More Than a Score (5 page)

In addition to shunning literature, the CCSS also misuse nonfiction in an effort to turn writing into reading passages—and reading passages into test questions. The CCSS emphasize what is called “close reading” and call for students “to be able to answer a range of text-dependent questions, whose answers require inference based on careful attention to the text.”
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The idea is to emphasize “what lies within the four corners of the text” and deemphasize the student's own perspective in order to uncover the author's meaning in the text. One of the chief architects of the CCSS, David Coleman, even went as far as saying in an address to New York State educators, “As you grow up in this world, you realize people really don't give a shit about what you feel or what you think.”
21
As New York–based educator Daniel E. Ferguson has written, “Text-dependent questions, for Coleman, hold everyone accountable to what's within the four corners of the text. What he does not say, however, is that they also make for better standardized test questions.”
22

Whatever you think of the standards themselves, the most detrimental aspect of the CCSS are the standardized tests—and the high stakes—that are attached to the standards. The new generation of CCSS tests, most prominently the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) and Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) exams, are designed to permanently enshrine high-stakes standardized bubble filling as the arbiter of success in education. Already there are numerous examples of the detrimental results of these CCSS tests. New York State was one of the first to mandate that students take the PARCC exams in the spring of 2013, and only 31 percent of students passed the tests in English and math.
23
The testocracy celebrated this decline in test scores as proof that the new standards were ushering in an era of rigor and accountability, with then New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg calling the results “very good news.”
24

Amber Kudla, a high school student from North Tonawanda, New York, gave a speech at her graduation (the text of which appears in chapter 13) that contains an important analogy exposing the absurdity of Bloomberg's thinking: “As for the argument that the assessments are challenging our students more, sure that's true. It's a challenge to fit the same amount of material into one year with more exams. It's a challenge to memorize loads of facts in time for the next test. It's also a challenge to eat a teaspoon of cinnamon in one bite without choking, but what are you really accomplishing?”

Hypocrisy of the Testocracy

At first glance it would be easy to conclude that the testocracy's strategy for public schools is the result of profound ignorance. After all, members of the testocracy have never smelled a free or reduced-price lunch yet throw a tantrum when public school advocates suggest poverty is a substantial factor in educational outcomes. The testocracy has never had to puzzle over the conundrum of having more students than available chairs in the classroom, yet they are the very same people who claim class size doesn't matter in educational outcomes. The bubble of luxury surrounding the testocracy has convinced many that most testocrats are too far removed from the realities facing the majority of US residents to ever understand the damage caused by the high-stakes bubble tests they peddle. While it is true that the corporate reform moguls are completely out of touch with the vast majority of people, their strategy for remaking our schools on a business model is not the result of ignorance but of arrogance, not of misunderstanding but of the profit motive, not of silliness but rather of a desire for supremacy.

In fact, you could argue that the MAP test boycott did not actually begin at Garfield High School. A keen observer might recognize that the boycott of the MAP test—and so many other standardized tests—began in earnest at schools like Seattle's elite private Lakeside High School, alma mater of Bill Gates, where he sends his children, because, of course, Lakeside, like one-percenter schools elsewhere, would never inundate its students with standardized tests. These academies, predominately serving the children of the financially fortunate, shield students from standardized tests because they want their children to be allowed to think outside the bubble test, to develop critical thinking skills and prioritize time to explore art, music, drama, athletics, and debate. Gates values Lakeside because of its lovely campus, where the average class size is sixteen, the library contains some twenty thousand volumes, and the new sports facility offers cryotherapy and hydrotherapy spas. Moreover, while Gates, President Obama, and Secretary of Education Duncan are all parents of school-age children, none of those children attend schools that use the CCSS or take Common Core exams. As Dao X. Tran, then PTA co-chair at Castle Bridge Elementary School, put it (in chapter 20): “These officials don't even send their children to public schools.
They
are failing our children, yet they push for our children's teachers to be accountable based on children's test data. All while they opt for their own children to go to schools that don't take these tests, that have small class sizes and project-based, hands-on, arts-infused learning—that's what we want for our children!” The superrich are not failing to understand the basics of how to provide a nurturing education for the whole child. The problem is that they believe this type of education should be reserved only for their own children.

A Brief History of
Test-defying

The United States has a long history of using standardized testing for the purposes of ranking and sorting youth into different strata of society. In fact, standardized tests originally entered the public schools with the eugenics movement, a white-supremacist ideology cloaked in the shabby garments of fraudulent science that became fashionable in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As
Rethinking Schools
editorialized,

