Standardized Tests Hurt Asian-American Students, Too, Though Many Get High Scores

March 27, 2023 stevenmsinger academic freedom, Accountability, California, capitalism, Civil Rights, college, Corporate Education "Reform", Data, Education, history, immigration, Learning, Parents, Politics, Prejudice, Racism, School Funding, school segregation, Schools, small class size, Social Justice, Standardized Testing, Student Mobility, Students, Teachers, Uncategorized, White Privilege #StandUpForPublicSchools, Asian-Americans, East Asian, education, Fair Test, high stakes testing, Politics, public schools, SAT, standardized testing, teachers, Test Prep, test scores, test-based accountability

Standardized tests are one of America’s most racist institutions.

Year after year, decade after decade, the poor and people of color get fewer school resources, larger class sizes, narrowed curriculum and lower acceptance to colleges.

And all this simply because they tend to score lower on these types of assessments than richer, whiter people.

That’s no accident.

Yet, as defenders of standardized testing (and racist practices in general) love to point out, not all minorities consistently fail these tests.

In particular, Asian-Americans – taken as a whole – score better than white Americans.

So the tests are totally fair, right? Case closed?

Wrong.

Asian-Americans, who make up roughly 5 percent of public school enrollment nationally, are just as much victimized by standardized testing as any other minority. The only difference is their success is held up as an excuse for upholding this deeply inequitable practice.

It’s kind of like if two people were pitted against each other in a race, and one had to run a mile, and the other had to run 1.5 miles – and the second person actually won. Would that make the race fair?

No. Not at all. But the organizers point to the result as proof that running that extra distance in the same amount of time was nondiscriminatory. So stop complaining!

Weighted practices like these have impacts that go far beyond numbers on a page.

Take the SAT. Asian-American students typically score higher than other students on America’s most popular college gatekeeper as they do on other standardized tests. For instance, among high school students who graduated in 2020, Asian students scored an average of 632 on the SAT math section, compared with 547 for white students. The average math score overall was 523 (out of 800).

What does this really mean?

ASIAN AMERICANS ARE NOT A MONOLITH

First of all, when we talk about Asian-American students doing well on standardized tests, we’re generalizing. We don’t mean all Asians – only a certain percentage of certain kinds of these people. After all, Asia is a pretty big continent.

According to the US Census Bureau, there are roughly 23 million Americans of Asian descent, and the largest subgroups are people of Chinese and Indian ancestry with populations of approximately 5 million each. Next comes people of Filipino (4.2 million), Vietnamese (2.2 million), Korean (1.9 million) and Japanese descent (1.5 million).

But those are just the biggest subgroups. When you add in all Asian-Americans including Pacific Islanders, you get more than 50 different ethnic groups with varying languages, immigration histories and educational experiences.

Any generalization about such a diverse group will leave out important details, including test scores.

ALL ASIANS DON’T GET HIGH TEST SCORES

For example, high test achievement is not something attained universally by all people who can trace their parentage through that part of the world. It’s actually much more common for East Asians than others. In particular, we’re talking about people of Chinese, Korean and similar heritages.

If you know anything about those countries, it’s easy to understand why this is so. Historically, these areas have had their own kinds of standardized exams for centuries.

In these countries, college admission often is decided on a single high-stakes test – the gaokao in China or the suneung in South Korea. People whose cultures trace back to these parts of the world are used to engaging in intense test prep as a regular feature of teenage life. So many Asian immigrant parents with ties to these countries often see the SAT or ACT as the equivalent of Asia’s admissions tests and thus engage in test prep as a matter of course, regardless of cost or effort.

This goes far in explaining why Chinese- and Korean-Americans have the highest rate of participation in SAT/ACT test prep – even more than people from other Asian ethnicities.

In one study, more than half of Korean-Americans and 42 percent of Chinese-Americans took an SAT prep course before college compared to 35.6 percent of white students, 32.4 percent of Hispanic students and 40.4 percent of black students. This is true regardless of household income. Affluent Asian Americans were more likely to take test prep, but 46.7 percent of low-income Korean-Americans still took a prep course.

Test prep is a double edged sword. The companies providing such services claim to increase test scores hundreds of points, but average gains are more often in the range of 10-30 points.

East Asian-Americans show statistically significant gains from test prep much more often than others. This is partially due to having better access to adequately funded K-12 schools than other minority groups. They are less likely to attend racially segregated, poorly resourced schools, unlike their Black and Hispanic peers. Even Asians from lower socio-economic backgrounds tend to get more out of test prep than others because they are more likely to attend well-resourced schools than their counterparts in the same socio-economic bracket.

And let’s not forget that test prep companies target Asian-American communities. You’ll find them in urban centers like Koreatown in Los Angeles or heavily Asian suburbs such as the San Gabriel Valley. Advertising material for these services are often in multiple languages or displayed in Asian-language newspapers and ethnic media.

Most of New York City’s 411 prep centers are based in Queens and Brooklyn, “with over a quarter of them… most notably in the boroughs’ Asian enclaves of Flushing and Sunset Park in Brooklyn,” The New York Times reported.

“On the opposite coast, 861 such tutoring centers exist in California’s Orange, Santa Clara and Los Angeles counties, all heavy with Asian-American families,” the article states.

So it’s no wonder why certain Asian-American communities – especially East Asian communities – tend to favor test prep and achieve high standardized test scores.

ASIANS ARE HELD TO UNFAIR STANDARDS

But let us not forget that East Asians are not ALL ASIANS. If you’re unlucky enough to be from other parts of that massive continent or the island chains of the Pacific, the US will still paint you with the same broad brush.

All Asian-Americans – whether of East Asian descent or not – are held to a higher standard in things like college admissions where overachievement is considered the norm and little else is tolerated.

A National Study of College Experience led by Espenshade and Radford (2009) showed that a student who self-identifies as Asian will need 140 SAT points higher than whites, 320 SAT points higher than Hispanics, and 450 SAT points higher than African Americans.

This is unfair to East Asians because it expects them to jump through more hoops than white people or other ethnic groups just to be accepted, but it is even worse for other Asian subgroups.

A 2022 study of the nine-campus University of California – the state with the country’s largest Asian-American population – concluded that Filipino, Thai, Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander and Laotian students were admitted at below-average rates and that many ethnicities including Samoans and Chamorros, were underrepresented in the system.

Why? They had lower test scores than admissions officials expected.

Such an emphasis on standardized testing is not healthy for students of any nationality. The College Board makes millions of dollars every year with assessments like the SAT and ACT holding the scores up as proof that certain students have what it takes to excel in college or universities.

However, standardized tests do not assess things like critical thinking or even consistent academic effort. As such, those admitted mostly because of standardized achievement have a tendency to fizzle out in certain fields that require more creativity or originality to succeed.

This is a rarely mentioned side effect of Asian-American’s standardized testing overachievement. And it may help to explain why – despite scoring well on standardized tests – Asians don’t complete college as often as students from other ethnicities.

According to an analysis of the 23-campus California State University System, all Asian subgroups were less likely than whites to complete their degrees in four years. There were roughly 78,000 Asians attending the university system in 2016, yet their four-year completion rate was 3% below that of all students. Only a few subgroups – Japanese and Asian Indians – had four-year completion rates that exceeded the average.

If test scores and admissions were all it took to achieve post secondary success, you’d expect college completion to be shared by Asian-Americans across the board.

In reality, college attainment varies significantly within the Asian community. While more than half of Japanese and Korean Americans (and nearly 3/4 of Asian Indian Americans) age 24 or older had a bachelor’s degree or higher in 2019, the same was true for less than 1/5 of their Laotian, Hmong and Cambodian counterparts.

CONCLUSIONS

Therefore, it is highly suspect when standardized testing apologists point to Asian-American test scores as proof the system is fair and balanced.

First of all, it conflates the achievements of mostly East Asians with all Americans of eastern heritage. Second, it demands more of one minority group to be accepted as equal to a white majority.

If standardized assessments were fair tests of academic achievement or ability, there would be no need for such contrivances. If they really showed who would de best in colleges or universities, that would be borne out in graduation rates.

Instead, a closer look at the data shows just how unfairly discriminatory these tests and this system is. Standardized tests of this sort were invented in America as a way to privilege white Europeans from other ethnic groups, and even after a century of revisions, they still function the same way.

Standardized testing should be abolished in favor of more accurate assessments of learning such as classroom grades. Teachers should be unshackled from the need to cater to the testing companies and allowed to emphasize critical thinking, originality and creativity in the classroom.

After all, these are the skills necessary for the jobs of the future – as well as for students to self actualize into the adults they want to be.

In any case, the standardized testing industry can no longer hide behind the myth of the Asian-American model minority to justify their shady business practices.

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Standardized Test Scores are Incompatible with Your School’s Equity Plan

November 4, 2022 stevenmsinger #BlackLivesMatter, Accountability, Budget, capitalism, Child Predators, Civil Rights, Corporate Education "Reform", Data, Education, Eugenics, history, Junk science, Learning, Local Control, Philosophy, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, privatization, Racism, School Funding, Schools, Scripted Lessons, small class size, Social Justice, Standardized Testing, Students, teacher autonomy, Teachers, Toxic Testing, White Privilege antiracist, education, equity, field test, high stakes testing, Ibram X. Kendi, MAP test, Martin Shapiro, Politics, prejudice, public schools, racism, standardized testing, teachers, teaching to the test, test makers, Test Prep, test scores, test-based accountability, testocracy, W. James Popham

The primary goal of public education is to teach all children fairly.

