A teenage boy in a black trench coat walks down a school hallway.
A young girl abruptly turns a corner and is about to walk past when she stops and notices an oblong shape in his coat.
He pulls out an AR-15 and points it at her head.
She gasps. He smiles.
“Hold it right there, Patrick.” Says a voice behind him.
“Mr. Callahan?” The boy says starting to bring the barrel around.
‘Uh-uh. Stop right there,” says the voice shoving something in the boy’s back.
“I know what you’re thinking,” the teacher continues. “My homeroom teacher, Mr. Callahan, has a gun in his desk. Did he remember to bring it with him to hall duty? Well to tell you the truth in all this excitement I kinda lost track myself. But being it’s a 500 S&W Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world and would blow your head clean off, you’ve gotta ask yourself one question: “Do I feel lucky?” Well, do ya, punk?”
Apparently this is how Doug Mastriano thinks school shootings can best be prevented.
Not gun control. Not stopping teens from buying assault weapons. Not keeping guns out of the hands of the mentally ill.
Instead, arm the teachers. Arm the principals. Put a piece in the hands of Lunch Lady Doris. Maybe even the custodians will be packing heat with a bucket and mop.
This is not the kind of serious proposal Commonwealth residents deserve from a representative of the legislature or executive branch. It’s not the kind of serious proposal you’d expect from a grown adult. Heck. It’s not what you’d expect from a small child still unable to tie his own shoes.
School shootings are not action movie scenarios. They’re not run-and-gun video games. They’re not cops and robbers. They’re real life.
Lest we forget, there were police officers on both the campuses of Robb Elementary School in Texas and Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, where shootings cumulatively took the lives of more than 30 students.
According to a 2021 JAMA Network study that looked at 133 school shootings from 1980 to 2019, armed guards did not significantly reduce injuries or deaths during school mass shootings.
In fact, when researchers controlled for location and school characteristic factors, “the rate of deaths was 2.83 times greater in schools with an armed guard present.”
Put simply, school shootings are not rational activities subject to cost benefit analysis from the people contemplating doing them. Would-be shooters do not expect to come out alive. They don’t care if there is armed resistance or not. In fact, the presence of armed resistance only encourages them to bring deadlier weaponry – especially semi-automatic guns.
And when trained police are afraid, Mastriano expects better from school staff – teachers, secretaries, aides, and nurses!!!?
A similar proposal permitting the arming of school employees passed the state Senate in June 2017 but it died in a House committee. In the district where I work as a middle school teacher, we talked about the issue at a staff meeting.
The few people who thought it was a good idea and said they would gladly bring a gun with them to school are nice people – but they’re the last ones you’d want armed.
Moreover, we have a school resource officer who said he was not in favor of the measure because it would make things tougher for law enforcement responding to a shooting. It would make it that much more unclear who the shooter was and increase the chances of friendly fire.
It’s hardly surprising Mastriano is making such boneheaded proposals.
Mastriano is either a fool who does not understand the issues or a patsy of the lunatic fringe of his party or both.
He wouldn’t arm teachers with books, funding or resources to teach – just guns.
He is an embarrassment to the people of Franklin County who elected him to the legislature and the Republican base who chose him to represent them in the governor’s race.
Fools like Mastriano are going to get innocent people and their children killed – not to mention the suffering thousands will have to endure if his policies ever see the light of day.
He thinks the answer to school shootings is to turn the school librarian into Yosemite Sam.
If you vote for him in the general election, you will reap what you sow – misery and death.
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I try to sleep, I try to rest, but worry and hopelessness settle down on me like a shroud.
If you’re like me, you may need some help getting through it all.
So here’s a list of five things we can do – not just you, but me, too – that hopefully will help us rejuvenate ourselves somewhat in the next few months and set us up for a successful year with our students.
1) Be Present with Friends and Family
Teachers often live in their heads.
We’re always planning a new lesson or thinking about how to help a student or improve something from the year before.
But this is summer break.
It’s time to tune out and turn off.
You’re home and hopefully you can find some time to spend with friends and family.
Just remember to try to be there. Actually be there.
Don’t live in your head. Live in the moment.
Let the present open up in front of you and actually enjoy the things you’re doing.
Our professional lives often demand we sacrifice so much time with our significant others, our kids, and the people we care about. Now is the time to balance the scales and enjoy their company. And nothing else.
