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.

One librarian's view of testing

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.

“You cannot feed the hungry on statistics” - David Lloyd George

The entire staff of Seattle Public Schools received a very threatening letter from Superintendent Nyland this week. To call it disturbing is sadly an understatement. Assuming the newish head of Seattle schools knows that his letter is provocative, then perhaps he wants to have it on record for the Feds that he was obeying the letter of the law? If he doesn’t understand the provocation, his naivete is troubling indeed. What kind of leader wants to firm the resolve of his opposition? What is the purpose of the letter? Intimidation? The assertion of authority? Whatever his motivation the end result is clearly negative.

The language of the letter has that hollow Orwellian tone of misleading ed reform propaganda and the content is full of logical fallacies. For instance, “Although the amount of SBA testing time for each individual student is relatively small (about eight hours depending on grade level), because of our limited technology, the administration of the test is spread out through much of the spring months”. The time that the student is directly engaged in the test event is not the only time the student spends with the testing material because there are also test prep sessions and practice tests. Also, the spread out nature of the schedule impacts computer labs and student access to them for long periods of time, essentially from April until the end of the school year.

Elsewhere Nyland insists, “The SBA however, does take several steps in the right direction”. This however is purely his opinion, there is no knowing whether this is the right direction for several years until we have more data. And opinions will still vary. Later he tries to illustrate a point with a forced binary, “The challenge of our times is whether we face those challenges with a GROWTH mindset or a FIXED mindset” as if these options were dependent on the common core when in fact no standards can guarantee this. Indeed, Mr Nyland then goes on to praise the work we’ve done in Seattle. “The growth over the past six years has been exemplary district-wide and includes more schools of distinction than any other district in Washington.” But this was all done prior to the adoption of the common core. Aren’t there some cliches that fit here about fixing what ain’t broke?

The FAQ that Mr. Nyland linked in the letter left out several important questions. The following questions are in no way exhaustive, they just happen to be the ones that occur to me. Ask another teacher and I’m sure you will get another set, probably more relevant than mine.

Why was my school given a budget cut while spending to implement SBA was increased?

What about the 30% of Seattle children who are not in Seattle Public Schools who do not take the test? What does that do to our norm referencing?

But the biggest question is who sets the standards? When it comes to the development and marketing of the common core it sure looks like Bill Gates and his education club having been doing this work. Was the development of these standards consistent with the model of democracy we really want to teach our children? Because there are some problems with the process of setting these standards and that is a bad thing for our democracy.

The rich divert their money into tax-exempt foundations that specialize in influence peddling. Instead of taxing the rich to amply fund education for WA state’s students we let foundations dangle (with all kinds of strings attached) money to fill the school budget gaps This ultimately relinquishes decision making power to a small number of influential individuals making for a narrow and unhealthy vision of what education should be. We can call this the corporate vision of ed reform. The common core are their standards.

There is another vision for education, one that is focused on the humanity of our students and not on their test scores. Yes, it is an expensive endeavor to educate our children but wouldn’t the tax-exempt foundation money be better used if it were equitably distributed tax revenue rather than a stream to continue filling the already overflowing coffers of the rich? Wouldn’t it be better to have our students making new knowledge in creative projects rather than hunkered in front of computers prepping for and then taking tests? We can call this the community based vision for education, one that serves the needs of the community and not the global market.

Economic justice will not be delivered by the rich who pay to have the laws written in their favor. Their greed and lack of compassion blind them to the realities faced by most people most of the time. It is the voice of the people that can secure economic justice and the efforts of individuals that challenge the power structure. These standardized tests based on the common core are a tool of social control. Mr. Nyland, you have no right trying to silence the dissent that is exposing the insidious nature of these tests. Unfortunately you have failed and earn no credit for your letter.

Bullying from a position of power

It is rich that Nyland accuses Greenberg of harassment, intimidation and bullying when it is Nyland who is harassing and bullying Greenberg. Nyland’s behavior is the kind of behavior usually displayed by individuals with emotional behavior disorder. Perhaps superintendents learn this behavior because of their positions of power and its corrupting influence. It might develop in people without previously displaying itself as a characteristic. Regardless of how it develops in this case the behavior seems related to a type of cowardice. A cowardice Greenberg does not seem to be displaying. In fact, Greenberg is not being intimidated by Nyland’s harassment and bullying  because he is the one with the courage to discuss the most serious reasons people are bullied in the first place: racism, sexism and other forms of bias that Nyland seems unwilling to discuss publicly.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing

I have noticed that having just a little knowledge about something can lead to problems. Anyone at the beginning stages of learning a language has probably faced a situation where you say something well enough to a native speaker who then thinks you actually speak the language as they begin rattling off sentences that you have no hope of understanding. Or you begin working on a simple leaky faucet that becomes a major overhaul of your pipes and only a plumber can put it right. This is also called “getting in over your head” and it is exactly where some public school administrators are at when it comes to standardized testing, except that in this case the problems are not individualized but passed onto students, their families and ultimately our society as a whole.

