Island Paradise and Testing Hell

This chart comes at the end of a story on Monday in the Honolulu Advertiser on the testing madness that threatens to swallow up the schools on the Islands. As the piece notes, the schools are now "expected to wipe away generations of inequality on a rigid timetable so all students are proficient in core subjects by 2014."

As parents and teachers and children fret and worry to come up with more schemes to raise test scores, no one seems to have noticed that they are doomed to the failure that the impossible and racist goals of NCLB assures. At what point will the rhetoric change, or will it ever change before Hawaiians give up on their public schools for not accomplishing the impossible? They are almost half-way there in reading scores, and the economic conditions of their children are unfortunately and inextricably linked to how they perform as they move toward 2014. The real heavy lifting is yet to come.

Here are some numbers nationwide that shows clearly that poor children will continue to be the unacknowledged canaries in the mines for the silent and invisible poison of school privatization. From the NCCP:

How many children in the United States live in low-income families?
There are more than 73 million children in the United States.
_ 40%—29.2 million—live in low-income families.
_ 18%—13.5 million—live in poor families.