This can be easier said than done, but it’s worth a try.
2) Don’t Focus on Things You Can’t Change
There is so much going on in the world, and we’re teachers. We’re problem solvers.
We want to fix broken things, and there is so much broken out there. The news is often not our friend.
I’m not saying to ignore what’s going on. We do so at our peril. But we have to try to put it all in context.
We’re just people – individuals caught in nets of complexity. We can’t solve all these problems ourselves.
It could be a sincerely stupid politician accused with pedophilia and insurrection who thinks taking pot shots at teachers will win him votes from the lowest common denominator.
It could be… so many people.
Take a deep breath and let it go.
You don’t need that baggage weighing you down.
As Nelson Mandela is supposed to have said:
“Having resentment against someone is like drinking poison and thinking it will kill your enemy.”
Leave that behind.
There will be plenty more next year.
4) Don’t Expect Too Much of Yourself
Often our harshest critic is ourselves.
We try so hard to be kind to everyone all year. This summer, be kind to yourself.
It’s break time. You don’t have to clean the whole house top to bottom. You don’t have to finally rearrange the utility drawer or any of a million other things that have been waiting around for you to get to them.
By all means, make those doctor’s appointments you’ve been waiting on. Buy a new pair of shoes. Cut the grass.
But if something doesn’t get done, don’t feel like it’s a failure.
You are allowed to simply do nothing.
Sometimes that’s the best thing we can do.
Be as productive as you want. Sometimes that helps alleviate stress, too – the satisfaction of getting things accomplished.
However, this break is not all about crossing things off your TO DO list.
It’s just all the stuff outside the classroom that I can’t stand.
I make a file during the year full of Christmas cards, goodbye messages from parents and students, positive emails, etc. During the summer is a perfect time to read through them and remember the good things.
At least, that’s what I try to do anyway.
So there’s my list. I hope you found it helpful.
Health, relaxation, calm. Be warned – I’m certainly no expert on the subject.
Remember the words of author Nakeia Homer:
“You are not lazy, unmotivated, or stuck. After years of living your life in survival mode, you are exhausted.”
Finding ways to recharge and renew is something I know I desperately need – maybe as you do, too.
Here’s hoping we can find the peace we need this summer.
The new academic year will be here before we know it.
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My 8th grade students approach the climax and resolution with equal parts dread and delight.
But it doesn’t always start that way.
No book I teach has gone through a greater change in cultural opinion than “Mockingbird.”
It used to be considered a bastion of anti-racism. Now some folks actually consider it to be racist.
The story is about Scout and her brother Jem as they grow up in Alabama during the Great Depression. Most of the drama centers on their father, Atticus, who defends a black man, Tom Robinson, in court against trumped up charges of raping a white woman.
Ever since its publication in 1960, people have tried to ban the book from school libraries and from school curriculum.
And that’s still true today. However, this used to be the work of the far right. Today there are almost as many objections from the far left – though for very different reasons.
For 50 years, the biggest complaints came from conservatives about the book’s strong language, discussion of sexuality, rape, and use of the n-word. Though today you’ll find almost as many on the left proclaiming that the book actually perpetuates the racial intolerance it purports to be against.
Republicans have become more extreme than ever. They see any discussion of race as “Critical Race Theory” – a conflation of a legal framework not actually taught in K-12 schools with any substantive discussion of racial inequality. It’s really just a simple dog whistle to try and shut down any discussion of the racial status quo.
These sort of complaints are typified by the Biloxi Public School Board in Mississippi which in 2017 removed Lee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel from its curriculum because, “It makes people uncomfortable.”
On the other side of the coin are people on the other pole of the political spectrum. Writers like Kristian Wilson Colyard don’t object to a discussion of racism and prejudice. They think “Mockingbird” doesn’t go far enough – or at least that the discussion it has is framed incorrectly.
Colyard doesn’t think the book should be banned or removed from libraries, but instead insists it isn’t a good teaching tool.
“Lee’s is not the best book to teach white kids about racism, because it grounds its narrative in the experiences of a white narrator and presents her father as the white savior.”
While I think Colyard has a fair point of literary analysis, I don’t agree with her conclusion.
Oppression, after all, is relational. It takes both the experience of the oppressed and the oppressor to fully understand it. And if we want to help end the cycle, it makes sense to show the oppressor how to bring that about.
