Big Joel is Watching

May 31, 2007 (GBN News): The NY City Department of Education announced today what Chancellor Joel Klein called a “revolutionary new testing program”. Saying that the previous program, “Perpetual Testing”, was a “vestige of the past”, the Chancellor touted the new plan, which is to be termed, “Total Testing”. The program will make use of a new IBM supercomputer called ARIS II. Mr. Klein said that ARIS II is so powerful that it beat the original ARIS a thousand straight times in both chess and backgammon. Calling ARIS a “dinosaur” which has “long been in need of replacement”, the Chancellor said that the DOE has been working day and night with IBM to develop the new computer, for which the Department will pay $180,000,000.

Chancellor Klein criticized the old “Perpetual Testing” program, which had not yet been implemented, saying that its scope was limited to the school day. While “Perpetual Testing” would have tested virtually every aspect of the school day, with “Total Testing”, students will carry a computer chip, linked to ARIS II, which will constantly monitor their progress both in and out of school. This way, the Chancellor said, even homework can be evaluated as it is done, and teachers can sit in the comfort of their own homes in the evening and monitor their students’ progress in “real time”.

Critics immediately branded the “Total Testing” program “Totalitarian Testing”, but Mr. Klein dismissed the criticism as coming from “the usual defenders of the status quo”. He also ridiculed rumors that the computer chips will be implanted in children’s heads. Saying that the DOE would never do anything that intrusive, the Chancellor said that children will instead wear the chips on hospital type bracelets, which will be cut off upon graduation.

In a related story, after nearly 120 years in the game business, Parker Brothers had to close its doors today after its entire game development staff was institutionalized due to the stress of keeping the game “Children First: A Game of Irony” up to date. The game, based on the NY City school system, has been wildly popular, but the changes at the DOE were just too much for the developers to keep up with. Upon hearing of their fate, IBM immediately offered jobs to the entire Parker Brothers staff to work on the development of its “next generation” computer, ARIS III, which is slated to be ready for use by the DOE by the beginning of summer school. The DOE Public Relations department is rumored to already be preparing the Chancellor’s statement blasting the “outdated” ARIS II computer and its associated “Total Testing” program.