But since its inception, the system has never been set up to actually accomplish this.

So these days you hear a lot of talk about fixing the problem – of how we can ensure students of color and other historically underserved children get the same high-quality education racially and economically privileged kids always have received.

This almost always concludes with two types of plan.

First, there is the serious venture made up of things like increasing spending to meet student need, wraparound services, early intervention, reducing class size, redistributive justice and cultural competence – a plan that looks the reality in the face and makes bold attempts to come to terms with it.

Then there is the cheap knockoff proposition – a buzzword-laden scheme where someone is trying to convince you their half hearted proposal is actually a solution to the very real problem of educational inequality.

And the number one thing you can use to tell the difference between the two is this – standardized test scores.

The first plan that is centered around actually fixing disparities makes no mention of test scores – or at least relegates them to obstacles. The second is built all around them – as an essential component of the overall scheme.

This is because the second feel-good-accomplish-nothing plan is essentially performative.

Therefore, it is constructed around standardized test scores as a metric of success.

Planners think: We’re going to do A, B and C to make our schools more equitable. And how will we know we’re doing it right? We’ll use our standardized test scores!

That’s not accuracy. It’s ostentation. These scores don’t demonstrate anything at all about equity. True, they purport to show readily apparent increases or decreases in academics.

However, even this is an illusion.

A rise or fall in test scores is not, in fact, based on authentic academic success but merely success at taking standardized tests designed for very different purposes.

And anyone who understands the history of these types of assessments and how they still work will know that this mirage is built at the cost of genuine equity.

In fact, the inequalities plaguing our public school system are due in large part to our national insistence that standardized test scores be the ultimate measure of success.

So constructing your plan to fix this problem around one of its root causes is like claiming you can fix a sinking ship by drilling more holes in its hull.

At best, it’s naive. At worst, it’s self-defeating and disingenuous.

The problem centers around the difference between standardized tests and assessments created by classroom teachers.

Both types of assessment are supposed to measure what students have learned. But not all learning is equal.

For example, a beginning chef needs to know how to use the stove, have good knife skills and how to chop an onion. But if you give her a standardized test, it instead might focus on how to make foie gras – something that would only come in handy at a high end French restaurant.

That’s not as important in your everyday life, but the tests make it important by focusing on it.

The fact of the matter is that standardized tests do NOT necessarily focus on the most important aspects of a given task. They focus on obscurities – things that most students don’t know.

This is implicit in the design of these exams and is very different from the kinds of tests designed by classroom teachers.

When a teacher makes a test for her students, she’s focused on the individuals in her classes. She asks primarily about the most essential aspects of the subject and in such a way that her students will best understand. There may be a few obscure questions, but the focus is on whether the test takers have learned the material or not.

When psychometricians design a standardized test, on the other hand, they aren’t centered on the student. They aren’t trying to find out if the test taker knows the most important facts or has the most essential skills in each field. Instead, there is a tendency to eliminate the most important test questions so that the test – not the student – will be better equipped to make comparisons between students based on a small set of questions. After all, a standardize test isn’t designed for a few classes – it is one size fits all.

New questions are field tested. They are placed randomly on an active test but don’t count toward the final score. Test takers aren’t told which questions they’ll be graded on and which are just practice questions being tried out on students for the first time. So students presumably give their best effort to both types. Then when the test is scored, the results of the field test questions determine if they’ll be used again as graded questions on a subsequent test.

According to W. James Popham, professor emeritus at the University of California and a former president of the American Educational Research Association, standardized test makers take pains to spread out the scores. Questions answered correctly by too many students – regardless of their importance or quality – are often left off the test.

If 40 to 60 percent of test takers answer the question correctly, it might make it onto the test. But questions that are answered correctly by 80 percent or more of test takers are usually jettisoned.

He writes:

“As a consequence of the quest for score variance in a standardized achievement test, items on which students perform well are often excluded. However, items on which students perform well often cover the content that, because of its importance, teachers stress. Thus, the better the job that teachers do in teaching important knowledge and/or skills, the less likely it is that there will be items on a standardized achievement test measuring such knowledge and/or skills.”

Think about what this means.

We are engaged in a system of assessment that isn’t concerned with learning so much as weeding people out. It’s not about who knows what, but about which questions to ask that will achieve the predetermined bell curve.

This is important when it comes to equity.

If we are guided in large part by standardized test scores, we aren’t guided by authentic learning. We’re guided by a false picture of learning. Therefore, the most effective way – perhaps the only practical way – of raising test scores is to teach directly to a specific test. And not only the test, but the specific version of the test being given that year.

So if we do somehow manage to raise test scores, we haven’t improved academics at all but a mere semblance of it. And thus the equity we might celebrate in such a situation would be just as false.

You got a good score on the MAP test. Hurrah! But that doesn’t mean you know anything of real value except how to take this particular MAP test which, itself, will change after the next round of questions are field tested.

This has huge implications for the quality of education being provided at our schools. Since most administrators have drunk deep of the testing Kool-Aid, they now force teachers to educate in just this manner – to use test scores to drive instruction. So since the tests doesn’t focus on the most essential parts of Reading, Writing, Math, and Science, neither does much of our instruction.

And if we insist on evaluating the equity of our schools on these test scores, we will only make things that much worse.

We end up chasing the psychometricians. We try to guess which aspects of a subject they think most students don’t know and then we teach our students that to the exclusion of more important information. And since what students don’t know changes, we end up having to change our instructional focus every few years based on the few bread crumbs surreptitiously left for us by the state and the testing corporations.

That is not a good way to teach someone anything. It’s like teaching your child how to ride a bike based on what the neighbor kid doesn’t know.

It’s an endless game of catch up that only benefits the testing industry because they cash in at every level. They get paid to give the tests, to grade the tests and when students fail, they get paid to sell us this year’s remediation material before kids take the test again, and – you guessed it – the testing companies get another check!

It’s a dangerous feedback loop, a cycle that promotes artificially prized snippets of knowledge over constructive wholes.

And let’s not forget where these tests come from.

They were created in the 1910s and 20s by eugenicists to prove the supremacy of white Europeans over other racial and ethnic groups.

While these original tests are no longer in circulation, the assumptions behind them are an essential part of our modern day standardized tests.

The very method of question selection in today’s tests builds economic and racial bias into the very fabric of the enterprise.

According to Prof. Martin Shapiro of Emory University, when test makers select questions with the greatest gaps between high and low scorers, they are selecting against minorities. Think about it – if they pick questions based on the majority getting it right, which minority got it wrong? In many cases, it’s a racial or ethnic minority. In fact, this may explain why white students historically do better on standardized tests than black and Hispanic students.

This process may factor non-school learning and social background into the questions. They are based on the experiences of white middle-to-upper class children.

So when we continually push for higher test scores, not only are we ultimately dumbing down the quality of education in our schools, but we’re also explicitly lobbying for greater economic and racial bias in our curriculum trickling down from our assessments.

As Ibram X. Kendi, author of “How to be an Antiracist” puts it:

“Standardized tests have become the most effective racist weapon ever devised to objectively degrade Black minds and legally exclude their bodies.”

This is incompatible with any enterprise aimed at increasing equity.

You are engaged in a never-ending cycle of teaching to the test at the expense of authentic learning. You’re engaged in making minorities think like their privileged peers – of overcoming who they are just to be accepted into a game.

This is not education. It is assimilation, and it will always put the assimilated at a disadvantage to the majority – those they are being forced to imitate.

Equity and standardized testing do not go together.

They CANNOT go together. They are anathema.

Those who suggest otherwise are either well-meaning fools or duplicitous malefactors.

There is a multi-billion dollar standardized testing industry dependent on keeping us testing our kids.

But we can no longer continue feeding that beast and pretending that we can somehow provide equity to our underserved children, too.

We have to choose – equity or testing. Fairness or unrestrained capitalism.

Do not believe anyone who tells you to support a plan built on both.

It does not exist.

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What I Told My Students About Yesterday’s Attempted Trump Coup

January 8, 2021January 8, 2021 stevenmsinger #BlackLivesMatter, Accountability, Budget, capitalism, Child Safety, Compassion, Congress, Corporate Education "Reform", COVID-19, Democrat, Donald Trump, Education, Gun Control, Guns, Hate Crimes, history, Learning, Pittsburgh, Police, Politics, Prejudice, President, Propaganda, Racism, Republican, School Funding, school segregation, school violence, Schools, segregation, Social Justice, Standardized Testing, student action, Students, teacher autonomy, Teachers, Technology, Voting Rights, White Privilege education, George Floyd, Guns in Schools, Politics, Riot, school funding, school segregation, Students, teachers, test-based accountability, Trump, Washington D.C.

The moment I had been dreading happened.

Student names started popping up on my screen waiting to be admitted into this morning’s first Zoom meeting.

What was I going to say to them?

Yesterday in Washington, DC, thousands of Trump supporters charged into the Capitol Building at his urging in an attempt to stop Congress from certifying his Presidential defeat.

What would I tell my middle schoolers?

What COULD I say?