Moreover, the book sneaks up on its themes. There’s very little about outright intolerance on the first page or even the first few chapters. The idea creeps up on you as the narrator slowly becomes aware of the prejudices around her and the trial comes deeper into focus.
As to the question of white saviorism, I think this is more often a buzzword than a legitimate criticism. White people are not heroes for attempting to put right something they put wrong. It is their responsibility, and seeing someone do that in fiction is a really powerful thing.
Atticus doesn’t think he’s saving his client Tom Robinson. He doesn’t think he’s special for doing so. He’s doing what he thinks is right. Now Scout certainly views this through rose-colored glasses and lionizes him for it, but that’s a character’s point of view. It’s up to the reader to look at all this critically and come to your own judgement about it.
Frankly, I think that’s one of the real values of the book. It provides a deep narrative, well told, for readers to examine and discuss very complex issues.
If you think Atticus is given too much credit for what he does, that’s something you can discuss with other readers. I don’t see how doing so cheapens or hurts the cause of antiracism.
In addition, the problem of centering the story on the white people is rectified by reading more widely in the literature. “Mockingbird” shouldn’t be the only book on the topic you read. To be well-rounded, you should read more from the point of view of people of color subjected to white people’s intolerance. And there are so many wonderful books to choose from – Toni Morrison’s “Beloved,” Ralph Ellison’s “The Invisible Man,” Alice Walker’s “The Color Purple,” etc.
However, teachers shouldn’t be made to feel like they’ve wasted an opportunity by using “Mockingbird” in the classroom – even if it’s the only book that year they read on this topic. There must be more opportunities in years to come. Racism and prejudice should not be a one-and-done topic in US schools. It is too important for that.
In my classroom, this book is far from our first discussion of the issue.
We talk about Fred Hampton and the Black Panther Party. We talk about the 1968 Olympics Black power fist. We talk about Black cowboys like Bass Reeves. We talk about Bessie Coleman, Angela Davis, James Baldwin, and so many others.
When we read S.E. Hinton’s “The Outsiders,” – a book that almost entirely eschews the topic – I make sure to point out that the narrative takes place in and around Tulsa, Oklahoma, and we discuss Black Wall Street and the massacre of Black people perpetrated by their White neighbors.
When the verdict of the trial comes down, there are real tears and stares of disbelief.
One of my students this year, Mya said, “I shouldn’t be surprised, but I thought it was going to turn out differently.”
Me, too. Every time I read it.
The book confronts students with the world as it is and challenges them to do something about it.
White or Black, it holds up the reality of injustice and demands we take a side.
And that’s why this book remains relevant and just as important today as it ever was.
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Teachers instruct on proper behaviors and then reward students they see going above and beyond to achieve them.
Here’s another example.
A student at his lunch table is yelling and throwing food. Nearby another student is sitting quietly and reading a book.
Then a teacher walks over and gives the quiet child a yellow card which can be used to enter a raffle for a special prize. He might win an Oculus VR game system or tickets to a baseball game.
That’s social-emotion learning, too.
Instead of just cracking down on the negative behaviors, we try to reward the positive ones.
To be fair, it works to a degree.
But most of the time, it doesn’t.
The same kids end up with huge stacks of yellow cards and the rest get just one or two. Few students actually change their behavior. They just become virtue signalers whenever an adult is present.
Moreover, there’s an incredible amount of pressure on teachers to not just instruct but to closely observe every student’s behavior and constantly give positive reinforcement to those doing what should be the norm.
And that’s not even mentioning the frequent disruptions necessary to reward those children who can best navigate the system.
But that’s only one way of addressing the problem of bad behavior.
But it only goes so far in the halls, the cafeteria and during unstructured times.
Inside the classroom is another beast altogether – as it always has been.
Ever since I first started teaching more than two decades ago, it’s been necessary to work to achieve a classroom culture.
The teacher has to expend significant time and energy with the students as a whole and each student individually to set up a mini-society where each member gets respect by giving respect.
We try to set up the environment so everyone feels safe and involved, everyone is accepted for who they are, comfortable to be themselves and feels empowered to take the chances necessary to learn.
This means: (1) testing students’ abilities in SEL, (2) holding teachers accountable for student behaviors, and (3) pretending educators are developmental psychologists.
When it comes to the way students interact outside of the class, teachers should be part of the planning process but the main responsibility of conducting it should be with administrators.
