout their education, and graduation, in most cases, now depends on achieving a passing score on one or more state-prescribed testing instruments.  The very survival of the schools themselves depends on their students’ performance from year to year on these tests.  Schools whose students don’t show adequate yearly progress, measured by (what else?) test scores will be sanctioned, taken over by new leadership, or just closed.  Parents study yearly results to decide where to live so their kids can attend good schools.  Politicians proclaim success or failure of school funding policies based on standardized test scores.  No other measure of the school’s quality comes close to test scores for sorting out the good from the bad.

With so much riding on how well students and schools perform on standardized tests, it is not surprising how much emphasis is placed on preparing for them.  School administrators make hard choices to cut back on social studies, foreign languages and the arts in their curricula to make more time for the stuff that “counts” on the tests.  Recess gives way to more math and reading time.  Band and foreign language become after-school extracurricular activities.  Physical education is cut to once every two weeks or so, if it’s not eliminated entirely.  Schools try to find ways to adjust academic schedules to pack in more days of classes earlier in the school year before the administration of the standardized tests.  The Minneapolis Star Tribune reported a story just last week about several schools in Southeastern Minnesota who got permission to start school several days early in the fall to try to improve their standardized testing scores.  The report said that the experiment failed because the schools’ standardized test scores didn’t go up in spite of a few more days of class one year!  Teachers are judged, too, on how well their students do on these tests compared to the students of other teachers.  To be sure they measure up, the teachers focus on the material that will be tested, to the exclusion of other subjects and other learning experiences.  There is not much room left for creative teaching, experiential learning, or innovative lesson plans, the promise of which probably motivated many teachers into entering that profession in the first place.  Families are affected too, as teachers fill students’ backpacks with homework designed to boost those all-important test scores.

Entire industries have grown up around standardized testing in our educational institutions.  There are, of course, organizations like the Educational Testing Service that create, administer, and score the tests.  In addition, there are consultants that specialize in helping school districts figure out ways to improve their students’ performance on the tests.

Click here http://www.yojo.com/ace_your_test.htm  for an example of a firm that, for a fee, will come to your elementary school and put on a test prep assembly starring this Cookie Monster look-alike character!

There are also consultants who analyze the results of the tests and compare them to other schools in the district, state, nation, and world.  There are organizations like Princeton Review who offer proprietary review courses and prep materials designed to improve individual students’ performance on the tests relative to others. 

Testing also creates business for doctors and psychologists who test children for “learning disabilities.”  If learning disabilities are identified, these students may get special circumstances for taking the tests, such as private rooms or extra time), or they may be put on prescription drugs designed to improve their concentration, focus, or calm them down if these tests create too much anxiety that interferes with their performance. 

Although the private schools are generally exempt from the government-mandated standardized tests required for public schools, preparation for standardized tests, especially the ACT/SAT, is a big part of their focus as well.  Private schools market to parents who want to give their children every possible advantage to score big on the college entrance tests, with ads that trumpet their average ACT/SAT test scores and list the prestigious colleges that have accepted their graduates.  

Speaking of colleges, they too live by standardized test scores, using them not only to select their entering freshmen, but also to award financial aid packages in a way that is designed to inflate their ACT/SAT averages for marketing purposes.  Students with very high ACT/SAT scores get the most generous financial aid awards to lure them to enroll so that the college can claim even more selectivity in their marketing to the next year’s prospective freshmen and their families.  http://www.hamline.edu/undergraduate/admission/first-year-scholarships.html

From all this attention on standardized tests throughout the American student’s educational experience, then, it seems that the skill of picking the right answer from A, B, C. or D and accurately transferring that choice onto a bubble sheet quickly enough to complete all or nearly all of the questions in the time allowed must surely be the most important skill a human can have in the real world.  Right?  Maybe not!   Once your formal education is finished and you enter the real world of work and adult life, how many actual bubble sheets will you actually encounter?  Beyond a specialized professional license exam to gain entry into a field like law or medicine, the answer is, probably none.  And once you pass that last testing hurdle, you’ll probably never see another standardized test as long as you live.  Could it be that our entire institution is based on something that’s arguably irrelevant? Choose one: (a) yes (b) no (c) all of the above (d) none of the above.  Never mind that this question doesn’t make sense.  None of it does.