We can’t offer you equitable resources. We can’t stop judging you with biased standardized tests. We can’t desegregate your schools. We can’t protect you from gun violence. We can’t even give you in-person classes because of a global pandemic the government has given up even trying to control!

And now I’m supposed to say that even the semblance of our democracy is up for grabs?

I started clicking on their names.

I only had a few moments before I had to speak.

I cleared my throat and began welcoming them, one-by-one as always.

And then it was time.

I stared at all these empty black boxes, and began.

“We’ve got to talk about yesterday,” I said.

“Not yesterday in class. That was fine. Everyone did an outstanding job on yesterday’s assignment.

“We have to talk about what happened yesterday in Washington, DC. Does anyone know what that was?”

And I waited.

Eventually I saw a few messages that individuals had their hands raised.

A few kids said that people had charged the Capitol. But that they didn’t know why.

So I explained it to them.

I told them how Trump was refusing to accept the results of the election. That he had lost, but continued to challenge it in the courts. Both Republican and Democratic judges had turned him down saying that he had no proof. So Trump spoke outside of the White House yesterday telling his followers to march on the Capitol, which they did.

At this point I noticed something strange on my screen.

The rows of empty boxes had turned into windows. No more memes or messages or generic names. Most of my kids had turned on their cameras and were meeting my eyes – in some cases – for the first time.

So that’s what Kelsey looks like, I thought. Wow! Marquis is really built. Is that little kid in the grey hoodie really Caulin?

I got flustered and stopped talking, but the students took up the narrative for me.

Some of them mentioned watching videos on-line of the riot. They saw a guy with horns in the President’s chair?

“No, I said. “That was the Vice-President’s chair in the Senate.”

“Wasn’t there someone at someone’s desk?”

“Yes, that was Nancy Pelosi’s desk,” I said. “A rioter broke into her office and put his feet up. She’s the Speaker of the House.”

And so it went on for a few minutes. They brought up things they had seen and I either clarified or supported them.

As a whole, they were wealthy in details but poor in meaning.

Most of the white kids seemed to be taking it ironically. The black and brown kids were more quiet and subdued.

A white boy wrote in the chat that it was “Civil War 2: electric bugaloo.”

I said, “Yes, you’ve hit on an important point. Some of these folks may have been trying to start a new Civil War.”

I tried to put the event in historical context.

I told them how nothing like this had ever happened in my lifetime. That the last time people broke into the Capitol Building like this was during the War of 1812 when the British tried to force the US to become a colony again. However, that was a foreign power invading our country. Wednesday was our own citizens seeking to overturn the results of an election, trying to overwrite the will of the people.

That’s when the first black student spoke up.

“Mr. Singer, why were they waving Confederate flags?”

“Yes! That’s true, Jamal. Many of them DID have Confederate flags and that’s really important.”

Before I could say more I got a series of rapid-fire questions from the same group who had been silent up to this point.

“Why didn’t the police stop them?”

“Why’d they steal stuff? I saw some guy walking away with a podium.”

“Why they so mad?”

I smiled and said that these were all excellent questions.

I asked if any of them knew who George Floyd was.

No one responded.

I told them he was a black guy who was murdered by police when an officer knelt on his neck.

After that happened, there were protests by Black Lives Matter activists and others in several cities including Pittsburgh. The police showed up in riot gear. As these protestors demonstrated almost entirely peacefully – certainly more peacefully than what we saw in DC yesterday – more than 14,000 people were arrested.

“How many people do you think were arrested yesterday?” I asked.

“Didn’t someone die?”

“Yes, a woman was shot in the Capitol and three others died of medical emergencies. How many people were arrested?”

“None,” said a student of color who hadn’t participated before.

“Why none?” I asked.

“Because they was white.”

I told him that he right and wrong. Out of thousands of rioters who broke into the Capitol, thirteen people were arrested. And the reason there were only 13 was because they were white.

I told them that this whole affair needed to be investigated. That we needed to know how and why the police responded the way they did. That we needed to hold the rioters accountable. That we needed to make sure those who instigated this violence were made to pay for it, too.

“Is Trump still President?” Someone asked.

“Yes,” I said. “For about two more weeks. But there are a lot of people who think he should have to step down sooner.”

So we talked about how he could be removed from office. We talked about impeachment and the 25th Amendment. We even talked about how Trump was banned from Twitter and Facebook – how he couldn’t post or tweet but still could send a nuclear missile anywhere he wanted.

And then it quieted down.

I asked them if there was anything more they wanted to know or if there was anything else they wanted to say.

They were still.

A few cameras clicked off.

I told them that I was there if anyone needed anything, that their teachers were here if they were feeling anything and wanted someone to talk to.

And then that was it.

I made one of the most abrupt and inelegant transitions in my career and we returned to our normally scheduled lesson.

Did it help any?

I don’t know, but I told them what I could. I told them the truth as I saw it.

There was a time when I would have been more reticent about it.

But the day after domestic terrorists try to steal our system of government isn’t the time to hold back.

As a teacher, sometimes I feel so helpless.

There’s so much I’d like to do for my students.

I want them to get the resources they need. I want to stop the unfair testing, integrate their schools, keep them safe from gun violence and control Covid-19 so we can return to the classroom.

I want to live in a country where majority rule is cherished and protected, where no one thinks the collective will should be trumped by white privilege.

But when all those things are out of reach, I still have one thing left to give.

The truth.

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White People, We Need to be Responsible for Our Own Racism

June 24, 2020 stevenmsinger #BlackLivesMatter, Accountability, Black Names, Civil Rights, Compassion, Donald Trump, Education, history, Learning, Philosophy, Police, Politics, Prejudice, protest, Racism, school segregation, Schools, segregation, Social Justice, White Allies, White Privilege, Whiteness anti-racism, Black Lives Matter, education, George Floyd, police brutality, Politics, racism, white supremacy, Whiteness

Hey, White people.

We need to talk.

You may be watching all these protests and demonstrations lately and be wondering what they have to do with you.

After all, you didn’t kill George Floyd. You didn’t put up a Confederate statue. You didn’t call the police on a Black person just because he was being Black.

At least, I hope you didn’t.

But all this strife and unrest really does have a lot to do with you.
Not because of anything you did necessarily, but because of who you are – your role in society.

Now don’t get all defensive on me.

I’m not saying you should feel guilty for things that you had no control over, don’t approve of or possibly didn’t even know happened.

As James Baldwin said:

“I’m not interested in anybody’s guilt. Guilt is a luxury that we can no longer afford. I know you didn’t do it, and I didn’t do it either, but I am responsible for it because I am a man and a citizen of this country and you are responsible for it, too, for the very same reason…”

That’s really the point – responsibility.

You have responsibilities just by being a White citizen of the United States. I have those same obligations.

And it’s high time we talked about exactly what those commitments are and how we can meet them.

One of those responsibilities is consciousness.

We can’t be so ignorant of racism and White supremacy anymore.

I know everyone is different and some people know more about these things than others. However, you have to admit that just being a White person, you probably don’t know nearly as much about them as any random Black person.

After all, Black folks deal with this every day. You and I, we’re just visiting.

And, heck, maybe we don’t know much about them.

Maybe the schools should have taught us more. Maybe movies and TV and media should have prepared us better.

But they didn’t.

So we need to remedy that ignorance.

That means reading up on the subject – reading a book like “The New Jim Crow” by Michelle Alexander or “How to be an Antiracist” by Ibram X. Kendi, or “Between the World and Me” by Ta-Nehisi Coates.

There are also some great films like “13th” and “When They See Us” by Ava Duvernay, “Do the Right Thing” by Spike Lee or “I Am Not Your Negro” by Raoul Peck.

Now don’t get me wrong.

I’m not saying this like I know everything there is about the subject. I need to crack open some more books, watch some more movies and learn more, too.

There’s always more to learn.

The fact that so many white people found out about the Tulsa Massacre from the HBO’s series “Watchmen” proves that, as does the fact that many of us learned about Juneteenth only because President Trump suggested having one of his hate-filled MAGA rallies in Tulsa on that date.

Knowledge is power. So let’s get some.

Second, we need to understand that racism is first and foremost a system.

It is a built-in component of almost every social structure, government policy, historical narrative and media message in this country.

Think about what that means.

We don’t need racists to have racism.

The system, itself, is enough.

Let’s say we had a ray gun that could eliminate racism. You shoot people with this zap gun and POOF they’re no longer racist.

So we take the gun to space and hit everyone in the US with it. All racist attitudes immediately disappear. Not a single person in the entire country is racist.

It wouldn’t matter.

All of our systems are still racist.

The way our government works, the legal system, law enforcement, housing, the tax code, the schools – everything.

You don’t need a single racist person. The system, itself, perpetuates the ideology by treating people of color unfairly and pretending that this injustice is exactly the opposite, and – what’s worse – our unquestioning acceptance of that system makes it invisible.

That gives us another responsibility.

We have to actively change the system.

To go back to Baldwin:

“I’m an American whether I like it or not and I’ve got to take responsibility for it, though it’s not my doing. What can you do about it except accept that, and then you protest it with all your strength. I’m not responsible for Vietnam, but I had to take responsibility for it, at least to the extent of opposing my government’s role in Vietnam.”

So it is our responsibility to recognize where our systems are racist and to do everything we can to change them.