And, finally, we mustn’t ignore the responsibility of parents and guardians.
We must free parents from overwork and professional pressures so they can do more to teach their children how to interact with others.
It takes a village to raise a child – a village that knows how to communicate with each other and respect each member’s role.
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The Covid-19 pandemic on top of years of corporate sabotage and propaganda have obscured what public education really means and why it is absolutely necessary to the functioning of our society and any possibility of social, racial or economic justice.
Let’s begin by looking at how the current disaster exacerbated an already difficult situation and then consider why we should care enough to fix the mess.
The Pandemic Effect
Public schools got a bloody nose from the Coronavirus crisis.
Issues of masking, contact tracing, safety of immunocompromised students and staff, and when to open or close buildings (among other issues) lead to inevitable dissatisfaction from all fronts.
However, none of these issues should have been decided at the local level in the first place.
Instead, the CDC made conflicting decisions based more on the needs of the economy than public health (many of which were roundly ignored anyway). Then federal and state governments either refused to decide safety protocols leaving it up to individuals or municipalities, or when they did decide matters, they were embroiled in partisan battles over any kind of restrictions.
In fact, it was the failure of federal, state and even local municipal governments that often made public schools the de facto legislators of last resort. And this is something they were never meant to be.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are 567,000 fewer educators in our public schools today than there were before the pandemic. And finding replacements has been difficult. Nationwide, an average of one educator is hired for every two jobs available.
This has left us with a weakened system suffering from more problems than before the pandemic hit.
Why Are Public Schools Important?
Because of what they are and what they represent.
We hear about public education so often – usually in deprecating terms – that we forget exactly what the term signifies.
It is a school where any child can go to get an education.
You don’t have to pay tuition. You don’t have to have a special ability or qualification. You don’t have to be neurotypical, a certain race, ethnicity, belong to a certain faith or socioeconomic status. If you’re living in the US – even if you’re here illegally – you get to go there.
That may seem simple, but it is vitally important and really quite special.
Not all nations have robust systems of public education like we do in the US.
This country has a commitment to every single child regardless of what their parents can afford to pay, regardless of their access to transportation, regardless of whether they can afford uniforms, lunch or even if they have a home.
We simply define education differently. We look at it as a right, not a privilege. And for a full 13 years (counting kindergarten) it’s a right for every child, not just some.
Perhaps even more significant is our commitment to children with special needs.
We have developed a special education system to help children at the edges that many other countries just can’t touch. In some nations these students are simply excluded. In others they are institutionalized. In some countries it’s up to parents to find ways to pay for special services. The United States is one of the only countries where these children are not only included and offered full and free access, but the schools go above and beyond to teach these children well beyond their 12th academic year.
In every authentic public school in the United States these students are included. In math, reading, science and social studies, they benefit from instruction with the rest of the class. And this, in turn, benefits even our neurotypical students who gain lessons in empathy and experience the full range of human abilities.
That isn’t to say the system has ever been perfect. Far from it.
But at least at the very outset what we were trying to do was better than what most of the world takes on. You can’t achieve equity if it isn’t even on the menu.
Without public schools, equity is definitely not on offer.
Public is Better Than Private
That’s really the point.
Charter, cyber and voucher schools are not set up around this ideal.
They are about who is sent away, not about letting everyone in.
The United States is a big country – the third most populous in the world. We have 332,630,000 people and growing. That’s about 50 million students in public schools.
No private system in the world has ever been able to work at that scale. If we lose our public schools, many kids will be left wanting.
It forces students to compete to get into schools and schools to compete for their very existence. Think of how that affects instruction. Schools have to spend a considerable amount of time and money attracting students to enroll. That’s time and money that doesn’t go to education. It goes to advertising.
Moreover, any school that attracts a surplus of students can choose which ones its wants to enroll. The choice becomes the school’s – not the parents’ or students’. In fact, administrators can turn away students for any reason – race, religion, behavior, special needs, how difficult it would be to teach him or her. This is much different from authentic public schools. There, any student who lives in the district may attend regardless of factors such as how easy or difficult he or she is to educate.
It’s a Darwinian model made to benefit the predators, not the prey. It’s a boon for any unselfconscious businessman who doesn’t mind getting rich stealing an education from children.
We Must Fight
That’s why we must fight to keep our public schools.
