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By THADDEUS HERRICK

From THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
June 15, 2004

EL PASO, Texas -- Last winter, Principal Karla Onick issued a challenge to her students at L.B. Johnson Elementary School. If each grade met its goal in a book-reading contest, she would eat worms.

On May 21, Ms. Onick stood up in the school cafeteria and ate two 8-inch night crawlers sauteed with mushrooms and onions. The children squealed. Then Assistant Principal Alberto Reyes plucked two worms from a jar and ate them raw.

"I bit the first one and it squirted all over my mouth," he says. "So the second time, I just swallowed."

As state and federal pressure intensifies on public schools, outrageous acts by teachers and administrators are becoming increasingly popular motivational tools. Educators have long agreed to the dunking pool and a pie in the face to raise money. But now they're turning to stunts inspired by reality TV to get students to read and perform well on tests.

Under state and federal education programs, schools face penalties if students don't continue to improve on tests. In Texas, home to one of the strictest sets of standards in the nation, the state has already closed several charter schools for failing to show adequate progress.

Last month, Charles Bruner, the principal of Forest Meadow Junior High in Dallas, let his students clip his hair with dog shears after their test scores indicated the school would move up a notch in the state ranking system. Earlier this spring, Robert Gordon, principal of Hendrick Ranch Elementary School near Riverside, Calif., kissed a potbellied pig after students met a reading challenge. And in Hampton, Va., Principal David Gaston modeled a pink tutu for his students at Burbank Elementary after their state test scores improved.

"I even had a little tiara," says Mr. Gaston.

Last year, after Mr. Gaston made his challenge, the local newspaper, the Hampton Daily Press, editorialized against "principals promising to do silly things" if students pass the state test, known in Virginia as the Standards of Learning tests.

Such a "proliferation of hoopla," the paper wrote, "consumes time, ratchets up students' (and teachers') anxiety and feeds the perception that SOL tests are the focal point of education, not a tool."

Susan Ohanian, a former teacher, education critic and author of "One Size Fits Few: The Folly of Educational Standards," posted an item about Mr. Gaston on her Web site under the headline, "How does a principal dressing up in a pink tutu improve education?" Ms. Ohanian recalls a former student of hers who as a grown man told her she had taught him to love books. "I'm glad he can remember me for that," says Ms. Ohanian, "and not for eating worms."

Under the No Child Left Behind Act, signed into law by President Bush in 2002, schools have until 2014 to meet new testing standards. Meanwhile, they must show adequate yearly progress for specified ethnic and socioeconomic groups, special-education students and English-language learners. If all groups don't show improvement for two consecutive years, parents may take their children out of a school and send them to another.

So principals say they are doing what they can to ensure that their schools survive. One strategy is reading programs such as Accelerated Reader, a software package introduced in 1986 by Renaissance Learning Inc., in Wisconsin Rapids, Wis., It gives children points for reading books and passing a comprehension test. Schools often exchange the points for prizes, such as T-shirts, erasers, rulers and pencils. Until last year, children at Hendrick Ranch Elementary could also exchange their points for soft drinks.

"It was extremely popular," says Mr. Gordon. "But it wasn't healthy."

This year, Mr. Gordon told his students he would kiss a potbellied pig if they scored a total of 17,000 school-wide points during March. By the end of the month, the students had exceeded the goal. So, on an outdoor stage, after various pig songs and pig jokes, a teacher held a pig named Abner while Mr. Gordon kissed it. The event made the local newspaper, which ran a photo of the kiss. "It's all people want to talk about," says Mr. Gordon. "You'd think it was my greatest achievement as an educator."

Many of the stunts come at schools facing a variety of social and economic challenges. El Paso's Johnson Elementary, which is in sight of the Mexican border, is 98% Hispanic. Half the school's students are learning English as their second language. Most live in housing projects or low-income apartments. And, Ms. Onick says, families are so transient, few children who start school in kindergarten are still in the school at the end of fifth grade.

Despite these obstacles, educational-testing experts say elementary-school children can be more easily motivated to perform on standardized tests than middle-school and even high-school students. While younger children are more likely to want to please, the older ones tend to see little point in most accountability tests. So sometimes they need an extra push.

Mr. Bruner took over at Forest Meadow Junior High in Dallas two years ago. This year, he promised the kids they could shave his head with dog shears if they moved the school up a notch to "acceptable" from a "low-performing" rating on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills tests. Results in hand, Mr. Bruner held an assembly where one assistant principal showed up with a Mohawk haircut and two others bleached their hair. Then six student leaders and six of the school's most improved students took clumps of hair from Mr. Bruner's head as their schoolmates cheered. "A barber from Super Cuts was waiting in the wings," says Mr. Bruner. "He took it to the skin."

In El Paso, Ms. Onick's stunt was the brainchild of Janet Pendygraft, a fourth-grade teacher and coordinator of the Accelerated Reader program at Johnson who was inspired by the hit TV show "Fear Factor" and by the popular children's book "How to Eat Fried Worms." After the challenge was made over the intercom in midyear, teachers posted pictures of Ms. Onick eating gummy worms in the hall under the caption "Guess who's going to eat worms?"

When the school's 765 students reached their reading goal, Ms. Pendygraft set out for the live bait section at Wal-Mart. With night crawlers in hand, she scoured the Internet for recipes and called Poison Control to ask whether worms would make her boss sick. The official couldn't say. "But I felt OK," says Ms. Pendygraft, "because on 'Survivor' they eat those sorts of things."

Just to be sure, Ms. Pendygraft boiled the worms three times. Then she cooked them in a skillet on the stage of Johnson's cafeteria, rolling them in flour before frying them and laying out mustard, ketchup and salsa for Ms. Onick. Since the cafeteria can accommodate only half of the school at one time, Ms. Onick did an encore.

Ms. Onick says she enjoyed the chance to show her students she could have fun. Next year, she intends to issue another reading challenge to her students, but not one involving worms. "We'll probably put on sumo suits," she says, "and do a little wrestling."