We need to fully integrate our schools, for instance. We need to reform our criminal justice system so that Black people are not arrested and convicted at higher rates than White people who commit the same crimes. We need to stop police or others from killing unarmed Black people and getting away with it. We need to stop denigrating Black people for the “crime” of having Black-sounding names.

This is the work of social justice. It requires us to get involved in organizations like Black Lives Matter, Journey for Justice, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

It requires us to think about which policies we support and which politicians we can support at the polls.

But that’s not all.

We have one more great responsibility to meet.

We can’t just understand racism and fight systems of oppression. We have to fight the most insidious proponent of White supremacy.

And it is us.

These systems that create an unjust society also created you and me.

So to a greater or lesser degree they have shaped our minds, our conceptions, our norms, our values.

If we’re being honest, we have to admit that includes some racism.

We didn’t ask for it, but racist ideas have seeped into our consciousnesses.

And most of the time we may not even be aware they’re there.

I know I’m not.

Let me give you an example.

Several years ago my wife and I won free tickets to an opera recital. We like that sort of thing so we dressed in our finest and went to the concert hall to enjoy some culture.

The soprano was a local girl I’d never heard of (I’m sorry. I can’t remember her name), but she was wonderful. She was also Black.

And the Black community was out in force to support her. The concert hall was filled with mostly Black faces above suits and Sunday dresses.

It was the first time I could remember not being in the majority, and it made me uncomfortable.

I knew it was stupid. The other people there at the concert were no danger. No one was going to take their suit jacket off to jump a couple of White people who came to hear Puccini and Verdi.

But I felt some fear in my gut.

It wasn’t rational. I guess all those nightly news reports disproportionately megaphoning Black crime while ignoring that committed by White folks had an effect on me. I didn’t ask to be taught that fear. I didn’t want it. I recognized it as dumb and bigoted.

I couldn’t control the way I felt. But I could control the way I reacted.

I made an effort to talk with those around us and be as friendly as possible. And for their part these folks were entirely warm, cordial and inviting.

That’s what I’m talking about.

We, White people, have to take a step beyond learning about racism and acting against it. We have to do some soul searching and locate it within ourselves.

It’s probably there.

You can’t grow up in America without having it grow inside you like an alien pathogen.

We are sick with it – some people more than others – but all of us White folks are infected.

Maybe that doesn’t bother you.

It bothers me.

I don’t want it.

I don’t want these stupid ideas inside my head. And, yes, I don’t want the privileges I get just because of my pigmentation.

If I succeed in this life, let it be because I did something worthy of success. Don’t let it be just because of the lack of melanin in my skin.

Everyone deserves to be treated fairly.

Black people even more so because they are so often not treated that way.

As Baldwin said:

“We are very cruelly trapped between what we would like to be and what we actually are. And we cannot possibly become what we would like to be until we are willing to ask ourselves just why the lives we lead on this continent are mainly so empty, so tame, and so ugly.”

I bring this up not to judge you.

Brother, I’ve never met you. Sister, I don’t know you.

I’m on my own parallel journey.

There is only one person you have to be accountable to – and that is yourself.

Can you live with yourself if you have not taken these few steps?

If you believe in justice, don’t you have a responsibility to be so in all your dealings with other people?

Black people are people.

Black lives matter.

White people like us have responsibilities to our brothers and sisters of color.

Let’s meet them.

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Standardized Tests Increase School Segregation

June 19, 2020 stevenmsinger #BlackLivesMatter, Accountability, Budget, California, capitalism, Civil Rights, Compassion, Corporate Education "Reform", Education, Eugenics, history, Local Control, Pennsylvania, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, Racism, School Funding, school segregation, Schools, segregation, Social Justice, Standardized Testing, Students, Teachers, White Privilege annual testing, education, high stakes testing, Politics, prejudice, public schools, racism, school segregation, schools, segregation, standardized testing, Students, teachers, teaching to the test, Test Prep, test-based accountability, tracking

Let’s say your community has two schools.

One serves mostly white students and the other serves mostly black students.

How do you eliminate such open segregation?

After all, in 1954 the U.S. Supreme Court struck down school segregation in Brown vs. Board of Education as essentially separate and unequal.

It’s been nearly 70 years. We must have a recourse to such things these days. Mustn’t we?

Well, the highest court in the land laid down a series of decisions, starting with Milliken vs. Bradley in 1974, that effectively made school integration voluntary especially within district lines. So much so, in fact, that according to a report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office, from 2000 to 2014, school segregation more than doubled nationwide.

But let’s say you did find some right-minded individuals who cared enough to make the effort to fix the problem.

What could they do?

The most obvious solution would be to build a single new school to serve both populations.

So if you could find the will and the money, you could give it a try.

Unfortunately, that alone wouldn’t solve the problem.

Why?

Standardized tests.

Even when students from different racial or ethnic groups aren’t physically separated by district boundaries or school buildings, the way we rate and sort these students within the same space causes segregation.

This is because our manner of placing kids into classes, itself, is discriminatory.

We have exactly this situation in my own western Pennsylvania district, Steel Valley. We have two elementary schools – Barrett and Park – one of which serves mostly black kids and the other which serves mostly white kids. However, even when the children get to our single middle and high schools, segregation persists.

They may finally be in the same building, but they aren’t in the same classes.

Most academic tracks have at least a lower and a higher level of each course. The former is invariably organized around remediation and basic skills, the latter around critical thinking and creativity.

Moreover, being in the higher level course comes with increased opportunities for mentoring, field trips, special speakers, contests, prizes, and self esteem. And the lower courses can degenerate into mindless test prep.

Which would you rather your child experience?

We don’t enroll students in one or the other at random. Nor do we place them explicitly based on their race or ethnicity.

Increasingly schools enroll students based primarily on their test scores.

Classroom grades, student interest, even teacher recommendations are largely ignored. Kids who pass their state mandated standardized assessments generally get in the higher classes and those who fail get in the lower classes.

And – Surprise! Surprise! – since test scores are highly correlated with race and class, most of the black kids are in the lower classes and most of the white kids are in the higher classes.

Let me be clear.

This isn’t because there’s something wrong with the poor kids and children of color or something right about higher socioeconomic status and white kids.

It’s because of (1) economic inequality, and (2) implicit bias in the tests.

In short, standardized assessments at best show which kids have had all the advantages. Which ones have had all the resources, books in the home, the best nutrition, live in the safest environments, get the most sleep, don’t live with the trauma of racism and prejudice everyday.

However, even more than that is something indisputable but that most policymakers and media talking heads refuse to acknowledge: standardized testing is a tool of white supremacy.

It was invented by eugenicists – people who believed that white folks were racially superior to darker skinned people. And the purpose of these tests from the very beginning was to provide a scientific (now recognized as pseudo scientific) justification for their racism.

A standardized test is an assessment where the questions are selected based on what the “standard” test taker would answer. And since this norm is defined as a white, middle-to-upper-class person, the tests enshrine white bias.

I don’t mean that 2+2=4 has a racial bias. But most questions aren’t so simple. They ask test takers to read passages and pick out certain things that are more obvious to people enculturated as white than those enculturated as black. They use the vocabulary of middle to upper class people just to ask the questions.

This is white supremacy. Using these tests as a gatekeeper for funding, tracking, and self-respect is educational apartheid.

Black students make up almost 17 percent of American students nationwide. If all things were equal, you’d expect them to make up a similar percentage of advanced courses. However, they account for only 10 percent of students in Gifted and Talented Education (GATE) classes.

In some areas it’s worse than others.

For example, according to a Department of Education Office for Civil Rights report from 2014, black students in the northern California city of Sacramento make up 16.3 percent of the population but only 5.5 percent of GATE programs. Meanwhile, in the south of the state, in San Diego, 8 percent of students are black, but make up just 3 percent of GATE classes.

Those are big disparities. In fact, the phenomenon is so common that social scientists created a term to describe it – racialized tracking.

But it has also been the subject of civil rights complaints.

In New Jersey the imbalance was so extreme the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a complaint in 2014 against the South Orange–Maplewood School District. In a statement, the ACLU said racial segregation across academic tracks “has created a school within a school at Columbia High School.” More than 70 percent of students in lower classes were black while more than 70 percent of students in advanced classes were white.

Even so there wasn’t much that could be done. The matter ended with the Office for Civil Rights ordering the district to hire a consultant to fix the problem, but it still persists to this day.

This “school within a school” went from metaphor to reality in Austin, Texas. In 2007, a city school, the Lyndon Baines Johnson Early College High School, split into two different entities existing within the same building. And the main factor separating the two was race.

The second floor became the Liberal Arts and Science Academy (LASA), a public magnet high school serving mostly white and Asian students. Meanwhile, the majority black and Latino students stayed on the first floor taking regular education courses.

How can that be legal? Because too many people want it that way.

LASA is ranked the best Texas high school and the 11th-best high school in the United States. In fact, whenever you see those lists of the best schools in the country, they are often the result of a wealthy local tax base combined with how many poor and minority kids they were able to keep out.

It’s a matter of priorities.

Many people – especially white people – talk a good game about equity but what they really want for their own children is privilege.

It’s what happens when you let scarcity dominate public education, and it doesn’t have to be this way.

We can invest in our schools so that all children have what they need – so that they aren’t in competition for dwindling resources.

But this must go hand-in-hand with an emphasis on social justice. Black lives matter. We cannot continue to treat black children as disposable.