But you may luck out. Every privatized school isn’t a scam. Just most of them. So if you have found a charter, cyber or voucher school that is working for your child and doesn’t self-destruct in the time your child is enrolled, you may wonder why you should worry about the rest of us – the kids caught up in a web of privatized predation and neglect?
You have to live in this society. Do you really want to live in a country with a large population of undereducated citizens who cannot figure out how to vote in their own interests? Do you really want to live in a society where crime is a better career choice for those who were not properly educated?
That’s why we can’t let public education disappear.
I know it may sound like an insurmountable task, but saving our public schools can be done.
It will require collective action.
We will need to actively participate in our school board elections, go to school board meetings and possibly even run to serve on the board, ourselves.
Many people are upset with what local boards did during the pandemic, but the way to solve this isn’t to flee to schools without democratic principles. It is to seize those principles and make them work for you and your community.
And to do that, we need real political change at every level of government – local, municipal, state and federal.
None of this is easy. All of it takes work.
But it is the fight we must wage if we are ever to keep our democracy.
It is the fight we must win to create the better world our children deserve.
Public schools are worth saving, but it is up to you and me to do it.
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If there’s one thing people love to argue about, it’s charter schools.
Go to any school board meeting, PTA forum or editorial page, and you’re bound to see folks from all different walks of life getting red in the face over these institutions.
But what are they anyway? And why do they generate so much passionate disagreement?
To answer these questions and many more, I’m going to examine five of the most pernicious myths about charter schools, debunk the fallacies and come to the simple truths.
1. Charter Schools are Public Schools
That’s what charter school supporters say, anyway. But it’s only partially true.
Charter schools were invented in 1991 and only exist in 43 states and the District of Columbia. They enroll about 6% of the students in the country – roughly three million children.
To be fair, some charter defenders will argue that since they are free from the same regulations as public schools, they can cut costs WITHIN their institutions and provide the same services for less. However, they never return that savings to the taxpayers. They simply cut services for their students and then pocket the savings. Lowering quality may be a way to cut costs, but it’s not exactly an innovation – and certainly not something to be envied.
This may be cost effective to the bureaucrats and profiteers running charter schools, but it is not a savings to you and me – to speak nothing of how it hurts the students hoping to receive a quality education.
So do charter schools save money?
QUICK ANSWER: NO!
3. Students do Better Academically in Charter Schools
This is what it says on all those charter school advertisements you see popping up everywhere. But is it true?
The problem with answering that is one of apples and oranges. How do you fairly compare charter and public school students when each group is so different?
Meanwhile, authentic public schools can’t do that. They take all comers.
As a result, charter schools can APPEAR to do better for their students but that appearance is due to privileged rules not better teaching or academic programs.
According to a 2010 Mathematica Policy Research study funded by the federal government, middle-school students who were selected by lottery to attend charter schools performed no better than their peers who lost out in the lottery and attended nearby public schools. This was the most rigorous and most expensive study of charter school performance commissioned by the US Department of Education, and it found no overall positive benefit for charter schools.
And there have been many others. A 2016 study found that Texas charter schools had no overall positive impact on test scores and, in fact, had a negative impact on students’ earnings later in life.
So, taken as a whole, do charter schools outperform authentic public schools?
QUICK ANSWER: NO!
4. Charter Schools are About Innovation
This was, in fact, one of the selling points of the charter school concept when it was first proposed. Being freed of the regulations that authentic public schools have to abide by would allow charter schools to be laboratories for innovation.
Moreover, those few charter schools that do engage in creative practices such as organizing the curriculum around a theme like creative arts or racial justice issues aren’t doing anything that isn’t already being done at authentic public schools – specifically magnet and lab schools.
The creativity and innovation you find at most charter schools is in the accounting department – finding new ways to reduce the services students would find at the neighborhood public school and redefining the savings as profit. That and circumventing conflict of interest regulations to allow the corporation that manages the charter school to buy properties from itself at a hefty mark up.
Is any of this innovation?
QUICK ANSWER: NO!
5. Charter Schools Improve Civil Rights
This is perhaps the most often cited benefit of charter schools. In fact, the impression has been that charters are the choice of people of color and serve them better than their neighborhood public school.
However, the facts show a somewhat different reality.
Are these schools doing a better job of meeting the needs of these children? A 2016 report from UCLA casts doubt on this idea.