The appeal of standardized testing is easy to understand. It promises to be an objective measure of a student’s knowledge or cognitive ability in an easily digestible and usable form. This “objective measure” has all of the trappings of science which lends it an illusory sense of  credibility. Tradition and economic realities have solidified the status of standardized testing and there is an assumption that the tests do what the creators of the tests say they do. These are powerful rationales which seem to make sense but they represent only a partial knowledge of something which is in fact even larger and very difficult to understand in its fullness. Unfortunately, the appeal is built on a false premise and therefore draws  incorrect conclusions.

The truth about the appeal of standardized testing is that it is an easy way out. Reducing students to scores makes it easier to manage their educations and relieves teachers of the very difficult task of assessing them using more in depth and meaningful methods. Although our society is currently caught up in a love affair with “big data”, there are limits to its accuracy and usefulness, and it can lead to lazy thinking which in turn leads to false conclusions. This lazy thinking is what bothers me most because administrators use data that is descriptive as if it were prescriptive, treating the end result as a symptom that can be isolated and fixed with specific interventions. That approach is “finger in the dike” patch work and lulls its users into a sense that they are accomplishing something because they can point to the numbers with reverence. But, as Stephen Jay Gould so thoroughly demonstrates in The Mismeasure of Man, this type of testing is inherently biased and is, in fact, based on 19th century racist theories about the inferiority of Black Africans and Native Americans.

This sorting of human intelligence has been used in the past as a justification for social policies such as slavery and the displacement of native populations and military capability. It is now being used to maintain or channel people into classes. An incomplete understanding of the background of the tests yields an incomplete understanding of what the tests do. The marketers of these tests highlight the ability of the tests to measure some cognitive functions such as recall or reading comprehension without mentioning that the tests are even better at measuring economic status. Another omission is that these tests can not measure intelligence and do not have the ability to predict individual success. But hey, it’s marketing.

We’ve been sold a shoddy bill of goods. But quality control has been hindered by those with too little knowledge and too much authority. Ignoring the political economics of standardized testing whether through denial or ignorance limits our ability in the education community to appreciate quality education when we see it. It limits our ability to recognize where we have gone wrong. It’s time to stop accepting mediocrity with a smile. I think it is time to “return to sender” and stuff these tests where they belong.

Boom-town Education Spending

Any longtime Seattle resident driving around town today can easily point to the number of cranes and other building machinery as evidence that we are in a big-time boom cycle. At the same time we can point to our schools for evidence of poverty in spite of the wealth accumulating all around.  To say that this discrepancy is upsetting is a bit of an understatement.  How dare our leaders claim scarcity when it is clearly artificial?

Scarcity. Part of the most rudimentary economic equation. Supply and demand. But we are fully into the swing of the 21st century with its huge technological advances and the economic equation at this point is far from rudimentary. Economic laws have been studied, researched and experimented upon. We are in an economic stage completely infused with the ideology and programs of Neoliberalism, an ideology that recommends privatization, deregulation, free markets and personal affluence and overlays and blends in with the economic objectives of both the Democratic party and the Republican party. We have greater productivity than ever before, markets flooded with product, unmanageable piles of consumer waste, many signs of historic abundance. So how else can it be true that there is scarcity unless it has been manipulated to appear so?

I for one am (We are) tired of hearing the same claims over and over; I’m fed up and unwilling to accept them anymore. This seems to be a sentiment shared by many, which has been expressed by the State Supreme Court in the McCleary decision. There is money and there is a way to get to it and the State is obligated to fulfill its duty of providing adequate education to the state’s citizenry. Let the taxing begin. The one percent have more than enough personal wealth, it was produced by the people in the first place and only ended up in their pockets because they were in the right place at the right time. They own the organs that crank out the myth of scarcity but they don’t own the minds of the people. Minds are more important than money.  It’s time to invoke a new mantra: mind over money.

Minds are supposed to be nurtured in school. Minds that will ultimately mature and be set to the task of creating new wealth. With our multi-tiered educational system many minds will benefit from school. The wealthy have the best shot, since they have the best private schools and are advantaged in every possible way. Many students in public school have a very good shot but far too many do not and the poor have the least chance of all. Money can help nurture minds and lift up the poor. This is money well spent because innovation comes from well nurtured minds, especially those from lower stations because they simply have farther to go and come up with bigger schemes. This is a major source of new wealth.

