As the school librarian I have a special vantage point for observing standardized testing in action. Not only do I have a finger on the pulse of how technology is managed in my school, in the district and across the state but I watch as every teacher brings their classes to one of the two labs in the library to test from April until the end of the school year. This is my 6th year watching the parade as it takes over the library for testing. At the beginning of my assignment as librarian I was a MAP testing coordinator but I resigned from that after 3 years and I was able to establish a higher degree of professional best practice in my library with the time that was restored to my primary function. Librarians manage information and resources related to information, we are specialists but we are not assessment specialists, we are information and technology specialists. Our territory is books and computers.
In addition to refusing to continue as the testing coordinator I began pushing back in other ways too, through the Building Leadership Team (BLT) and with direct talks with my administrators, until last year I managed to keep testing out of the library for all but 3 weeks of the year. Previously the library had been requisitioned for as many as 14 weeks one year. This year the longer period of library closure resumes.
We are in full swing with SBAC testing and the library has been commandeered to be used as a testing site. The computers are off limits to students all day for any purpose other than SBAC. Students needing to come into the library to work on a project or print a paper need to wait until after school and hope it is not too crowded. I have some flexibility letting kids come in to check out books but only because I have forcefully defended students’ rights to access. The pressure from admin to cast everything aside for the sake of the tests is real. So the library will again be used for testing almost exclusively from early April until the end of the school year. I find the idea of limiting student access to the very expensive resources in the library a shameful waste.
I’ve been asked to speak from my experience as the technology committee chair in my school, as someone very familiar with the adoption, roll-out and implementation of technology. To do so I’d like to relate this sketch of how decision making and project implementation really works in our district. Last year our technology committee analyzed the needs of our school and developed a plan to implement the rollout of new tech in the form of laptop carts. We thought that the district allocation was short by about 60 computers. Our request for additional machines was denied and we went ahead and planned for the arrival of 78 new laptops. Protocols were developed, the carts were placed in team leader home-rooms marked, labeled and put into service. About two months into the school year, sometime in November, word comes down from central that we will be getting two SBAC carts (60 computers) because they determined that we didn’t have adequate access. Nevermind that we already told them that last year, the key element is that we only got an increase in resources in order to support the tests not for student use in their project based learning.
As a librarian it looks to me and many of my colleagues that the entire educational industrial complex created standards to prepare the market for the sale of tests, curriculum, tech gadgets, software and ultimately charter schools. It is part of a long-term strategic campaign. I know that people want to label this position, my position, as being prone to conspiracy theories. But it is not a conspiracy theory at all, it is a marketing plan. It is fairly well established that investors are eager to exploit the emerging market in the ed sector as privatization methodically shreds public schools like tractors tilling the fields.
Even when I was a high school student I was philosophically opposed to standardized testing and I still have the same feelings but now I have experience from the other side of the coin and solid evidence of the pernicious nature of the these tests. They do not simply exhibit inherent racism but are actual tools of social control in line with the market forces that are in the hands of the extremely rich. This situation of over-testing has developed in the most undemocratic of ways, with the likes of Bill Gates, Rupert Murdock and the Koch brothers purchasing influence over decisions that should be made by the people most affected rather than this tiny handful of plutocrats. It was bad when I was in school and is now intolerable. It has to stop.