Charter schools are notorious for suspending their black students at much higher rates than their white students. While suspensions for students of color are high at public schools as well, they are much more extreme at charter schools.
More than 500 charter schools suspended Black students 10 percent more often than white students. Moreover, the same figure holds for students with disabilities at 1,093 charter schools. In fact, 374 charter schools suspended 25% of their entire student bodies at least once.
However, this increased segregation isn’t just something that affects Black charter school students. It affects white charter school students, as well.
In the first case, the charter schools end up with a disproportionate percentage of Black students and the white students are left in the public schools. In the later case, the Black students are left in the authentic public schools and the white kids flee to the charter schools.
Both cases are not good for civil rights. They allow students of color to be targeted for disinvestment and reductive curriculum while further privileging the white students.
The idea that it is somehow in the best interest of children of color to be provided with schools containing fewer safety precautions is kind of insulting.
Far from improving civil rights, charter schools too often violate them.
“With the expansion of charter schools and their concentration in low-income communities, concerns have been raised within the African American community about the quality, accessibility and accountability of some charters, as well as their broader effects on the funding and management of school districts that serve most students of color.”
Black Lives Matter organizers also called for a charter school moratorium. Charters, they wrote, represent a shift of public funds and control to private entities. Along with “an end to the privatization of education,” the Movement for Black Lives organizers are demanding increased investments in traditional community schools and the health and social services they provide.
Moreover, the Journey for Justice Alliance – a coalition of grassroots community, youth, and parent-led organizations in over 30 cities – has gone even further calling for an end to all school privatization.
The organization posted on it’s Website:
“The evidence is clear and aligns with the lived experience of parents, students and community residents in America’s cities: school privatization has failed in improving the education outcomes for young people. There is no such thing as “school choice” in Black and Brown communities in this country. We want the choice of a world class neighborhood school within safe walking distance of our homes. We want an end to school closings, turnarounds, phase-outs, and charter expansion.”
So do charters improve civil rights?
QUICK ANSWER: NO!
There are a lot of myths spread about charter schools – many of them being propagated by the charter school industry, itself.
Most of these are not facts; they are marketing.
While there are some charter schools that do a decent job educating children, the charter school concept is deeply flawed.
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To answer that question, we have to understand how we got here in the first place – where these kinds of assessments came from in the US and how they became the guiding policy of our public schools.
From the very start, it had serious consequences for public policy. The results were used to rationalize the forced sterilization of 60,000 to 70,000 people from groups with low test scores, thus preventing them from “polluting” the gene pool.
However, Brigham’s greatest claim to fame was the creation of the Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT) to keep such undesirables out of higher education. These tests were not central to school curriculum and mainly used as gatekeepers with the SAT in particular still in wide use today.
The problem then – as now – is that standardized tests aren’t very good assessments. They work okay for really simple things like rudimentary math. However, the more complex a skill you’re assessing, the more inadequate the tests. For example, imagine just trying to have a conversation with someone where your only choices of reply were limited to four canned responses. That’s a multiple-choice assessment. The result is a testing system that selects against the poor and minorities. At best, it reproduces the economic and racial disparities of society. At worst, it ensures those disparities will continue into the next generation.
That isn’t to say the system went unchallenged. By the 1960s, the junk science and leaps of logic behind standardized testing were obvious and people began fighting back in court. Black plaintiffs began winning innumerable lawsuits against the testing industry.
Perhaps the most famous case is Hobson v. Hansen in 1967, which was filed on behalf of a group of Black students in Washington, DC. The court ruled that the policy of using tests to assign students to tracks was racially biased because the tests were standardized to a White, middleclass group.
So in the 1980s, the Reagan administration published “A Nation at Risk,” a campfire tale about how America’s public schools were failing. Thus, the authors argued we needed standardized testing to make American children competitive in a global marketplace.
For instance, it concluded that average student test scores had decreased but didn’t take into account that scores had actually increased in every demographic group. It compared two decades worth of test scores, but failed to mention that more students took the test at the end of that period than at the beginning, and many of the newer students were disadvantaged. In other words, it compared test scores between an unrepresentative group at the beginning of the comparison with a more representative group at the end and concluded that these oranges were nothing like the apples they started with. Well, duh.
Most people weren’t convinced by the disaster capitalism at work here, but the report marks a significant moment in the standardization movement. In fact, this is really where our modern era began.
It took an additional two decades, until 2001, for President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation to require standardized testing in ALL public schools.
