Love work. Hate domination. Ban standardized testing.

Every year at this time I feel the need to write about the same thing I’ve written about this time
of year since I became a public school teacher fourteen years ago and developed the practice
of self-reflection. It’s about testing. I hate it. And I hate feeling compelled to write about it every
year. Over the years I have learned how to channel the anger that this hatred inspires and this
year I’ve decided to focus it on trying to provoke a moratorium on standardized testing in
Seattle.

I know hatred is a strong word but in this case it is appropriate. My favorite Wisdom of the
Fathers right now is “Love work. Hate domination. Don’t get familiar with the authorities.” In spite
of its antiquity this saying strikes a fierce and necessary chord against domination. There is a
dominant hand on display when the testing starts. There are special conditions, special scripts
and the presence of the principal trying to not look nervous. It is evident in the roll out and
execution of the testing process. There is a distinct corporate atmosphere and the security of
the eurocentric content is protected with all of its sanctimonious pomp.

The hatred in this case is focused on the oppressor while the love from this saying is focused on
the things we do. And I love this work I do as a librarian in a school with an under resourced
population, delivering resources on target and on call. I love the fact that my job is social justice
on the go. But when I see what I think of as injustice around me I feel compelled to speak out of
my own privilege and pain. I speak from the shadow of the Nazi holocaust of the Jews which
completely discredited racism and eugenics. Here we are today using the same sorting and
ranking that was done by eugenicists to prove white superiority a century ago. Is that not
hateful? The sorting and ranking nowadays works as a type of mind control on a mass scale
because children believe these numbers have some mysterious power to determine their fate,
when in reality they are the mechanism that locks the hierarchy into place.

The hatred rises to anger which I am hoping prompts action. An action has the power to
promote change. If we are lucky enough to promote change then we will have the opportunity
for the love to take over. If that happens, then we get to do the work we know we should be
doing and that we want to do. If this could be the result of hating domination I wouldn’t turn it
down.

Then there is the realization that hating domination means not only hating the oppressor but
also hating any tendency in oneself to dominate others. I can only go so far as a provocateur
and it would be presumptuous of me to suggest solutions for problems I know nothing about.
We would clearly be moving into uncharted territory with a moratorium. It would take a
monumental effort but I think our challenge and charge deserves no less. There are a lot of
questions and I’m only aware of a few answers but what I have in full surety is the conviction
that ending this practice of stamping our children with these numbers is an anti racist action.

This moratorium would set into motion a series of responses to cope with logistics and to explore
opportunities. It would mean that there would be a period of district wide action research, which
could mean there would be 100 different research questions, one for each school, or schools
could cluster together around common research questions. All of this needs to be developed in
a collaborative effort.

This moratorium is not a move to eliminate standards, in fact it is my opinion that the standards
are too low, too few and too inflexible. They are also too eurocentric. We need to have enough
standards to be able to actually create culturally responsive classrooms. There need to be
enough measures to ensure a custom fit for all students. There also needs to be the realization
that not all standards apply to every individual.

The question comes forward, “If we remove the tests what mechanism will be in place to ensure
an equitable outcome for all students?” But the question assumes that having the tests in place
already ensures equitable outcomes when they don’t. It seems to me that they were designed to
produce unequal outcomes - so the first step in ensuring equitable outcomes is to remove the
mechanism that is preventing them from happening in the first place. Test scores most closely
correlate to zip codes, not intelligence. “Intelligence is as subjective as beauty. When will we
realize that? When will we realize we can not standardize intelligence and test those standards
and exclude people who don’t reach those subjective standards?” - Kendi. The test is the
problem not the solution.

The teaching profession as a whole is worth fighting for and this moratorium would go a long
way to returning power to the teachers which ultimately empowers the families. At this point in
history it is teachers that are leading the way in resistance to the status quo and struggle
against complacency. It is up to the teachers to inspire and instruct our families to advocate for
the best outcomes for their children and for all children, regardless of race, ethnic origin, sexual
identity, status as an ELL, IEP, advanced or struggling learner, by eliminating the most rigid
barrier of them all, standardized testing. It is the authority that we shouldn't be getting familiar with.