Being gifted, talented or advanced can’t be reduced to a score on a standardized test. In fact, I’d argue that such measures should be banished from our conception of excellence altogether as the tests, themselves, should be discontinued.

This doesn’t mean we can ignore the centuries of racist policies that keep our children of color down – housing segregation, inequitable funding, over policing, a lack of resources, being left out of specialized programs. Nor does it mean that we can ignore implicit bias white teachers invariably have about black students.
But we have to dismantle the systemic racism enshrined in our school policies. The most well-meaning individuals will make little headway if the system, itself, is corrupt.

The two must be accomplished hand-in-hand, at the micro and macro level.

Integration is absolutely essential. We must ensure that all of our students get to go to school together – but not just in the same buildings, in the same classes.

This requires an end to standardized testing but maybe also an end to advanced placement courses as we know them. Why focus on higher order thinking only for the privileged kids – do it for all. Individual student needs can be met with dual teachers in the room, pullout resources and the like.

It is important to meet the needs of every student, but we cannot in doing so allow unspoken bias to be the gatekeeper of opportunity.

Equity is not just a pretty word. It has to be one of our most cherished goals.

Otherwise our policies and our people will leave many children behind.

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HBO’s “Bad Education” Aims at Public School Theft While Ignoring More Frequent Fraud at Charter Schools & Testing Companies

April 27, 2020April 27, 2020 stevenmsinger Accountability, Betsy DeVos, capitalism, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Compassion, Corporate Education "Reform", Credibility, Data, Democrat, edtech, Education, Eugenics, history, Learning, Local Control, Media, Network for Public Education, New York, Obama, Opt Out, Parents, Pennsylvania, Politics, Prejudice, principals, privatization, Propaganda, Republican, School Choice, School Funding, school segregation, school vouchers, Schools, segregation, Social Justice, Standardized Testing, Students, Teachers, Technology, Toxic Testing, White Privilege Bad Education, charter schools, Cyber Charter Schools, ed-tech, education, film, fraud, HBO, Hugh Jackman, movie, Politics, public schools, school vouchers, standardized testing, theft

“Bad Education” is a frustrating movie to watch as a public school teacher.

It does a fine job telling the true story of a wealthy New York district where administrators stole millions of dollars for themselves.

But it ignores the far more frequent waste and malfeasance caused by school privatization, high stakes testing and runaway ed tech.

Maybe I’m being too sensitive, but there is no subject more political than public schools.

During the current Coronavirus pandemic, teachers and schools are finally getting some respect from people who are trying to “home school” their own kids while the nation’s classrooms are shuttered.

But education budgets are still routinely slashed, and every policymaker from Betsy DeVos to Barack Obama still thinks there is nothing better than closing public schools and replacing them with charter and/or voucher schools.

Pundits continually decry low test scores while applauding every means to increase racial and economic segregation. They push every policy to increase the school to prison pipeline for black and brown students.

And now HBO drops this movie about Rosalyn School District Superintendent Frank Tassone (Hugh Jackman) who embezzled $11 million from taxpayers.
What happened in Rosalyn was scandalous. But it’s an outlier.

Such misappropriation and outright theft rarely happens at public schools. After all, the records are all public. It just takes someone to check up.

For REAL theft you have to go to charter and voucher schools where the law literally allows them to spend our money without most of that public oversight.

Viewers like me from Pennsylvania still remember Nick Trombetta. The founder and former CEO of the Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School stole a similar sum (at least $8 million), and got much less prison time (20 months vs. Tassone who served 3 years). Trombetta used taxpayer dollars to buy a$300,000 private jet for goodness sake! He bought a $933,000 condo in Florida! He bought $180,000 houses for his girlfriend and mother in Ohio. He did all this and more – and his lawyers got the charges down to tax evasion! Why is there no movie about THAT?

Or how about June Brown?

As the head of Agora Cyber Charter School, which was part of the K12 Inc. charter empire, she was indicted for stealing $6.5 million from taxpayers. She and her executives were indicted on 62 counts of wire fraud, obstruction of justice and witness tampering. She had a reputation for claiming large salaries and filing suits against parents who questioned her.

Where’s that movie?
The history of charter schools reads like a who’s who of hucksters and thieves!

Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT) the largest charter school in Ohio was forced to shut down and auction off all its taxpayer funded property because administrators grossly inflated its students body of 12,000 online students to the state.

New Jersey charter schools spent as much as $800 million of taxpayer dollars to buy property that they then charged taxpayers additional money to rent from the charter schools, according to an IRS investigation.

The Network for Public Education published a report in 2019 detailing more than $1 billion in federal dollars misappropriated by charters – including hundreds of millions spent on charters that never even opened or that closed soon after opening.

I think those would make good movies. Don’t you?

But let’s not forget the other vulture industries that prey on our public school system without providing much of value in return.

If you want REAL fraud, you have to go to the standardized testing and ed tech industry sucking away billions or taxpayer dollars while providing services that are either unnecessary or downright destructive.

Why do we give every public school child high stakes tests in grades 3 through 8 and once in high school? Because the federal government says so.

These tests don’t tell us how well students are doing in school. We have at least 180 days of classroom grades that tell us that.

These tests taken over a period of a few days tell us what the corporation making them thinks is important. And they nearly always show that richer kids are doing better than poorer kids, and that whiter kids are somehow “smarter” than blacker kids.

And for this prized data we pay billions of dollars to big businesses every year.
It’s one of the largest captive markets in existence. That’s some 50.4 million children forced to take standardized assessments. The largest such corporation, Pearson, boasts profits of $9 billion annually. It’s largest competitor, CBT/ McGraw-Hill, makes $2 billion annually. Others include Education Testing Services and Riverside Publishing better known through its parent company Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

If many of these companies sound like book publishers, that’s because they are or their parent companies are. And that’s no coincidence. It’s another way they bolster their own market.

Not only do many of these testing corporations make, provide and score standardized assessments, they make and provide the remedial resources used to help students pass.

So if your students are having difficulty passing the state test, often the same company has a series of workbooks or a software package to help remediate them. It’s a good business model. Cash in before kids take the test. Cash in when they take it. And if kids fail, cash in again to remediate them.

Ever wonder why our test scores are so low? Because it’s profitable! The money is all on the side of failure, not success. In fact, from an economic point of view, there is a disincentive to succeed. Not for teachers and students, but for the people who make and grade the tests.

In fact, when I sat down to watch “Bad Education” I thought it was going to be about high stakes testing cheating scandals. I thought it was going to be about how the pressure to have students score well on the tests have in some cases resulted in teachers and/or administrators changing answers to inflate the scores.

But no. That’s not mentioned at all. There’s talk about test scores but their value is never questioned for one second.

Hugh Jackman’s superintendent dreams of leading his schools from getting the 4th highest test scores to having the 1st highest. But nowhere does anyone mention how these tests were literally developed by Nazi eugenicists or how they have been challenged countless times for violating children’s civil rights or even the sizable parent-led opt out movement in the same New York suburbs where the film takes place.

Okay. Maybe I AM being too sensitive.

The film does seem to have a theme about how we expect everything from schools and teachers and don’t reward them well enough. But this is undercut by the obvious villainy of people who use that discrepancy to take advantage of the trust the public has placed in them.

Public schools rarely act this way.

I fear that many people will miss that point.

Instead it will be more fuel to the fire that public schools are bad and must be replaced.

There’s even a parting shot about Jackman’s character’s pension.

I’m all for drama.
But when filmmakers bend over backward to ignore the elephant in the room, I tend to lose my appetite for popcorn.

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Busing and School Segregation Used for Politics not Policy

July 8, 2019 stevenmsinger Accountability, Bernie Sanders, Betsy DeVos, California, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Common Core, Competency Based Education, Congress, Corporate Education "Reform", Credibility, Democrat, Democrats for Education Reform, Donald Trump, edtech, Education, Election, Elizabeth Warren, Learning, Local Control, Media, Obama, Parents, Politics, Prejudice, President, privatization, Racism, Republican, School Choice, School Funding, school segregation, school vouchers, Schools, segregation, Social Justice, Standardized Testing, Students, Supreme Court, Teachers, Technology, voting, White Allies, White Fragility, White Privilege Bernie Sanders, busing, charter schools, Democrats, education, education policy, Joe Biden, Julian Castro, Kamala Harris, neoliberal, Politics, Privatize, public schools, school segregation, schools, segregation, standardized testing

If children of all races went to the same schools with each other, it would be harder to treat them unequally.

Moreover, it would be harder for them to grow up prejudiced because they would have learned what it’s like to have classmates who are different from them.

And though most people agree with these premises in principle, our laws still refuse to make them a reality in fact.

Perhaps that’s why it was so astounding when Kamala Harris brought up the issue of school segregation and busing at the first Democratic debates.

If you’re anything like me, for the first time these debates made Harris look like a viable contender for the party’s Presidential nomination to face Republican incumbent Donald Trump in 2020.

But then she immediately contradicted herself when people actually started to take her seriously.

During the debates, Harris called out front runner and former vice president Joe Biden for opposing court-ordered busing in the 1970s as a way of combating school segregation.

The California Democrat and former federal prosecutor rightly said that 40 years ago there was a “failure of states to integrate public schools in America,” so “that’s where the federal government must step in.”

But her star-making moment was when she made the whole matter extremely personal.

“There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools and she was bused to school every day,” Harris said. “That little girl was me.”