So if multiple choice bubble sheet skills are not what our children need to prepare them for the competitive global economy of the 21^st century, what do they need?  One obvious skill is ability in languages beyond English.  But wasn’t it foreign language that got cut back in grade school to make more time for drilling on the multiplication tables?  How well served are America’s global workers of the 21^st century by the decision to axe early exposure to foreign languages?  We all know that it’s much harder to try to learn them on our own as adults.

Another skill that will be sorely needed in the working world is the ability to work in groups to solve problems.  But as Sir Ken Robinson points out in the supplemental video for this chapter, our educational system’s focus on individual test performance does little to develop that skill.  In our system, collaboration is akin to cheating and is to be avoided.  Our educational system doesn’t spend very much time on projects that teach us how to work together because that’s not on the standardized tests.  A recent experience of mine is a case in point:  I recently completed a group project for a laboratory science class that depended entirely on the four-member lab group working together, each doing their assigned piece of a total project, sharing data, agreeing on a hypothesis, designing a research method, and doing all this in a timely manner that allowed each group member to prepare the required individually written report on the results.  From the beginning, it became painfully clear that we all needed a lot of work on developing our collaboration skills.  Yet, as the supplemental video points out, collaborating is how real problems get solved in the real world.  At least we were lucky that we were getting a chance to work this way at Hamline in that class, and a few others.  These are skills we all need to develop for a successful future, and yet, our educational institutions usually don’t seem to put such a high priority on helping us to develop them.

Newman points out that in the contemporary educational system in the United States, “course grades, standardized test scores, and class rankings are emphasized so much and create such personal anxiety for students that they may actually overshadow learning and intellectual growth” (p. 262).  He observes, however, that despite the fact that the competitive atmosphere of American education “can sometimes create incompatibility between the needs of the individual student and the needs of the system”, without grades and test scores, however, “the competitive system based on survival of the fittest” simply wouldn’t work (p. 262).  Could it be that the “survival of the fittest model” is the problem?

I am not suggesting that all standardized testing is unnecessary and invalid.  Of course we need to make certain that our schools are educating all children for their place in the world.  Having no objective standards, or having ones that are too low won’t help us either.  But the educational system’s overwhelming reliance on standardized tests, more and more of them, doesn’t seem to be the best way for the institution of education in the United States to address what Newman calls “the fundamental societal need” of teaching young people “what it means to be a member of society in which they live and how to survive in it” Newman, p. 28). 

It’s time to find a better way.  I certainly wish I knew this answer to this perplexing question.  “None of the above” might be scored as correct on the test, but it’s not very helpful for solving the hardest problems in real life, such as this one.

Is Ritilin Robbing Us of our Next Einstein? (Chapter 8 Second Post)

Newman’s Chapter 8 discussion about the increasing use of drugs to treat ADHD in children in the United States raises many questions.  Newman makes the suggestion that perhaps in too many cases the school system and parents are translating “inconvenient behavior” of children into individual sickness so that they can be treated with medical remedies such as drugs (Newman, p. 252).  His idea is that we are medicating children to enforce conformity and uphold the values of a society in which children are supposed to be “well-adjusted, well-behaved, sociable, attentive, high-performing, and academically adept” (Newman, p. 252).  Newman also says that labeling disruptiveness as an individual disorder protects the school system’s legitimacy and authority.  Enforcing order and conformity may be important goals for an educational institution and making life a bit easier for parents whose ADHD children are difficult to deal with may be good reasons to medicate children with ADHD, but these medications may rob some of these children of achieving their highest potential.

