Offered on Thursday at Arne Duncan's workplace:
Testing
Abolitionists
We are engaged in
a struggle to abolish high stakes standardized tests and to bring back local
public control to a public school system that serves the needs of all children
who choose it. Resistance is growing among teachers, parents, students,
legislators, and unions (at least in Chicago).
And though our numbers are still thin and our voices, perhaps, muted and
our sprouting resistance sometimes subverted and coopted, that does not keep
our actions from advancing, nor does it diminish the rightness of our
cause. Let me share with you a little
background on how we got here today at this tipping point.
The
efforts during the 1960s to fix social and racial inequality relied largely on
increased educational opportunity to get the job done. Increasing educational access, more financial
assistance, more job training, federal monitoring—these were the routes chosen
to change inequality, and they were chosen because they were less expensive,
both monetarily or politically, than structural fixes. There was,
for example, much less resistance to more job training than there was for a
guaranteed minimum income for poor people, or for changes in the apartheid
housing patterns that FHA had ensured since the 1930s, with its redlining maps.
In short, more education funding and
more access were less threatening to the powerful than structural changes like
income redistribution, integrated housing initiatives and mandates, workplace
requirements, mass transit systems, health care guarantees, etc.
As more federal money was funneled
into Title I and other ed programs for equalizing the poor and the brown, there
was more demand for a proper accounting of how that money was spent. There were liberal accountability advocates
like Robert Kennedy, who wanted to make sure the money did something for poor
kids, and conservative ones like Richard Nixon more focused on efficiencies,
even though Richard Nixon today looks like a Marxist when compared to the proto-fascist
Tea Party robots assembled by the Koch Brothers’ superpacs.
The
more money that poured into public schools to end inequality and the more that
this strategy did not bring desired results, the more disappointment grew and
the more political pressure resulted to make it work. The social visionaries of Washington blamed
the educational establishment for dragging their feet, and educators reminded
the visionaries that educators, alone, could not end inequality without other
structural changes. The social visionaries
leaned on the technocrats to tighten the thumb screws with more tests, and
educators responded by reminding Washington that you can’t fatten your cows by
weighing them more often. And thus, the
accountability arms race was born.
And
though harsher sanctions have come to be attached to the testing accountability
strategies over the decades, even the universal compliance and proficiency
demands of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLBA) have still not ushered in the
compensatory outcomes promised to all those children of the 1960s or, now, to
their grandchildren who remain left behind.
And though each new reform decade promises greater rewards if only the
implementors would implement and stop accepting excuses or looking for them,
accountabilists and reformists have learned, if nothing else, that failure has
its rewards. For until universal testing
proficiency arrives, corporate reformists may continue to credit others for its
non-arrival and to profit by its elusiveness all the while. By continually aiming their searchlight on
the horizon for any slackers that can be spotted and blamed, whether teachers,
students, or even parents, reformists are able to keep attention focused on who
they see as failing, rather than whose decrepit policies have already failed.
Each
successive generation of repackaged reform, then, has required new policing
measures, tougher sanctions, and fresh targets of blame in order for the
accountability searchlight to remain directed downward as the testing edifice
proceeds upward. This is clearly
illustrated in the present ad campaign by the world’s richest corporation, Exxon
Mobil. Until U. S. international test
scores climb to heights that American child poverty rates make impossible to
scale, Exxon Mobil may continue its national advertising campaign that reminds
us of U. S. students’ mediocre PISA rankings in math (25th) and
science (17th), all the while ignoring America’s more impressive
ranking (2nd) in child poverty rates among the “richest countries”
of the world (UNICEF, 2012). Where child poverty is low in the U. S., there is
ample evidence to show that American students are doing very well in
international test achievement comparisons and that economic disadvantage
accounts significantly for lower U. S. PISA scores when compared to other
Western nations (Carnoy & Rothstein, 2013).
In U.
S. schools, for instance, with poverty rates below ten percent, American
students rank first in the world on PISA in both math and science, and where
poverty is between 10 and 24.9 percent, American students score third behind
Korea and Finland (Riddile, 2010). Failing
to acknowledge this prominent feature of reality, while maintaining a studied
disregard for structural changes required for poverty rates and segregation to
be brought down and learning rates raised up, adds, then, a deep moral stain to
the frayed and faded reformist banner, a stain that cannot be washed away with
rhetorical balms like “Let’s Solve This.”
The puzzle can’t be solved when you have thrown away some of the pieces
or discarded the most important clues or excluded your best puzzle solvers from
the process.