The tactic was so successful that Biden has been fumbling to apologize and explain away a history of obstructing desegregation ever since.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted after the debate showed Biden had lost half of his support among black voters since earlier in June.

Meanwhile, the Harris campaign was quick to cash in on the political capital she earned by selling t-shirts with a picture of herself when she was in school with the emblem “That Little Girl Was Me.”

It could almost be a masterclass in how to make a political point to both boost your own campaign and change the narrative to improve national policy.

That is if Harris actually backed up her rhetoric with action.

Unfortunately, she has been tripping all over herself to keep this a criticism of Biden and not let it become a policy prescription for today.

While perfectly happy to support busing as a measure to stop segregation in the past, she seems much less comfortable using it to stop our current school segregation problems.

Because even though the landmark Supreme  Court decision that found racial segregation to be unconstitutional – Brown v. Board of Education – is more than 60 years old, our nation’s schools are in many places even more segregated now than they were when this ruling was handed down.

So the question remains: in some areas should we bus kids from black neighborhoods to schools located in white ones and vice versa to ensure that our classrooms are integrated?

Since the debates, Harris has waffled saying busing should be “considered” by school districts but she would not support mandating it.

In subsequent comments, she said she’d support a federal mandate for busing in certain situations where other integration efforts have not been effective or when the courts have stepped in to provide the federal government that power. However, she does not believe that either of these conditions have been met.

Frankly, it sounds a whole lot more like someone desperately making things up as she goes along than someone with a true plan to fix a deep problem in our public education system.

She rightly attacked Biden on his record but then came up short trying to prove that she would be much different, herself, if elected.

However, that doesn’t mean all Democratic candidates are so unprepared. A handful have detailed integration policy proposals.

The most obvious is Bernie Sanders.

In fact, it is a cornerstone of his “Thurgood Marshall Plan for Education.” Not only would he repeal the existing ban on using federal transportation funding to promote school integration, he would put aside $1 billion to support magnet schools to entice more diverse students. However, the most ambitious part of his desegregation effort goes beyond legislation. Sanders promises to “execute and enforce desegregation orders and appoint federal judges who will enforce the 1964 Civil Rights Act in school systems.”

Sanders understands that the courts have largely sabotaged most desegregation efforts in the last 40 years.

At least two Supreme Court rulings have taken away the federal government’s power to enforce Brown v. Board. The first was 1974’s Milliken v. Bradley ruling which established that federal courts could not order desegregation busing across school district lines. They could only do so inside districts. So in big cities like Detroit – where the case originated – you have largely black city schools surrounded by mostly white suburban ones. The ruling forbids busing from city to suburban districts and vice-versa thereby destroying any kind of authentic desegregation efforts.

More recently, in 2007, the Supreme Court’s Parent’s Involved decision put even more constraints on voluntary busing programs.

Sanders is acknowledging these problems and promising to select judges to the bench who would work to overturn these wrongheaded decisions.

To my knowledge, no one has yet offered a more comprehensive plan.

However, former Housing and Urban Development Secretary and San Antonio Mayor Julián Castro comes in at a close second.

As you might expect, his school integration plan focuses on real estate and housing issues. According to his Website, Castro’s plan includes:

“Fulfill the promise of Brown v Board of Education through a progressive housing policy that includes affirmatively furthering fair housing, implementing zoning reform, and expanding affordable housing in high opportunity areas. These efforts will reduce racial segregation in classrooms.”

In other words, Castro hopes to work around the courts by incentivizing integration in neighborhoods which would also increase it in our schools.

It’s a good plan – though perhaps not enough in itself.

Unfortunately, there are reasons to doubt Castro’s sincerity here. Unlike Sanders’ plan, Castro’s education policy statement is littered with jargon right out of the school privatization, edtech and high stakes testing playbook. These are, after all, the same people who have worked to increase segregation with the promotion of charter and voucher schools.

For instance, the second point of his plan is called “Reimagining High School” – a monicker stolen from the XQ Superschools program, a philanthrocapitalist scheme to rebrand school privatization funded by Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Steve Jobs.

This shouldn’t be surprising coming from  Castro. In 2013, the mayor went on a tour of cities sponsored by Education Reform Now – an arm of Democrats for Education Reform, a school privatization lobbying network. In the same year, he was also a featured guest at a ribbon cutting ceremony for IDEA charter schools. In 2010, he admitted he had no problem taking money with strings attached – a reference to the Obama administration’s chief education initiative of offering education grants if states increased reliance on high stakes testing and charter schools. In particular, Castro said: “I would have taken the Race to the Top money if I was mayor, dogcatcher, or whatever.”

And speaking of standardized testing and edtech, there are other telling hints that he’s on the neoliberal bandwagon in his current education plan:

“Provide educators and public schools flexibility in defining success, including competency-based assessments and support for transitions away from seat-time requirements. Provide maximum flexibility for school leaders, teachers, and students to work together to develop rigorous, competency-based pathways to a diploma and industry recognized credentials,” [Emphasis mine].

These terms “competency-based” and “rigorous” have strong associations with the privatization industry. “Competency-based” education programs usually mean making kids do daily mini-standardized tests on iPads or other devices and other untested cyber education programs. “Rigorous” has been associated with topdown academic standards like the Common Core that provide students with few resources or even taking them away and then blaming kids for not being able to meet arbitrary and developmentally inappropriate benchmarks.

Castro has some good ideas, but his troubling associations and language give any person familiar with these issues reason to pause.

Of course, Castro has not yet made a real mark among those Democrats seeking their party’s nomination.

Perhaps more important is the relative silence of a more popular candidate, Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

She hasn’t spoken much about integration efforts on the campaign trail. Along with Sanders, she is a co-sponsor of the Strength in Diversity Act, the leading congressional vehicle for school integration. However, that legislation is deeply flawed because it not only increases grant money for desegregation but also gives a big chunk of change away to charter schools.

In the past, Warren has supported a kind of school voucher program to separate where a student is enrolled in school from where they live entirely, but you can add it to the list of education issues she has not seen the need to clarify as yet.

It’s no surprise that so few Democratic hopefuls want to address the issue of desegregation – especially doing so through busing.

White middle class and wealthy people generally don’t support it.

They simply don’t want their kids going to schools with large numbers of black and brown students.

And this is a real moral weakness in white culture.

I went to an integrated school from Kindergarten to high school. My daughter goes to the same district. I teach at another integrated school.

The benefits of attending such a school far outweigh any negatives.

If students have to spend more time getting to and from school via buses to reach this goal, it wouldn’t matter if we valued the outcome.

In fact, many white parents don’t mind putting their kids on buses or driving them to get away from minority children.

Certainly we should try to minimize the time it takes to get to and from school but that shouldn’t be the only consideration.

They say we get the leaders we deserve.

If white people really want to defeat Trump, they may have to start by defeating the bigot inside themselves first.

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Standardized Testing is a Tool of White Supremacy

April 5, 2019 stevenmsinger #BlackLivesMatter, Accountability, Civil Rights, Corporate Education "Reform", Education, Eugenics, Learning, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, Racism, School Funding, Schools, Social Justice, Standardized Testing, Students, Teachers, White Privilege Buck v. Bell, Carl Brigham, education, Eugenics, history, Lewis Terman, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Psychology, public schools, Robert M. Yerkes, SAT, SCOTUS, standardized testing, white supremacy

Let’s say you punched me in the face.

I wouldn’t like it. I’d protest. I’d complain.

And then you might apologize and say it was just an accident.

Maybe I’d believe you.

Until the next time when we met and you punched me again.

That’s the problem we, as a society, have with standardized tests.

We keep using them to justify treating students of color as inferior and/or subordinate to white children. And we never stop or even bothered to say, “I’m sorry.”

Fact: black kids don’t score as high on standardized tests as white kids.

It’s called the racial achievement gap and it’s been going on for nearly a century.

Today we’re told that it means our public schools are deficient. There’s something more they need to be doing.

But if this phenomenon has been happening for nearly 100 years, is it really a product of today’s public schools or a product of the testing that identifies it in the first place?

After all, teachers and schools have changed. They no longer educate children today the same way they did in the 1920s when the first large scale standardized tests were given to students in the US. There are no more one-room schoolhouses. Kids can’t drop out at 14. Children with special needs aren’t kept in the basement or discouraged from attending school. Moreover, none of the educators and administrators on the job during the Jazz Age are still working.

Instead, we have robust buildings serving increasingly larger and more diverse populations. Students stay in school until at least 18. Children with special needs are included with their peers and given a multitude of services to meet their educational needs. And that’s to say nothing of the innovations in technology, pedagogy and restorative justice discipline policies.

But standardized testing? That hasn’t really changed all that much. It still reduces complex processes down to a predetermined set of only four possible answers – a recipe good for guessing what a test-maker wants more than expressing a complex answer about the real world. It still attempts to produce a bell curve of scores so that so many test takers fail, so many pass, so many get advanced scores, etc. It still judges correct and incorrect by reference to a predetermined standard of how a preconceived “typical” student would respond.

Considering how and why such assessments were created in the first place, the presence of a racial achievement gap should not be surprising at all. That’s the result these tests were originally created to find.

Modern testing comes out of Army IQ tests developed during World War I.