In an Abnormal Psychology class I took a couple of years ago, I recall learning that there may be just a fine line between genius and various mental disorders.  With today’s increased emphasis on using pharmaceuticals to “normalize” the human experience, you have to wonder how many of the millions of American school kids taking drugs for ADHD are doing so at the expense of discovering their full range of creativity and talents.  Michele Novotni, Ph.D., a psychologist, said that her clients don’t like the way taking the drugs make them feel. “They say it stifles their creativity and spontaneity—and that they feel like impostors, not their real selves.” For that reason, Novotni says, her patients are often tempted to take a vacation from taking the drugs.  Her comments reminded me of a book I read a couple of years ago:  An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness by K. Jamison.  Jamison, a psychiatrist suffering from manic-depressive disorder, today called Bipolar-I Disorder.  Jamison knew on many levels that taking lithium could level out the extreme highs of her manic episodes, but she did not like to take it because it robbed her of her best creative thinking ability.  Much of Jamison’s book is about the balance between medication to control and manage her extreme mood swings and the high cost of taking the medicine in terms of its effect on her “real self.”

Apparently, the same issue confronts children with ADHD as well as their parents, as discussed in this article by Jeff Zaslow, a columnist for the Wall Street Journal, who contributes to an ADHD-related website.  http://www.hopetohealing.com/media/articles/movingon/movingon1.htm

In one of his articles, Zaslow asks, “What if Einstein Had Taken Ritalin?”  It's a fair question.  How many of the creators of the world’s art, music and literary masterpieces and most significant scientific discoveries would have been put on ADHD medication if they were children in the today’s American school system?  It is something to think about.

Assignment 8: Is Anything "Absolutely" Deviant, or Is It All Relative? Consider This Recent Case!

Our instructor’s comments to introduce Chapter 8 invited us to consider whether there are things that we recognize as deviant that are not socially constructed, i.e., that are considered deviant in every setting? 

In other words, are there any acts that are so obviously improper, immoral, evil or bad that their wrongness “exists prior to socially created rules, norms, and customs, independently of people’s subjective judgments”?  In still other words, is there really any action that is deviant following the absolutism definition of deviance, or is all deviance defined following relativism? According to Newman, the relativism definition of deviance draws on the symbolic interactionism and conflict perspectives and holds that “deviance is not inherent in any particular act, belief, or condition; instead it is socially constructed, a creation of collective human judgments and ideas” (Newman, p. 225).  This is a sociological question. 

To consider this question, I looked at recent news reports and tried to find the most heinous crime possible.  I think that this one comes as close to pure evil as any:

On October 16, 2011, four mentally disabled adults, ages 29-41, were found imprisoned in a 6’ x 10’ boiler room in the basement of an apartment building in Philadelphia, PA.  They were chained to a boiler.  The room reeked of excrement because the only “bathroom” facility these victims were provided was a bucket.  The victims were discovered by the building’s owner who heard dogs barking behind the door and who noticed a locked basement door and more trash than usual on the property.  When the victims were found, they appeared distressed, malnourished, and confused.  The estimated mental capacity of these victims was that of a 10-year-old. One victim, a woman, had been missing since 2005!

How and why did these victims come to be imprisoned in a filthy basement boiler room? Police have arrested four people so far and charged them with criminal conspiracy, aggravated assault, trespassing, kidnapping, simple assault, reckless endangerment of persons, unlawful restraint, false imprisonment.  Philadelphia police say these are just the initial charges. Their motive?  Police say that the suspects, two women and two men, imprisoned these people to steal their Social Security checks.  Since this story broke, police have discovered that these four victims may just be the tip of the iceberg.  When they searched the suspects’ belongings, they found drivers licenses, Social Security cards, and power of attorney forms belonging to at least 50 people.  Police now think that the victims were from numerous states, including Florida, Virginia and Texas.  More recent news reports say that more victims have been found, including several children, including the 19-year-old niece of Linda Weston, age 51, one of the suspects. Weston’s niece, who was in Weston’s care for 10 years, was found severely malnourished, scarred and beaten.