Skipping a Page

Whenever I hear a catch phrase like “let’s make sure we are all on the same page”, my body ripples with some species of a slithering revulsion. Even though my mind can track the reasoning, my body has its own response. Especially when the phrase is uttered by the face of corporate reach such as a school principal. My mind understands the reason a “leader” in charge of a team would want to adopt this sort of logic behind team building. It is easy to understand the need for structure if a group of people is actively working toward an objective. But my body knows there is something missing, something wrong with the picture. There is something wrong with the method.

I can remember feeling resentful as a 3rd grader when the teacher said not to read ahead. I didn’t understand the point. If I was interested in the story why should I have to wait for everyone to catch up? What if someone already read it with a parent? I’ve resented many admonitions not to wander off. But now, it is not a physical restriction I resent, it is the mental restriction because staying on the same page denies the existence of all the other pages. Good decision making cannot take place without a full examination of all pertinent pages. Our decision making process is severely handicapped by the notion of all being on the same page.

I fundamentally disagree with anything that smacks of prescriptive mono-culture. When the “leader” asserts that we should be on the page, it feels like a cultural slap in the face and personal attack on my Hebraic roots. Debate cannot be suppressed. Dissent will always exist. Isn’t there something about fencing things in to keep control? Well don't.

Here is what is acceptable, when the intention of being on the same page is to make sure everyone is up to date and filled in. What is not acceptable is using the phrase as a guilt prod to get people to fall in line with the program. That’s what makes the revulsion rise up.

We might settle on a page for a while but we humans are not just settlers, we are also hunter gatherers who seek diversity in our diets. We raise up natural scouts and sharp sighted visionaries. Being fenced into one page is too limiting, counter-productive and anti-multicultural. That  is why I recommend turning the page. Sometimes, you can even skip it.

The Death of a Bad Idea

It takes a long time for a bad idea to die. Although we ended slavery in 1863, the racist idea that empowered the institution of slave ownership is still dying a slow, torturous death. Racism was invented to justify the financial benefits that accrue to the owners of slaves who, in our country, got rich from tobacco, sugar and cotton. Today the same racist idea is used to justify the financial benefits of completely different industries, industries that use standardized testing as a weapon far more effective than shackles. Shackles only restrain the physical body while education based on the standardized testing movement uses mental restraints that numb the mind with its single purpose objective of stratifying society for the benefit of those already on top. Those people certainly don’t want racism to die. They are still getting rich off of it.

Today the same racist idea is being used to justify the financial benefits that accrue to the owners of the entire education industry, an industry that earns $1.7 billion in sales from the tests alone. The test makers also sell curriculum “aligned” to the tests, which is another money maker for them, with profits in the billions. But beyond that, the education industry serves the objectives of those who benefit from the entire profit hungry economy and who pay their underlings according to a “merit” based on the scores earned on these same tests. Many educators are still unaware of how harmful their complicity in the perpetuation of the practice of standardized testing is. But once they are all woken to the nature of the harm done they will join in the liberation efforts of those of us calling for a ban on standardized tests because:

• the tests are racist.
• they reinforce the sense of entitlement for the high scorers and the sense of unworthiness in the low scorers.
• they introduce unhealthy levels of stress into the school community.
• they reduce the learning experience to mere curriculum based on standards generated by distant technocrats.
• of the intoxicating quality of bias confirmation.

There are far too many arguments against the practice of standardized testing to repeat here, from their lack of validity to their inherent biases. It is not my purpose to catalog the erroneous notions about it. Instead, I am focused on the single most significant fact about standardized testing, its racism. And the mental lock that has been put on the well intentioned educators who continue to support it.