The United States has a long history of using intelligence tests to support white supremacy and class stratification. Standardized tests first entered the public schools in the 1920s, pushed by eugenicists whose pseudoscience promoted the “natural superiority” of wealthy, white, U.S.-born males. High-stakes standardized tests have disguised class and race privilege as merit ever since. The consistent use of test scores to demonstrate first a “mental ability” gap and now an “achievement” gap exposes the intrinsic nature of these tests: They are built to maintain inequality, not to serve as an antidote to educational disparities.
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When the first “common schools” began in the late 1800s, industrialists quickly recognized an opportunity to shape the schools in the image of their factories. These early “education reformers” recognized the value of using standardized tests—first developed in the form of IQ tests used to sort military recruits for World War I—to evaluate the efficiency of the teacher workforce in producing the “student-product.” Proud eugenicist and Princeton University professor Carl Brigham left his school during World War I to implement IQ testing as an army psychologist. Upon returning to Princeton, Brigham developed the SAT exam as the admissions gatekeeper to Princeton, and the test confirmed in his mind that whites born in the United States were the most intelligent of all peoples.
26
As Alan Stoskopf wrote, “By the early 1920s, more than 2 million American school children were being tested primarily for academic tracking purposes. At least some of the decisions to allocate resources and select students for academic or vocational courses were influenced by eugenic notions of student worth.”
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Resistance to these exams surely began the first time a student bubbled in every “A” on the page in defiance of the entire testing process. Yet, beyond these individual forms of protest, an active minority of educators, journalists, labor groups, and parents resisted these early notions of using testing to rank intelligence. Some of the most important early voices in opposition to intelligence testing—especially in service of ranking the races—came from leading African American scholars such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Horace Mann Bond, and Howard Long. Du Bois recalled in 1940, “It was not until I was long out of school and indeed after the [First] World War that there came the hurried use of the new technique of psychological tests, which were quickly adjusted so as to put black folk absolutely beyond the possibility of civilization.”
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In a statement that is quite apparently lost on today's testocracy, Horace Mann Bond, in his work “Intelligence Tests and Propaganda,” wrote:

But so long as any group of men attempts to use these tests as funds of information for the approximation of crude and inaccurate generalizations, so long must we continue to cry, “Hold!” To compare the crowded millions of New York's East Side with the children of Morningside Heights [an upper-class neighborhood at the time] indeed involves a great contradiction; and to claim that the results of the tests given to such diverse groups, drawn from such varying strata of the social complex, are in any wise accurate, is to expose a fatuous sense of unfairness and lack of appreciation of the great environmental factors of modern urban life.
29

This history of test-defiers was largely buried until the mass uprisings of the civil rights and Black Power movements of the 1950s, '60s, and '70s transformed public education. In the course of these broad mass movements, parents, students, teachers, and activists fought to integrate the schools, budget for equitable funding, institute ethnic studies programs, and even to redefine the purpose of school.

In the Jim Crow–segregated South, literacy was inherently political and employed as a barrier to prevent African Americans from exercising their right to vote. The great activist and educator Myles Horton was a founder of the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee that would go on to help organize the Citizenship Schools of the mid-1950s and 1960s. The Citizenship Schools' mission was to create literacy programs to help disenfranchised Southern blacks achieve access to the voting booth. Hundreds of thousands of African Americans attended the Citizenship Schools, which launched one of the most important educational programs of the civil rights movement, redefining the purpose of education and the assessment of educational outcomes. Horton described one of the Citizenship Schools he helped to organize, saying, “It was not a literacy class. It was a community organization. . . . They were talking about using their citizenship to do something, and they named it a Citizenship School, not a literacy school. That helped with the motivation.” By the end of the class more than 80 percent of those students passed the final examination, which was to go down to the courthouse and register to vote!
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Testucation
and the End of Assessment

The great civil rights movements of the past have reimagined education as a means to creating a more just society. The testocracy, too, has a vision for reimagining the education system and it is flat-out chilling. The testocracy is relentlessly working on new methods to reduce students to data points that can be used to rank, punish, and manipulate. Like something out of a dystopian sci-fi film, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation spent $1.4 million to develop biometric bracelets designed to send a small current across the skin to measure changes in electrical charges as the sympathetic nervous system responds to stimuli. These “Q Sensors” would then be used to monitor a student's “excitement, stress, fear, engagement, boredom and relaxation through the skin.”
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Presumably, then, VAM assessments could be extended to evaluate teachers based on this biometric data. As Diane Ravitch explained to Reuters when the story broke in the spring of 2012, “They should devote more time to improving the substance of what is being taught . . . and give up all this measurement mania.”
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But the testocracy remains relentless in its quest to give up on teaching and devote itself to data collection. In a 2011
TIME
magazine feature on the future of education, readers are asked to “imagine walking into a classroom and seeing no one in the front of the classroom. Instead you're led to a computer terminal at a desk and told this will be your teacher for the course. The only adults around are a facilitator to make sure that you stay on task and to fix any tech problems that may arise.”
TIME
goes on to point out, “For some Florida students, computer-led instruction is a reality. Within the Miami-Dade County Public School district alone, 7,000 students are receiving this form of education, including six middle and K–8 schools, according to the 
New York Times
.”
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This approach to schooling is known as “e-learning labs,” and from the perspective of the testocracy, if education is about getting a high score, then one hardly needs nurturing, mentorship, or human contact to succeed. Computers can be used to add value—the value of rote memorization, discipline, and basic literacy skills—to otherwise relatively worthless students. Here, then, is a primary objective of an education system run by the testocracy: replace the compassionate hand of the educator with the cold, invisible, all-thumbs hand of the free market.

Perhaps the most menacing aspect of high-stakes testing is the way it disfigures our society by training people to live in fear of making mistakes. Misunderstandings should be great opportunities for breakthroughs in comprehension. Yet American education policy treats miscalculations as perverse transgressions. The great playwright Oscar Wilde made a magnificent observation in his novel
The Picture of Dorian Gray
when he wrote, in words he ascribed to the fictional character of Lord Henry, “Most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes.” Oscar Wilde understood that without mistakes there is no creativity, and that without creativity life lacks meaning.