John
Goodlad, writing over 20 years ago, turned his own high beam on some of the
darker assumptions underlying the second generation of accountability testing
getting underway in 1992. One assumption
that Goodlad (1992) identified has led to some particularly regrettable
outcomes:
The necessity of
rigorously sustaining world-class standards (for fear of otherwise making a
mockery of the whole system) will ensure a steady supply of test-failers
(presumably accommodated by temporary job certificates), who will perform the
plethora of mundane services that the more successful among us will
increasingly require (p. 233).
Two decades later at the outset of Generation
3 of accountability testing, those “temporary job certificates” for
test-failers are referred to as “certificates of completion,” and they are
abundantly provided to students who have completed all high school requirements
except for passing the high school exit exams that reformists would now make
harder still. For with the
implementation of the nation's next testing delivery system, the Common Core
State Standards (CCCS), more and harder tests will be required than the ones
that many poor children have consistently been failing now for many years. We may wonder, then, how many more students
will find themselves giving up to “perform the plethora of mundane services
that the more successful among us will increasingly require.”
There are reasons
to believe that this outcome may be avoided if available evidence accompanied
by public demand can continue to be mobilized.
For the hurried, scientifically-dubious rise of value-added modeling
since 2009 is based on a foundation that is incapable of supporting the
structure that corporate reform schoolers are racing to build. Such heedless practices will increase the
likelihood of an eventual collapse, and the added weight of more high stakes
tests with validity and reliability pillars missing further weakens the
structure. At the same time, warnings of
possible collapse grow louder and have awakened concerns among parents who must
send their children into this questionable edifice, as well as from the
teachers who must work there, and even from the children, themselves, who have
sensed the danger imminent in educational structures built by flimsy measures
with hasty methods. As conservative social
engineers scratch their heads and as politicians fret about the potential
outcome, the corporate foundations issue orders to keep building without
delay. A rickety version of the Tower of
Babel proceeds, then, even as growing crowds encircle the construction,
speaking many languages but with a single message of opposition. From Seattle to Portland to Long Island to
Texas from North Carolina to Tennessee to Indiana, Pennslyvania, Colorado, Chicago
and Brooklyn, too many examples to count here of angry crowds circling Duncan’s
Tower of Babel that shudders even as it is built.
All these events
and actions indicate a growing turbulence that, when expanded, will alter the
power dynamics from the local to federal levels. The longstanding skepticism of professional
educators to testing accountability measures has now been taken up by parents,
students, school boards, state legislators, and experience tells us that
successful politicians are always on the lookout for public issues with support
on the rise, rather than on the decline.
The timing could
not be worse for corporate education reform. With the predominance of corporate
power to effect business-friendly education reforms reaching a zenith just
after the Great Bank Heist of 2008, the widespread resentment toward Wall
Street solutions from unaccountable billionaires has fueled a growing awareness
that more of the same reforms now directed by corporations with little
oversight will bring about another disappointing result. Too, taxpayers in cash-strapped communities
have begun to bristle at the notion of corporate interests running public
schools at taxpayer expense. Adding to
the growing unease is the realization that most charter schools are worse or no
better than the public schools they are replacing, and the ones that do have
higher scores offer a lockdown, zero tolerance model that increases segregation
and yields children who follow orders well but who think poorly. Additionally, total compliance boutiques like
KIPP influence other urban schools to emulate their inhumane policies, which
increases the numbers of dropouts and pushouts.
With the school-to-prison pipeline having entered the mainstream of
educational conversation nationally, policy makers are looking for any way to
reduce dropouts, if for no other reason than the economic one. Finally, the threat of charter expansion to
suburban school districts has awakened resistance among influential middle
class parents who are becoming keenly aware of the economic drain to school budgets
that comes with charter expansion.
With
so many rational reasons to doubt another generation of the same reforms with a
“New and Improved” stamped on the box, it should be expected, then, that the corporate
ed initiatives would resemble a round-the-clock project that is hurriedly
hammered into place by participants racing against a clock they cannot see,
with little incentive or opportunity for reflection and none for
self-evaluation by the project directors, themselves. Surely they have sensed that time is running
out.
Last year when I
was I here I said that I was not here
to speak to truth to power any more. If
those in this building over here cared then or now about the truth, or even the
facts, we would find no need to be here.
Arne Duncan and his hive of drones from the corporate foundations ignore
the truth, defy the truth, pretend the truth does not exist. The documented
failure of teacher performance pay schemes in Chicago, Nashville, and New York
is ignored. The failed school voucher and
charter schemes, documented by studies funded by corporate reformers,
themselves, are summarily dismissed.