Though money can nurture minds it cannot make new minds while minds are the only source of wealth since wealth is a construct of the human mind. This means that when we do not spend enough on education we are selling ourselves short by limiting the potentialities of all available minds. We need them because we will be facing increasingly more difficult problems and Neoliberalism is blind to the most pressing problems confronting us now and into the future.

The best way for Seattle to maintain its trajectory of prosperity is to put the money where it will be most effective. While building new office towers and apartment buildings all over town has some justification, it pales in comparison to spending more on education. There is a fountain of creativity, innovation and new wealth bubbling through the corridors of our public schools. It’s a lot of work tapping into it, it takes a lot of money to gear up and create an environment that is capable of teaching everyone but don’t tell me the money isn't there. Be honest and tell me someone just doesn't want to spend it on the poor. I won’t even ask why because I already know. Our prosperous state and our wealthy city can and should provide for the education that our students deserve.

Seeds of Destruction

It’s back to school and as usual we begin the year with several days of professional development. This is generally a good way to get teacher heads back in the game after a rejuvenating summer. The focus this year is on that double edged sword we commonly refer to as technology, aka educational technology or edtech. I consider it a happy thing from my point of view as the school librarian who is responsible for teaching information technology. I was the person who planned and set up most of the day’s activities with the edtech themes of collaboration and communication. I arranged sessions on digital storytelling, video production, the SmartBoard, our school’s class web pages and on collaborating on projects with schools around the country and around the world. But there was one rather long session that I was not responsible for setting up. The one on using our district’s new gradebook program from Pearson. And that is the one that made it clear to me that what we were doing was sowing the seeds of our own destruction. We are building and implementing systems that will ultimately further decay our influence, power, and professional stature. The way it is happening is exploitative and sneaky.

My school has been implementing a system of standards based grading for the last four years. When this process was initiated by our principal, I was an early adopter of the concept. In fact I had begun doing something very similar in a Math class I was teaching 8 years ago, before it was even on the principal’s radar. I was trying to make a grading system that was more fair and focused on each specific skill that I was teaching. My support for the principal’s initiative was based on my own experience creating a more accurate grading system but further because it was also a move toward my actual preferred pass/fail system. Standards based grading is a way to remain conscious of removing behavioral issues from academic grading, which I also support. But if technology is a double edged sword, the same can be said of standards based grading. There is a notion of equity on one edge but the other edge has been tempered by corporate America and the realization struck me during the training how that is so.

We are learning to use Pearson’s new addition to their gradebook of a standards based grading option, which two schools in the district are piloting, mine and one other. Both the incorporation of the use of technology in the classroom and the implementation of standards based grading promise a leveling of the playing field which will help eliminate the “achievement gap”. Yes, both have the potential to help educators achieve that goal but simultaneously both further the agenda of corporate education reformers and pave the way for a more streamlined, cost effective system that can generate profit. This is how the demonic brilliance of our capitalist system works. Corporate managers have very long time lines with distant event horizons well plotted. They have time to watch the workforce produce goods and services and they don’t even have to limit their scope to their own employees because any independently developed idea can ultimately be bought (or back engineered). So all of the work that we as teachers do to implement standards based grading ultimately becomes an asset of Pearson.

Here’s a bit of what the gradebook program looks like. When a teacher creates an assignment it is entered into the program by selecting which CCSS standard will be learned by the students. These are all preloaded into the system and there are complex algorithms that weigh scores and average all of the student’s work over the quarter. These programs can differentiate ad infinitum and are capable of tying directly into the standards based Smarter Balance testing that is being put into place this year. But here is the troubling part and I can easily envision this coming down the road. Once the dust settles in a few years and the entire district is on the system, cost cutting initiatives like using software to teach the standards will be sold as a way to personalize education while quietly resulting in a reduction in the teacher force.

As these systems form and gel, opportunities will arise to increase profit by cutting labor costs. It is naive at this point in time to think that this is not the ultimate goal of the corporations behind ed reform. Neoliberal front-men who push ideas like standards based grading are largely unconscious of their complicity with these corporate goals, having been suckered into believing that they are working toward equity when in fact they are helping to increase and solidify the stratification of our society and the implementation of a profit driven education system. All of the work teachers put into creating this system of standards based grading is done out of sincerity and I admit it is oh so easy to be swayed by the hype. Claims of equalizing access to a rigorous education are superficial, they seem to make sense and I don’t want to blame teachers for going along to get along but there is a point when things get ridiculous. Except it won’t be funny when teaching jobs are turned over to Pearson’s machines.