Here’s the conundrum for people who put religious faith in standardized testing. For all I might rail against standardized testing and the standards they purportedly measure, I actually want to raise standards not lower them. I want more not fewer standards. I want a set of standards so large that no matter what standards an individual chooses to master, there is a standard for them to use. I want individuals to each master the standards they have chosen from a set of standards as unique as they are. Without prescribed standards we can customize education for each individual's practical needs rather than base it on some unrealizable ideal.

Fighting against standardized testing is part of a liberation movement not just for the students who continue to be abused by the practice but also for the educators who labor under the misconception that testing provides some sort of social good, that testing will help make our society more fair and just because it will help eliminate racial inequality. The exact opposite is the truth, they perpetuate racism, not eliminate it. The achievement gap itself is a racist idea.

We are not going to bargain this because there is nothing to bargain. There is no compromise. We will end racism and to do that we need to ban standardized testing. Once we do that we can focus on helping students make sense of their world rather than trying to standardize them according to the racist premises of our society.

Betraying the Library

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!

Nothing without Us

Here's the message Seattle teachers have for their employer:

You're nothing without us.

The school board and the entire central administration have no meaning, have no value and have no use without the teaching corps. The teachers are the experts and you are mere facilitators for what we know needs to be done. We don't need you for accountability, we have the students and their families to hold us accountable. Who are you accountable to? You should be accountable to the students, parents and teachers. Us. The people of Seattle. But you act like you are above it all. You act like the billionaires who call your shots: arrogant and litigious. The entire system is upside down. You are wrong, you are hurting people, and it can't go on. 

It is time for a revolution.

I'm not buying it

During a ritualized team building exercise at the beginning of the school year an interesting  assertion of power occurred when the principal was trying to encourage a spirit of teamwork. He was giving an example of why agreed upon policy standards were more effective when everyone on the team was “on the same page”. His example was the no hats policy which immediately got a tittering response from all the teachers who were wearing hats at the time and which set up a humorous remark from the principal about the immediate exception to the rule while we were having our professional development session. He cited the reason for the rule as being for security purposes because hats and hoods make it harder to ID a student who is acting out. He further stated that this, like many of the decisions made in prior years, was a good one because we know from experience that it works. At this point my reaction as a team member became “I don’t buy it.”

The principal is a logical and detail oriented leader but from my point of view he has some unfortunate blind spots. He is lacking a critical understanding of the dynamics of the dominant culture as demonstrated by his presentation of team building. Without that understanding he is incapable of assuming a stable premise. Without a stable premise, all the logic in the world will not deliver the truth. He was seemingly unaware that his statement about prior decision making was dis-empowering to the new staff who did not participate in the discussion he described the staff having had many years ago and thus the new staff’s opinions were unknown and thoroughly disregarded. He seemed unbothered by the fact that he was contradicting his statements about consistency by not having a consistent standard for assuring that social justice remains the focus for all that we do since he also stated that was one of our top priorities. He seemed ignorant of the irony that he was asserting the power of the dominant culture as a member of it by emphasizing a decision that entails innumerable cultural elements, many that vary greatly from the dominant cultural norm and that in doing so he was not acting for social justice but instead he was acting to assert class stratification.

There’s a lot to chew on in this little sequence but first I want to explain why I’m not buying the no hats policy itself; then I’ll go on to further deconstruct the assertion of power.

The security argument is bogus. The school is equipped with security cameras, so any unsanctioned activity is always monitored. As social animals we have multiple innate tools for recognizing individuals beyond facial recognition. We also know that the human animal uses hearing, touch and smell to identify each other. We are better equipped than most animals to use psychology too. The significance of this is that at our school we pride ourselves in our dedication to getting to know our students. Granted eyewitnesses are unreliable but at 950 students we don’t have such a large group that hats and hoods do a thorough job of disguising our students from us.