Decades of research on the effects of early school retention on children
who view school failure as equivalent to losing a parent—defied now by 14
states that have adopted this form of child abuse based on a single stupid
test. The warnings of the National
Research Council on the use of value-added scores, ignored. Fifty years of research on the value and need
for socioeconomic diversity in schools put in the trash. So no, speaking truth to power no longer
works—the power that has wrested control of the public school systems of
America does not give a damn about truth, or even the facts.
The truth,
rather, must be shared with more parents, grandparents, professionals, laymen, students,
and, yes, teachers, many of whom are now mis-prepared to teach by corporate teacher
training programs that make a mockery of the term, teacher preparation. Beyond the public shaming, mockery, and
ridicule that Arne Duncan and his minions have earned, we must plan, share, and
engage now in well-formulated attacks on the corporate reform school system of
miseducation, acts that use any and all form of civil disobedience and
non-violent resistance at our disposal. We must act to end high-stakes testing, for
until that happens, our potential as an educated, free people remains in
lockdown, captured within a corrupted caricature of accountability and made ignorant
by a fixation on universal compliance and phony test measures.
Jefferson said
those who believe they can be ignorant and free believe what never was and will
never be. That remains as true today as
it was when he said it. Education for
democracy looks different from the regimented universal sameness required by
the newest testing delivery system, the Common Core national curriculum, that is
now being demanded by the addicted-to-testing proto-fascists and their
corporate socialist sponsors.
It is no longer
enough to sign petitions, write letters, or join the PTA. It's no longer enough to try to humanize our
classrooms between the test prep for math and the test prep for reading. It is no longer enough to call your
Congressman and to go vote every two or four years for either unveiled evil or
the more mendacious variety. It is not
enough to do these things as we try to make the plantation more comfortable for
the slaves.
It is time for
real demands and real action to bring an end the crimes against our children
and our schools. Power concedes nothing
without a demand, as Frederick Douglass knew so well. When Douglass joined up with unknown little
19th Century blogger by the name of William Lloyd Garrison, no one
gave their cause to bring down America’s most valuable institution even the
smallest chance in hell. But those long
odds did not deter the abolitionists from their singular goal to end that most
vicious crime against humanity. They
organized, they spoke, they cajoled, they wrote, they protested, they defied,
they castigated, they demanded, and they rebuked the law that was already
broken. They hammered and they agitated,
and during it all they never weighed the value of their struggle against the
odds of success, but rather against the rightness of their cause.
Nor did the
abolitionists compromise their aims, collaborate with slaveholders, or alter
their singular aim to end slavery. They
did not accept slavery over here in order to get rid of it over there. They rejected the notion that a little
slavery was okay as long as it didn’t happen in their own neighborhoods. Nor did they eat at the slave masters’ table
in order to gain strength for their fight.
They did not oppose for-profit plantations while remaining quiet about
the non-profit ones where masters there, too, grew fat and righteous in their
depravity. They did not accept among
their thin ranks those who advocated for slavery when it was convenient or
profitable to do so, nor did they ally themselves with groups that did. They did not craft their message so as not to
upset those who supported slavery directly or those who did so by assuming “neutrality”
on the subject. They voted for no one
who did not oppose slavery by deed and word.
And they did not mute or obfuscate their message in order to attract financial
support for their cause from collaborators and enablers of slavery. Maybe there is something to learn from the abolitionists’
example as we struggle to abolish the high stakes testing that keeps our
children and teachers captive and working to make others rich.
Rather than sitting
in your warm homes this weekend hoping that someone will do something to end high
stakes testing, your coming here shows that you have made a conscious decision to
defy the tyranny of Testing’s corporate profiteers, to stand against the billionaire
fixated on social control, and to expose and ridicule their high-paid school overseers. Thank you, now and thank you for when you go
back home where this guerilla war for publicly-controlled, humane schools
without high stakes testing will continue.
As historian David Tyack says, children are about 20 percent of our population,
but they are a hundred percent of our future.
Our choice to remain free people offers us but one course: to restore and renew public education for ecological
sustainability and democracy, by whatever nonviolent means we can imagine.
Addendum Sunday April 7: To those critics of the abolitionist message, who insist on focusing toward "what we want in place of testing," I urge you to remain focused on what must be undone before anything new can be done: it is a diversion and a waste of energy to plan what you want to do with your 40 acres and that new mule as long as you are still a slave. Until high stakes testing ends, all the fine sounding plans remain pipe dreams.
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