Julius Caesar‘s got nothing on me when it comes to betrayal. He probably deserved getting stabbed in the back. But what did I do? Nothing, except believe everything I’d ever learned about learning. I believe that we learn best through an artful combination of experience and study. I believe that there is an individual educational path for each of us since each of us experience the world for ourselves, in our own way and at our own pace. My entire philosophy of education is based upon what I’ve experienced and what I’ve observed others experience, all of my life. Standardized testing is the opposite of all that. It has hit me like a knife in the back.
For five weeks I endured emotional displacement in my own library. While the library was occupied by a series of test proctors conducting their yearly exercise of installing and securing the mechanism of social control commonly known as standardized testing, I was on the sidelines. When they take over the library space to use it for standardized testing, I call it an "occupation”. At one point as a new school librarian, I was the MAP test coordinator who unknowingly occupied myself.
I scheduled all of the testing as well as oversaw all of the testing logistics. That assignment was given to me in my first year as the school librarian, early on in my career when I was unaware or in denial about the true nature of the machinations of public school standardized testing. It was an assignment that I could justify to myself as being key to my job security. But that changed quickly as I learned the job. Now I am only asked to give tech support. Standardized testing, of course, is done completely on computers. Computer maintenance is within the range of duties of the school librarian but my tech savvy is a very thin thread to hold onto when the librarian’s cloth is in fact very broad.
When I was the MAP testing coordinator, MAP testing happened three times a year. With the addition of the state mandated tests the library was closed for fourteen weeks out of the 36 week school year. After the second year of coordinating the MAP test I began pushing back, using the rationale that assessments were not part of the duties of the school librarian nor were school libraries meant to be testing centers. The school librarian’s job has to do with assuring access to materials and resources, reading advocacy and instructing students and teachers in information literacy. School libraries are meant to give students access to resources. That access is a constitutional right. Coordinating the MAP tests turned me into a gatekeeper for the data hungry technocrats who puppeteer from afar.
Pushing back involved opening up a grievance procedure with the help of my union to fight the principal over the librarian’s job description. What he had me doing was purely from his own mental model not what was in the collective bargaining agreement. Fortunately, the principal was up to the challenge of the learning curve about the purpose of the school library and the duties of the school librarian. In subsequent years I became stronger and more resolute about the purpose of libraries in schools. It did not then and does not now include standardized testing. Because of my advocacy I was able to cut the occupation time down to three weeks at the lowest point. This year it was back up to five weeks. Clearly this is an ongoing battle but I’m determined that the school library not be closed and appropriated for testing purposes.
Another aspect of the betrayal is that there has been an unwitting, mass consent of teachers who feel powerless to resist the corporate education juggernaut. I call it a corporate juggernaut because that is the only conclusion that explains why it feels so much like an occupation force that displaced me emotionally. Not all teachers agree with me. For some testing is consensual. That does nothing to allay my woe as a school librarian. Nor does the fact that most of the teachers in my school building agree with me that the whole process does nothing to help educate these children, especially those with the so called “greatest need”. The education establishment, which includes the district’s central administration, the OSPI, the US Department of Education and the corporate education juggernaut that produces the textbooks, the online resources, the standardized test as well as the standards, makes us into hypocrites. We are forced to contradict the teacher training that we received that was so heavily focused on child centeredness and constructivist theory.
There is nothing remotely constructivist about the library when the proctors have transformed it into a testing center. There are already 32 desktop computers in the library but another 32+ laptops were deployed on all of the desk surfaces in the library. Extra tables were crammed in and spread out leaving several feet between each tester to prevent cheating. This is a departure from the librarian’s usual practice of assuring access to the books for all students, including the wheelchair bound, by carefully arranging furniture to allow for good traffic flow. When the library is a testing center none of the computers are used for research, homework, writing or any other type of school work except for testing. There are no other activities allowed in the library other than testing. There are no book check outs during testing. The shelves are blocked because of the way the test proctors have arranged all of the tables including the extra tables in the library space to accommodate the additional laptops. It looks like a 21st century sweatshop.
One of the rules in my middle school library is the no food or drink rule. The rule is practical rather than judgemental. Custodial services are minimal (this is an underfunded public school after all) and damaged books and computers cannot be easily replaced. But one of the practices of the proctors is to encourage food and drink so that the students can comfort themselves as they test. The proctors also hand out artificial fruit flavored hard candies made out of corn syrup. These allegedly help brain function and increase test scores. To the librarian it looks like some twisted behavioral modification exercise that rewards children for accepting the stress they endure while being conditioned.
To the librarian some of the result of suspending the library rules is that there are cellophane wrappers everywhere, sticky spills and messes on the carpet and tables, and confusion among the students about how to behave in the library. Who outranks the librarian in the library and has the power to redirect long held library policy and routine? Who would have guessed that test proctors have so much power? But this isn’t the only demoralizing aspect of the whole process.
This year the parade of demoralized student test takers started in mid-April and continued through the end of May. As I watched this parade and remembered all the years past, visions of dystopia rained down upon me. Katniss Everdeen stood shoulder to shoulder with me in slow rage. Teacher complicity looked too much like what Hannah Arendt called the “banality of evil”, when ordinary people follow orders generated by some unseen bureaucracy for unknown purposes. I feel like I am one of the hypocrites, after dedicating a lifetime to defending and supporting 1st amendment rights that guarantee not only freedom of expression but also freedom of access to everything that has been expressed. This librarian feels certain that the entire testing ritual is nothing but an exercise of social control and the assertion of class privilege. This librarian is convinced that standardized tests are racist too.
The manner in which the administration takes control of the library space is an act of colonization, making claim and then repurposing the space for their own use. Admin is just a proxy for the ultimate beneficiaries though, the corporate juggernaut that profits off all our efforts. The dominant culture gets to exert itself any way it wants. They act as if they are in possession of some sort of moral imperative. There is no room for dissent, even in the dedicated neutrality of the library space. They set the standards. They betray the library
Since the library is usually a dedicated space for free inquiry it is bothersome to the librarian that the colonizers can so casually toss aside the norms of learning that have been so well established in the library. They have imbued their testing ritual with a church like reverence, making any kind of opposition seem immoral. They appeal to team spirit and call any criticism unsportsmanlike. All resistance rebuked. Free inquiry is abandoned.
The last betrayal is the betrayal of time. The amount of time wasted due to the meaningless ritual of testing is staggering. Just considering all the efforts the administration makes to increase the amount of class time because “we don’t have a minute to lose”, they are losing ground. They are doing the exact opposite by letting the testing take over. Teachers who are proctoring do nothing but proctor which includes about five minutes of blab at the beginning of the session, about five minutes of making sure everyone is logged in properly and then an hour and a half of watching paint dry so to speak. They do this three times a day for several days. A lot of them play games on their phones. And then there are the students who finish but have to sit in silence in order to preserve the reverential atmosphere. A lot of them play games on their phones. This is without even considering how much time is spent on test prep and what I like to think of as pre-worry. The librarian has to stay late to put away books from the book drop that had been collecting all day while the library doors were closed to students who were not testing.
The fact of testing in my library is a betrayal of all of my personal educational values, goals, experiences and how I think education should be carried out to benefit society in every way imaginable. I can’t stand the testing. I vow to stop it and replace it with authentic assessments based on personal learning plans and a much more progressive, democratic process and curriculum.
Betrayal begets revenge. Revenge takes time but the other side is wasting it. Revenge in the sense I’m thinking is worth the effort. Taking down the machinations of standardized testing will produce a good for all. Let's do it!