Since an important part of our interaction with students is getting to know why individual students present themselves the way they do, what is the point of asserting the rule other than to assert power over them? I believe we should not be trying to compel students to fit a standard set by the dominant culture. At all. Especially since their personal expression is often at odds with adult expectations and naturally so. This age group needs to learn to challenge adult authority and should be included in the decision making process. I believe we should be helping students become more like who they really are, encouraging their natural abilities, celebrating their heritage, while exposing them to new experiences. Making them comply to a rule that was decided a long time ago, without their consent, just because it is championed by an exemplar of the dominant culture, is wrong. But this is only one level of the assertion of power, that of the institution over the student. In the long run, the rule itself is not as important as establishing the protocols of power. The principal’s session was an effort to establish that for the staff.

The overarching level of power that was also being demonstrated is the neoliberal agenda of school reform which includes testing students into a stupor. The main focus of our school is raising test scores as was stated at another session in this year’s teacher orientation. By pronouncing the hat rule good because it was a tried and true example of our “agreed upon policy standards”, any other policy is equally as good and just as non-debatable. Arguing against any policy is not being a team player and therefore critical thinking is actually discouraged when questioning the validity of something like standardized testing or a hat policy. And all the while he was soliciting new ideas from the staff.~

This doesn’t feel like a healthy model or environment for deep learning. But it might produce a compliant workforce for the corporate workplace.

Sounding an alarm

As a passionate believer in public education I am obliged to sound an alarm because not doing so is a moral failure. What I’m seeing play out in my school right now is indeed alarming. We currently have two weeks of school left and another round of standardized testing has just been scheduled. Since April the library, which has two class sized computer labs, has been given over completely to testing. Instead of having students come to the library because it has the densest concentration of resources in the school with its books and technology, students are coming because it is a testing center. That is a misapplication of the funding the people of Washington, through its legislature, believe was allocated to promote reading and assist students with research and the completion of class projects, in other words a library program.

To be fair, students have been able to check out books and on a very limited basis to print papers. This is largely because I am a strong advocate for student access to library resources. But it is easy to imagine a zealous administration bent on completing the necessary 95% tested requirement that is in force from OSPI, completely eliminating student access to maintain a “proper testing environment”.

Right now SBAC has been completed but the ELL students are taking the STAMP test, and teachers have started sending students into the library to print, figuring that the testing has eased up. But, yesterday we learned that we need to test 116 students because one of the grantors to our City Year program needs the data from MAP as part of the funding requirement for next year and they won’t accept SBAC or any of the other data that has been produced this year. Here is the explanation for this late entry into the data race from the principal’s email,

“At the start of this year, we had planned to take the Amplify test for literacy and MAP test for math for all scholars.  The Amplify testing has been completed for some time.  The spring math MAP had been planned for June for all scholars to show growth between fall and spring, as we have done for many years in a row.  It had also been written into some of our grants.   

This year, due to the scope of the SBAC, I decided to try to reduce the amount of math spring MAP testing.  To do this I needed to work with two major grant organizations, the City of Seattle Seattle Families and Education Levy and the Diplomas Now grant.  The City of Seattle staff were able to switch our grant to remove Spring Math MAP.  The Diplomas Now partnership receives Federal AmeriCorps funding as a major source of funding to pay for City Year Corps members—for this grant, we were not able to make the change to remove Spring Math MAP.  Additionally, we also need to include literacy MAP for scholars on the focus lists.  The end result of this is that we have reduced the number of Denny scholars who are going to take the Spring MAP down to 116 (the group who benefit from direct support by our City Year Corps Members).”

What I see as unfair is this, these 116 students are already some of the most stressed students in the school. Many of them are the same ELL students who are STAMP testing in the very next room. STAMP is in addition to SBAC which is required of all students. ELL students also take the additional  WELPA. Now all of a sudden they have to do MAP, merely to satisfy a foundation hungry for data. This is exploitative and predatory in my opinion. I envision vampires sucking data from our student body to feed some corporate greed. It seems so clearly wrong to subject these children to this degree of over testing that not resisting it is a moral failure. These children do not understand why they are being tested and their parents don’t even know that they are being tested.

It saddens me that our leadership has struck this Faustian bargain with these public/private partnerships and have relinquished so much decision making to out of sight authorities.