A fairly complete account of this rapidly evolving crime can be found here: http://sct.temple.edu/blogs/murl/2011/10/20/tacony-dungeon-kidnapping-case-spirals-into-tangled-web-of-horror/ 

The Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey described this crime as
among the worst he has ever seen in his law enforcement career.  The Philadelphia mayor called it a tangled web of horror. Read and view their reactions here:  http://philadelphia.cbslocal.com/2011/10/19/understanding-the-basement-of-horrors-case/

This case deviance sounds about as purely evil, in absolutist terms, as one can imagine.  But is there any way that one can view this case in relativist terms?  It seems there is!  Linda Weston’s attorney has already said that his client does not understand the seriousness of the charges against her. He said that she is on suicide watch, and may not be competent to stand trial. Here is an account of the lawyer’s statements about his client’s mental state:  http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504083_162-20125222-504083/lawyers-alleged-lead-phila-kidnapper-linda-weston-doesnt-understand-seriousness-of-charges/

This sounds like the “medicalization” of deviance Newman describes on p. 250-251 of our textbook.  The alleged perpetrator of these horrible crimes is a victim herself!  She is mentally ill, and “no longer a sinner, but a victim, someone whose behavior is an ‘illness’ beyond his or her control” as Newman writes about alcoholics (p. 251).

Another way this “absolutely” awful crime could perhaps be viewed in relativist terms may be seen by considering how societies have historically treated mentally challenged individuals.  In the not so distant past, even in this country, mentally challenged adults and children were often confined to institutions, called “idiots”, subjected to eugenics such as involuntary sterilization, and worse.  The public outrage at the treatment of mentally disabled individuals by Linda Weston and her gang may in itself prove that deviance is indeed socially constructed.  Inhumane treatment of mentally disabled in institutions in the past was government sanctioned.  Now inhumane treatment of such individuals in cases such as the recent one in Philadelphia draw condemnation by public officials in “absolutist” terms.  Proof, I guess, that deviance really is all relative!

Assignment 7: Definition of Family: How Many Brothers and Sisters Do You Have?

How many brothers and sisters do you have?  This seems like a very easy and straightforward question for anyone to answer, but for me, the answer is anything but simple.  The answer depends on how you define family, brothers and sisters.  You could say that my family tree is more like a bush, with lots of different shoots, roots and branches.

I was adopted when I was eight months old by my Minnesota parents.  My adoptive father and mother had been married about seven years when they traveled to Romania to adopt me.  My adoptive dad had been married before and has two sons by his first marriage which ended in divorce.  I am the only child of my adoptive parents’ marriage.  That means that I have two half-brothers, who are 26 and 24 years older than I am.  I have never lived in the same house with either of my half-brothers, both of whom now have families of their own, and I don’t really know them very well because they have both lived far away from us my whole life, and they rarely visit us.

But my brother/sister count doesn’t end there.  When my parents adopted me, they learned that my biological Romanian sister Elena was adopted a few months earlier by a family from Ireland.  When I was five, we traveled to Ireland, and I met her.  She is just 13 months older than I am.  Elena’s adoptive Irish family had one biological daughter, and when they adopted Elena, they also adopted a boy from Romania, Nicolae, at the same time.  He is not biologically related to Elena and me.  So, my Irish-Romanian sister has an Irish sister and a Irish-Romanian brother who are not at all related to me. 

Last summer my parents and I traveled to Romania to see the orphanage I lived in and to try to locate my birth parents.  We learned that my birth mother died about five years ago, but my biological father is still living.  Unfortunately, he was away from the village when we were there so I didn’t get to meet him.  But we learned that I have two Romanian brothers, one older than me, and one younger, as well as three more Romanian sisters I hadn’t known anything about until last summer.  That makes a total of two Romanian brothers and four Romanian sisters (including the Irish-Romanian one).  I got to meet Ian, my 20-year-old Romanian brother, and Angela, my 16-year-old Romanian sister with the help of Romanian social services. 