With bipartisan support, Bush tied federal funding of schools to standardized test performance and annual academic progress. And from then on, the die was cast. This policy has been upheld through both Republican and Democratic regimes.
From the 1980s to 2022 we’ve had wide scale standardized testing in our schools. That’s roughly 40 years where the entirety of what is done in public school has been organized around these assessments. They drive the curriculum and are the ultimate benchmark by which success or failure is judged. If this policy was ever going to work, it would have done so by now.
However, it has achieved NONE of its stated goals.
NCLB specifically stated that all children would be proficient in reading and math by 2014. That has not happened. Despite spending billions of dollars on remediation and completely reorganizing our schools around the assessments, test scores have remained mostly static or even decreased.
NCLB also championed the idea that competing for test scores would result in better teachers. However, that didn’t happen either. Instead, educators were forced to narrow the curriculum to cover mostly what was assessed, reduce creativity and critical thinking, and teachers who served poor and minority students were even punished for doing so.
If the purpose of standardized testing was all the things the law purported, then it was a decades long failure. It is the policy equivalent of slamming your head into a wall repeatedly and wondering why you aren’t moving forward. (And where did this headache come from?)
If, however, the purpose of standardized testing was to fulfill Friedman’s privatization dreams, then it was a resounding success. Public schools still persist, but they have been drained, weakened and in many ways subverted.
Look at the evidence.
Standardized testing has grown from a $423 million industry before 2001 to a multi-billion dollar one today. If we add in test prep, new text books, software, and consultancy, that figure easily tops the trillion dollar mark.
Huge corporations make the tests, grade the tests and then sell remediation materials when students fail. It’s a huge scam.
But that’s not the only business created by this policy. Test and punish opened entirely new markets that hadn’t existed before. The emphasis on test scores and the “failing schools” narrative stoked unwarranted distrust in the public school system and a demand for more privatized alternatives.
Chief among these was charter schools.
The first charter school law was passed in 1991 in Minnesota. It allowed for the creation of new schools that would have special agreements (or charters) with states or districts to run without having to abide by all the usual regulations. Thus, the school could go without an elected board, pocket public money as private profit, etc. The bill was quickly copied and spread to legislatures across the country by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).
However, charter schools are rife with fraud and malfeasance. For instance, more than a quarter of charter schools close within 5 years of opening. By year 15, roughly 50% of charter schools close. That’s not a stable model of public education. It’s a get rich quick scheme. And since these types of schools are free from the kinds of regulations, democratic governance and/or transparency that keeps authentic public schools in check, another charter school scandal pops up almost every day.
But let’s not forget school vouchers. Before high stakes testing, the idea of using public money to pay for private or parochial schools was widely considered unconstitutional. Now about 4% of US students go to private and parochial schools some of which are funded with school vouchers. This is an option in 32 states and the District of Columbia, and more than 600,000 students participated in a voucher, scholarship tax credit or education savings account program last school year, according to EdChoice, a pro-voucher and school choice group.
In short, they’re subsidies for wealthier kids at the expense of the middle class and disadvantaged.
Without standardized testing, it is impossible to imagine such an increase in privatization.
High stakes testing is a Trojan horse. It is a way to secretly undermine and weaken public schools so that testing corporations, charter schools and voucher schools can thrive.
Judged by its own metrics of success, standardized testing is an abject failure. Judged by the metric of business and school privatization it is a rousing success.
And that’s why it has been so hard to discontinue.
This is corporate welfare at its finest, and the people getting rich off our tax dollars won’t allow us to turn off the flow of funding without a fight.
On the right, policymakers are often boldly honest about their goals to bolster privatization over public schools. On the left, policymakers still cling to the failed measures of success testing has not been able to meet time-and-again.
However, both groups support the same system. They only give different reasons.
It is past time to wake up and smell the flowers.
If we want to ensure education dollars go to education and not profiteers, we need to end standardized testing.
If we want to help students learn to the best of their abilities, we need to stop gaslighting them with faulty measures of success or failure.
If we want to allow teachers to do the best for their students, we need to stop holding them back with antiquated eugenicist shackles.
And if we truly want to save our public school system, we have to stop propping up privatization.
In short, we need to end standardized testing.
The sooner, the better.
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We want our kids to grow up to be smart, charming and successful. We don’t want them to lose their tempers over a joke – no matter how tasteless – and resort to violence.
