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.