In 1917, a group of psychologists led by Robert M. Yerkes, president of the American Psychological Association (APA), created the Army Alpha and Beta tests. These were specifically designed to measure the intelligence of recruits and help the military distinguish those of “superior mental ability” from those who were “mentally inferior.”

These assessments were based on explicitly eugenicist foundations – the idea that certain races were distinctly superior to others.

In 1923, one of the men who developed these intelligence tests, Carl Brigham, took these ideas further in his seminal work A Study of American Intelligence. In it, he used data gathered from these IQ tests to argue the following:

“The decline of American intelligence will be more rapid than the decline of the intelligence of European national groups, owing to the presence here of the negro. These are the plain, if somewhat ugly, facts that our study shows. The deterioration of American intelligence is not inevitable, however, if public action can be aroused to prevent it.”

Thus, Yerkes and Brigham’s pseudoscientific tests were used to justify Jim Crow laws, segregation, and even lynchings. Anything for “racial purity.”

People took this research very seriously. States passed forced sterilization laws for people with “defective” traits, preventing between 60,000 and 70,000 people from “polluting” America’s ruling class.

The practice was even upheld by the US Supreme Court in the 1927 Buck v. Bell decision. Justices decided that mandatory sterilization of “feeble-minded” individuals was, in fact, Constitutional.

Of the ruling, which has never been explicitly overturned, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, “It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind…. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

Eventually Brigham took his experience with Army IQ tests to create a new assessment for the College Board – the Scholastic Aptitude Test – now known as the Scholastic Assessment Test or SAT. It was first given to high school students in 1926 as a gatekeeper. Just as the Army intelligence tests were designed to distinguish the superior from the inferior, the SAT was designed to predict which students would do well in college and which would not. It was meant to show which students should be given the chance at a higher education and which should be left behind.

And unsurprisingly it has always – and continues to – privilege white students over children of color.

The SAT remains a tool for ensuring white supremacy that is essentially partial and unfair – just as its designers always meant it to be.

Moreover, it is the model by which all other high stakes standardized tests are designed.

But Brigham was not alone in smuggling eugenicist ideals into the education field. These ideas dominated pedagogy and psychology for generations until after World War II when their similarity to the Nazi philosophy we had just defeated in Europe dimmed their exponents’ enthusiasm.

Another major eugenicist who made a lasting impact on education was Lewis Terman, Professor of Education at Stanford University and originator of the Stanford-Binet intelligence test. In his highly influential 1916 textbook, The Measurement of Intelligence he wrote:
psych

“Among laboring men and servant girls there are thousands like them [feebleminded individuals]. They are the world’s “hewers of wood and drawers of water.” And yet, as far as intelligence is concerned, the tests have told the truth. … No amount of school instruction will ever make them intelligent voters or capable voters in the true sense of the word.

… The fact that one meets this type with such frequency among Indians, Mexicans, and negroes suggests quite forcibly that the whole question of racial differences in mental traits will have to be taken up anew and by experimental methods.

Children of this group should be segregated in special classes and be given instruction which is concrete and practical. They cannot master, but they can often be made efficient workers, able to look out for themselves. There is no possibility at present of convincing society that they should not be allowed to reproduce, although from a eugenic point of view they constitute a grave problem because of their unusually prolific breeding” (91-92).

This was the original justification for academic tracking. Terman and other educational psychologists convinced many schools to use high-stakes and culturally-biased tests to place “slow” students into special classes or separate schools while placing more advanced students of European ancestry into the college preparatory courses.

The modern wave of high stakes testing has its roots in the Reagan administration – specifically the infamous propaganda hit piece A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Education Reform.

In true disaster capitalism style, it concluded that our economy was at risk because of poor public schools. Therefore, it suggested circumventing the schools and subordinating them to a system of standardized tests, which would be used to determine everything from teacher quality to resource allocation.

It’s a bizarre argument, but it goes something like this: the best way to create and sustain a fair educational system is by rewarding “high-achieving” students.

So we shouldn’t provide kids with what they need to succeed. We should make school a competition where the strongest get the most and everyone else gets a lesser share.

And the gatekeeper in this instance (as it was in access to higher education) is high stakes testing. The greater the test score, the more funding your school receives, the lower class sizes, the wider curriculum, more tutors, more experienced and well compensated teachers, etc.

It’s a socially stratified education system completely supported by a pseudoscientific series of assessments.

After all, what is a standardized test but an assessment that refers to a specific standard? And that standard is white, upper class students.

In his book How the SAT Creates Built-in-Headwinds, national admissions-test expert, Jay Rosner, explains the process by-which SAT designers decide which questions to include on the test:

“Compare two 1998 SAT verbal [section] sentence-completion items with similar themes: The item correctly answered by more blacks than whites was discarded by [the Educational Testing Service] (ETS), whereas the item that has a higher disparate impact against blacks became part of the actual SAT. On one of the items, which was of medium difficulty, 62% of whites and 38% of African-Americans answered correctly, resulting in a large impact of 24%…On this second item, 8% more African-Americans than whites answered correctly…”

In other words, the criteria for whether a question is chosen for future tests is if it replicates the outcomes of previous exams – specifically tests where students of color score lower than white children. And this is still the criteria test makers use to determine which questions to use on future editions of nearly every assessment in wide use in the US.

Some might argue that this isn’t racist because race was not explicitly used to determine which questions would be included. Yet the results are exactly the same as if it were.

Others want to reduce the entire enterprise to one of social class. It’s not students of color that are disadvantaged – it’s students living in poverty. And there is overlap here.

Standardized testing doesn’t show academic success so much as the circumstances that caused that success or failure. Lack of proper nutrition, food insecurity, lack of prenatal care, early childcare, fewer books in the home, exposure to violence – all of these and more combine to result in lower academic outcomes.

But this isn’t an either/or situation. It’s both. Standardized testing has always been about BOTH race and class. They are inextricably entwined.

Which leads to the question of intention.

If these are the results, is there some villain laughing behind the curtain and twirling the ends of a handlebar mustache?

Answer: it doesn’t matter.

As in the entire edifice of white supremacy, intention is beside the point. These are the results. This is what a policy of high stakes standardized testing actually does.

Regardless of intention, we are responsible for the results.

If every time we meet, you punch me in the face, it doesn’t matter if that’s because you hate me or you’re just clumsy. You’re responsible for changing your actions.

And we as a society are responsible for changing our policies.

Nearly a century of standardized testing is enough.

It’s time to stop the bludgeoning.

It’s time to treat all our children fairly.

It’s time to hang up the tests.

NOTE: This article expands upon many ideas I wrote about in an article published this week in Public Source.

Who’s Afraid of Public Schools?

March 16, 2019March 16, 2019 stevenmsinger Accountability, Betsy DeVos, capitalism, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, college, Corporate Education "Reform", Donald Trump, Education, Grit, Learning, Parents, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, privatization, Propaganda, School Choice, School Funding, school segregation, school vouchers, Schools, segregation, Standardized Testing, Students, Teachers, White Privilege cheating, college, college admissions, College Cheating Scandal, Donald Trump, education, George W. Bush, Operation Varsity Blues, parents, Politics, public schools, schools, Students, teachers

Public schools are the bogeymen of American life.

We so often hear the bedtime story of “Failing Schools” that it’s no wonder some folks will do anything to ensure their kids get in elsewhere.

And let’s be honest. It’s the same impulse behind the latest college admissions cheating scandal.

A group of wealthy – though not too wealthy – parents thought their children should be able to enroll in the most prestigious schools.

So they bribed college admissions officers, cheated on standardized tests or paid coaches or other officials to accept their children as college athletes even if their kids had never played the sport.

We see the same kind of thing everyday in public schools – a confederacy of white parents terrified that their kids might have to go to class with black kids. So they dip into their stock portfolios to pay for enrollment at a private or parochial school.

Or they take advantage of a tax scholarship or school voucher to avoid an institution with low test scores by enrolling in one where students don’t have to take the tests at all.

Or they cross their fingers and enter their kid in a lottery to a charter school praying their precious progeny will escape the horrors of being treated just like everyone else’s kids.

And they call it a meritocracy!

What a joke!

They pretend that their children have earned special treatment.

WRONG.

No child deserves favoritism – paradoxically – because all children do!

There are really two important but related points here:

1) The children of the privileged don’t deserve a better education than anyone else’s.

2) Children who come from wealthy families (and or from privileged social circumstances) don’t do anything to distinguish themselves from the underprivileged.

But these nouveau riche parents tried to bribe the way forward for their kids anyway even though to do so they had to launder the money through a fake “charity.” They didn’t care that doing so would earn them a tax deduction and thus result in even less money for the underprivileged. They didn’t care about the underlying inequalities in the system. No. They only wanted their children to remain in the class of America’s chosen few.

And the best way to do that is with cold, hard cash.

America doesn’t run on Dunkin. It runs on greenbacks. Dinero. Swag. Bling. The prosperity doctrine made physical, quantifiable and mean.

No one really denies that there are two Americas anymore. We just lie to ourselves about how you get placed in one or the other.

And that lie is called excellence, quality, worth – the ultimate in class war gaslighting.

It’s a deception that this scandal has shattered to pieces.

The privileged don’t earn their privilege. It’s not something they possess on the basis of intelligence or hard work shown through test scores. They don’t have it because of drive, determination or grit – once again shown through test scores. They have it based on wealth – the kind of wealth that buys time and resources to either pass the tests or bribe the gatekeepers to change the scores.