My older brother and (I think) my oldest sister grew up with my birth parents.  Beginning with my sister Elena, however, the rest of us were turned over to the state for our care because our parents were very poor and had no circumstances to take care of us.  Elena and I got adopted, although not together.  Ian has lived in orphanages and group homes all of his life, and he will soon go off on his own to earn his living working in agriculture or forestry.  My little sister Angela lived at first in the orphanage, but she has lived most of her 16 years in foster homes.  When I met her this summer, she had quite recently been moved to a new foster family, and that is where I met her.  Her foster mother was taking care of her and another foster child.  My youngest Romanian sister Danielle is also in foster care. I didn't get to meet her.

But I am still not quite done with the sibling count.  In my birth parents’ village, we learned that after my birth mother died, my father sired another daughter who is now about three years old.  She is my half-sister.  I didn’t meet her and don’t know her name.  This young girl was left in the care of a relative, perhaps an aunt, who asked my adoptive parents to try to find a family to adopt her in the United States because the aunt doesn’t want to take care of her any longer.  I guess my birth father is not interested in providing for her care either.  She will likely be turned over to the Romanian foster care system soon because it is difficult, if not impossible, for Americans to adopt children from Romania now.  It occurs to me that I might have other half brothers or sisters in Romania as well.

So here is my grand total sibling count:  two U.S. half brothers; one Irish-Romanian sister (who has a brother and sister of her own); two Romanian brothers; three Romanian sisters; and at least one Romanian half-sister.

And here is the irony:  While my grand total makes it appear that I am rich in brothers and sisters, I am effectively an only child.  I have been raised apart from each and every one of my nine siblings and half-siblings listed above.  I really don't know any of them very well.  In addition, according to the U.S. Bureau of the Census, none of my siblings or half-siblings count as members of my family for any governmental purpose.  According to the Census, a family is “two or more persons including the householder, who are related by birth, marriage, or adoption, and who live together as one household” (Newman, p. 195).  That means that my census family consists only of my adoptive dad, my adoptive mom, and me.  The three of us are also a “household,” according to the Census. 

Newman says that according to the government’s definition of families, over 40% of U.S. households are not families because they consist of people living together who do not meet the narrow definition of familial relationships (p. 195).  My situation is different.  I have all sorts of siblings related to me by birth, marriage or adoption who do not live in my household, so they aren’t considered to be my family under the government’s definition.  Newman also says that “of all the groups we belong to, family is usually the most significant” (p. 194). That's because they provide us with a personal history and with much of our identity.  Newman also says that “family is one of the main social institution that addresses not only our personal needs but also the fundamental needs of society” (p. 194).  From that perspective, I suppose that perhaps the Census definition has it right in my case, for the most part, as it is my adoptive parents that have consistently addressed my personal needs and the fundamental needs of society to provide for my upbringing.  But it is nice to know that all these other siblings and half-siblings of mine who are also part of my personal history by birth, marriage and adoption also exist.  Although they are not a part of my day-to-day life, they are a part of me.

And by the way, if anyone has any idea how to draw all of this on a family tree, please let me know!  Here are a couple of ideas I found for this while surfing the net:

Building Reality: The Politics of Reality. Bill O’Reilly Spins in His “No-Spin Zone” (Chapter 3 Extra Post)

Note:  This is a “catch-up” post since I think I might be missing one related to Chapter 3! : )

Bill O’Reilly’s program “The Factor” is a very popular weekday news analysis program on Fox News’ Cable Television Channel.  O’Reilly introduces each program with, “Caution:  You are about to enter a No Spin Zone.” But, if you watch this program and think some spin is involved, you are not dreaming.  A study done in 2007 by independent researchers and published in Indiana University’s Journalism Studies academic journal found that this program is in fact, loaded with “spin.”

According to Newman (2010), putting “spin” on an event “is “to give it a particular interpretation, often one that is to the speaker’s advantage” (p. 65).  Newman says that spin is a “valuable political resource” used by politicians as well as by journalists, lobby groups and web bloggers (p. 65).  Despite his daily proclamations to the contrary, Bill O’Reilly is no exception.   He spins plenty!

A detailed discussion of spin found in a study of six months worth of The O’Reilly Factor episodes from 2007 done by Indiana University researchers Mile Conway, Mary Elizabeth Grabe, and Kevin Grieves can be read here: http://newsinfo.iu.edu/news/page/normal/5535.html

A summary of what these researchers found is that O’Reilly “consistently paints certain people and groups as villains and others as victims to present the world, as he sees it, through political rhetoric.”  In contrast to his daily “no-spin” proclamation, they found that he called a person or group a derogatory name once every 6.8 seconds, or almost nine times a minute during his opening segment for each show.  They also found that he used one of seven propaganda techniques (name-calling, glittering generalities, card-stacking, bandwagon, plain folks, transfer, or testimonial) nearly 13 times per minute in his editorials that open each program.

I guess the lesson is this:  Be wary of any political commentator who claims to be spin-free!  You can buy a variety of "No Spin Zone" merchandise from Bill O'Reilly's website, but as for me, I think I will save my money.

Definition of Family: Who Is Your “Real Mom”? (Chapter 7 Second Post)

“Who is your real mom?”  As an adoptee, I started getting this question at an early age because most people don’t think that I look much like my adoptive parents when they see us together. 

The first time I remember getting this question was in kindergarten when my Mom (my very real “adoptive mom”) came to my class and volunteered to read an adoption-themed book to the class in honor of National Adoption Month, which is November.  She read a family favorite:  Through Moon and Stars and Night Skies by Ann Turner. 

Later, when she was finished reading the book, a classmate named Maria asked me if the person reading the book to the class was “my real mom.”

Since I was a bit puzzled by the question and since my Mom was standing there, she stepped in to help.  My Mom gently asked Maria if she looked “real” to her or if she looked “pretend” or “imaginary” in any way.  Maria agreed that my Mom looked pretty real to her.  My Mom then asked her if she thought that an imaginary Mom could cook your food, drive you to school, teach you to tie your shoes, make you eat your vegetables and pick up your clothes, or hug you goodnight.  Maria agreed that an imaginary Mom wouldn’t be able to do any of those things for you.  In this way, my Mom nicely showed Maria and the rest of my classmates that she was, indeed my very “real” Mom.  She also explained the adoption terminology of “adoptive parents” and “biological parents” to Maria and the rest of the class.  To this day it amazes me how many people still refer to my biological parents as my “real” parents.  Yes, they are “real” people too, as are my adoptive parents!

From a legal perspective, adopted children in the United States enjoy the same status as biological children in the definition of family under all state laws and for all state and federal governmental purposes.  Social and normative definitions, however, are slower to catch up, as Maria’s question, and the many like it that I have gotten since, attest.

Here is a link to a cite called "Positive Adoption Terminology" for those who are interested in avoiding potentially awkward questions like Maria's.

http://www.friendsinadoption.org/adopting-with-friends-in-adoption/index_positive_adoption_language.php

Impression Management and Then Some! Be Glad Your Name Isn’t “Nakusa” or “Nakushi”! (Chapter 6 Second Post)

These girls and hundreds more got new names yesterday in India.  Their given names were “Nakusa” or “Nakushi” which in Hindi means “Unwanted.”  Yes, their parents named them “Unwanted” because they wanted boys instead.  In India, boys are favored because when girls get married, parents are expected to provide dowries and expensive weddings.  Under Hindu law, only boys can light the funeral pyres for their parents, although it is generally the daughters who hang around and take care of their aging parents.  “Unwanted” indeed!

The result of this blatant discrimination against female children in India is that more boys than girls are being born, due to parents aborting female fetuses.  Even those girls lucky enough to be born may not survive long due to neglect.  And those who do might be saddled with the “Unwanted” name. 

The government of Maharashtra in Central India decided to try to help girls with this incredibly cruel name.  In a mass “impression management” ceremony, these girls were allowed to choose new names.  In addition to boosting these girls’ self-esteem, their newly chosen names should make it easier for them to “obtain more favorable outcomes from others in particular social situations” as Newman (2010) describes the goal of impression management (p. 165). 

Here is a link to read more about hundreds of Indian girls no longer named “Unwanted.”

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44998378/ns/world_news-wonderful_world/?gt1=43001