Think about it.

George W. Bush got into Yale and Harvard and graduated with a 2.35 GP A. Why? Not because he had the grades and demonstrated his worth. He was a legacy. Like at least one third of all admissions to Ivy League schools, he got in purely because he had family who graduated from there.

You think Donald Trump threatened the College Board not to release his grades because they were all A’s!?

According to one account, his scores were merely “respectable.” Yet he still dropped out of the prestigious Fordham University and transferred to the University of Pennsylvania after two years based on family connections and the reputation of his father, Fred Trump, one of the wealthiest businessmen in New York at the time.

Moreover, his kids, Don Jr. and Ivanka, were both enrolled at Penn around the same time as their father made hefty contributions. They began classes in 1996 and 2000, respectively, just as the university and its private Manhattan clubhouse received more than $1.4 million in pledged donations from Trump, the school newspaper reported.

This is not merit. This has nothing to do with what these people deserve. It is money – a pure transaction, you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.

The only thing that separates what the Trumps and the Bushes did with this latest scandal – the so-called Operation Varsity Blues – is the amount of wealth involved.
If you’re super rich, you can get away with it. If you’re just rich, you’d better not get caught.

And if you’re poor or middle class, you’d better stay in your lane.

But there shouldn’t be any lanes on this highway. Or at least they should only be in place to maximize fairness and student success.

We sneer at the idea of Affirmative Action but only because it’s directed at people of color. No one says anything about the real Affirmative Action that’s been in place since before our country even began – the system of reciprocity and privilege keeping wealthy white families in positions of power like Lords and Ladies while the rest of us serfs scramble for their leavings.

All children deserve the same opportunities to succeed. All children deserve the chance to get an excellent education. All children should attend a first class school filled with highly educated and experienced teachers who can draw on plenty of resources, wide curriculum, tutoring, counseling and support.

And the only way we’ll ever achieve that is through a robust system of public schools.

I’m not saying they’re perfect. In many neighborhoods, they’ve been sabotaged and surgically dismantled, but that’s a problem with an easy solution. Invest in public schools!

Because the stated purpose of public education, the reason it exists at all, is equity.
The alternatives – private and charter schools – are essentially unequal. That’s their raison d’être – to create a market that justifies their existence.

In order for charter and private schools to be a thing, there must be schools that don’t otherwise meet students’ needs. There must be an unreasonable demand that schools indoctrinate students into parents’ religious beliefs. There must be schools that aren’t as well funded or that have to meet ridiculous federal and state mandates.

The result is a two-tiered system. Schools for the haves and for the have-nots.
It’s an apparatus that perverts the public to make room for the private.

In the public system, students are segregated into communities based on race and class and then their community schools are funded based on what their parents can afford. The rich shower their children with the best of everything. The poor do what they can.

Then the federal government pretends to hold everyone “accountable” by forcing students to take standardized tests that merely recreate the economic and racial disparities already present in their districts and neighborhoods. In turn, this provides the justification for charter and voucher schools that further erode public school budgets and increases the downward spiral of disinvestment.

Meanwhile, few notice how the equity built into authentic public schools gets left behind by those enrolling in privatized alternatives. No more open meetings. No more elected school boards. No more public comment or even a voice in how the money is spent.

So long as there are two Americas, the fear of being in the wrong one will motivate the privileged to cheat and steal their way to the top. They will horde resources and wealth for themselves and their children while denying it to others.

It is a self-perpetuating system – a loop that we’re all caught in.
We must break the chain. We must recognize our common humanity and stop the zero sum game.

And perhaps the best way to begin is by supporting authentic public schools and not privatization.

We have been taught to fear public education, because it is really our only hope.

The World Mourns for Jews After Pittsburgh’s Synagogue Shooting. What About Other Targets of Hate?

November 2, 2018November 2, 2018 stevenmsinger #BlackLivesMatter, Accountability, antisemitism, Art, Civil Rights, Compassion, Donald Trump, Education, Feminism, Gun Control, Guns, Hate Crimes, Healthcare, immigration, Labor, LGBT, Mass Shooting, Media, nonviolence, Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh, Politics, Prejudice, President, protest, Racism, Refugees, Schools, segregation, Sexism, Shooting, Social Justice, Teachers, White Allies, White Privilege, Whiteness anti-racism, jewish, Mass Shooting, Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh, Politics, prejudice, racism, Squirrel Hill, synagogue, Tree of Life, white supremacist, white supremacy

When a white supremacist killed 11 people and wounded 6 others at a Pittsburgh synagogue last weekend, the world took notice.

Lights dimmed at the Eiffel Tower and Empire State building.

Candlelight vigils were held nationwide – including in Boston, Houston, Washington D.C., Philadelphia, New Orleans, Atlanta, Chicago, New York City and Los Angeles.

A host of international leaders from the Pope to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to German Chancellor Angela Merkel expressed outrage, sadness and solidarity.

I’ll admit that as a native Pittsburgher and person of Jewish descent, it touched me deeply.

For a moment, it seemed like the whole world had stopped spinning and from every corner of the globe people were with us in our tragedy.

But at the same time, it was troubling.

After all, there were at least two other major hate crimes in the U.S. perpetrated within 72 hours of the shooting.

In Kentucky, a white man shot and killed two African-Americans at a Kroger grocery store following a failed attempt to break into a black church.

Only two days later, a deranged man who had railed against Democrats and minorities with hate-filled messages online was arrested for allegedly sending mail bombs to people who’d been criticized by President Donald Trump.

Where were the candlelight vigils for those atrocities?

Where were the international landmarks going dark?

Where was the worldwide condemnation?

In the wake of Pittsburgh’s tragedy, these other violent acts have been almost forgotten.

Yet they’re all symptoms of the same disease – hate and bigotry.

Don’t get me wrong.

What happened in Pittsburgh was terrible.

The Anti-Defamation League estimates that the shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue may be the most deadly attack on Jews on American Soil in our history.

But me and mine do not have a monopoly on sorrow.

We suffer, but we are not the only ones hurting.

This all happened not far from my home.

I’ll admit that I am having a really hard time dealing with it.

I am not sleeping well.

I find myself zoning out in the middle of everyday activities.

And I feel this constant anxiety like part of me is expecting to hear a gunshot ringing down the hall at any time.

When the alleged shooter entered the sanctuary armed to the teeth and shouted “All Jews must die!” before carrying out his plan, he included me in his declaration.

All Jews.

That’s me.

That’s my daughter. My parents. My family.

It means something to me that so many people have come together to repudiate this crime.

The Islamic Center of Pittsburgh and other U.S. based Muslim groups donated more than $200,000 for funeral expenses. An Iranian refugee (who hadn’t even been to the three rivers) started a GoFundMe that brought in $1 million for the victims and their families.

You can’t go anywhere in Pittsburgh without a memorial, a moment of silence, a shared statement of solidarity and love.

At the symphony, musicians read two statements from the stage against hate before playing a Hebrew melody with string quartet.

At my school – I’m a teacher – the union decided to collect money for the victims.

I saw a barge floating down one of the rivers that had the message “Stronger Than Hate” on the side next to the modified Steelers logo where the top star had been replaced by a Star of David.

I even saw a similar message on a Wendy’s sign: “PittsburghStrong/ Stronger/ Than Hate”.

The community has come together in a way I’ve never seen before.

But I can’t help wondering why.

Even after Richard Baumhammers went on a racially motivated killing spree in 2000 murdering five people including two Jews, the response wasn’t this overwhelming.

Perhaps it’s just that this latest shooting is the final straw.

Perhaps it is the moment when our nation finally pulls together and says that enough is enough – We won’t tolerate this kind of hate and violence.

I hope that’s it.

However, in the shadows of my mind I wonder if it might not be a reflection of the same beast that struck us last weekend.

Could it be that we’re willing to put up with violence against brown people, but only draw the line when those targeted have lighter skin?

I guess my point – if I have one – is this: Thank you, But.

On behalf of Pittsburgh’s Jews, thank you for having our back.

If we’re going to survive this, we’re going to need your continued support and solidarity.

But it’s not just us.

Hate crimes have jumped from about 70 incidents a year in the 1990s to more than 300 a year since 2001. And after Trump was elected, 900 bias-related incidents were reported against minorities within the first 10 days.

Our country was built on the genocide of over 110 million indigenous Americans and the enslavement of 30 million Africans.

The idea of concentration camps didn’t originate with the Nazis. Hitler got the idea from U.S. treatment of Native Americans.

Racism didn’t end with the Civil Rights Movement. It just changed shape and is hidden in the way we practice health care, education, and policing all the way to mass incarceration.

The shock and solidarity in the wake of the synagogue shooting is appreciated, but it’s not enough to mourn only when 11 Jews are murdered in cold blood.

It’s not enough to take a stand against anti-Semitism.

We need to join together to fight all of it.

We need to be unified against school segregation, police brutality, xenophobia and prejudice in all of its forms.

The white supremacist who killed my friends and neighbors targeted us because he thought we were helping brown-skinned immigrants into the country.

We can’t just stand for the helpers. We need to stand for those in need of that help.

It just won’t work any other way.

We can’t just be against violence to light skinned minorities. We have to empathize and protect our brown skinned brothers and sisters, too. We have to love and cherish our LGBTQ neighbors, as well.