Maybe this comes off as just some white dude clutching his pearls.
So when a person like me (who lives this reality day-in, day-out) sees something like this on a nationally televised broadcast, it’s a bit more personal.
My students and I just read an article about Smith in class.
It went through his entire career from Philadelphia high school kid to popular rap star to television and movie fame. Then my students had to write about what attributes Smith had that helped him become successful.
We talked about Will in depth.
Just about everybody knew and loved him. We were all excited he was up for another Academy Award and hoped that this would finally be the year he won.
And he actually did win Best Actor for his performance in “King Richard.”
This was supposed to be a triumph, a moment of increased representation for people of color.
Instead, it was yet another example of toxic masculinity.
You can praise Smith for defending his wife, but he took a verbal situation and made it a physical confrontation.
What he did would get anyone else arrested.
I’m not saying I wish he had gone to jail. I’m not saying he should have been stripped of his award.
But there should have been a consequence – SOMETHING!
He should have been asked to leave the ceremony, at least. Someone could have accepted the Oscar on his behalf.
Yet since there was nothing – NOTHING – he even got to make a tearful acceptance speech – that sends a pretty clear message to kids.
It says that this kind of behavior is okay. Maybe even praiseworthy.
Every ill in our society comes back to our public schools.
Malnutrition, addiction, crumbling infrastructure, absent parents, lack of social safety net, racism, prejudice and toxic cultural norms.
This is one of the main reasons so many teachers are leaving the profession.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are 567,000 fewer educators in our public schools today than there were before the pandemic. And finding replacements has been difficult. Nationwide, an average of one educator is hired for every two jobs available.
We need the rest of society to step up, not sink into the muck.
We had hoped for more from Will.
In the aftermath of all this, people have almost entirely forgotten what sparked the confrontation.
Chris Rock made a cheap joke about Jada Pinkett Smith, who was bald because she’s suffering from alopecia.
This is an illness I’ve suffered from myself – that my mother still suffers from.
Rock crossed a line not because he was making fun of Smith’s wife, but because he was ridiculing someone because of a medical condition.
If Smith hadn’t resorted to violence (perhaps if he had just said something instead), we’d be talking about Rock, not Smith.
But in crossing the line from words to fists, he obscured the point.
Violence is only justified in self defense – against in-coming violence.
Maybe you don’t want to admit it.
Maybe you love Will Smith so much you refuse to admit that he was wrong.
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There are black kids and white kids, Muslim kids and Christian kids, Latinos and Lithuanians, Italians and Iranians, girls, boys and all genders in between.
There are tall kids and short kids. Fat kids and thin kids. And, yes, some kids who like other kids in ways which all adults might not approve.
However, some people are too juvenile to deal with it – they can’t even say the word or can’t even endure someone else saying it!
That’s not so bad when you’re 13 and terrified of your own sexuality, anxious that anyone might question your cis privilege.
You still have time to grow out of such sophomoric hijinks.
Silencing the grown-ups in school won’t change who the kids are. It will just forbid us from mentioning reality. It will permit us to recognize only the tiniest fraction of who our students are and leave a de facto shroud over the rest.
I refuse to turn my classroom into a closet.
It might make the most bigoted adults feel better. It might relieve grown-up fears that just talking about other ways to live is enough to mold someone into something against their nature.
As if such a thing were possible.
But it won’t help the kids.
People don’t become their sexuality. They discover who they were all along – and ultimately no piece of legislation can stop that. It can make that search more difficult, painful and riddled with guilt. But you are who you are.
It’s regressive shame-based norms like these that encourage little boys to bash those who are different.
That make them feel the only safety lies in violence against the other so no one questions who they are, themselves.
That scares them enough to giggle at a three-letter word embedded in a poem.
And speaking of my giggle goose, eventually he got himself under control.
Before the end of the period he came back to the table.
Silently, swiftly, and soberly, he sat down with the rest of us ready to continue discussing “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Goodnight.”
Not a titter or laugh.
It wasn’t until a week later that he turned to me with a smile and asked:
“Mr. Singer, did you have a gay weekend?”
I did, Buddy. I did.
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I tried to compile a list of things that every teacher knows. I thought it might be helpful to see what kinds of things all teachers understand but that the general public probably doesn’t grasp.
Special education is vitally important but it is an unfunded mandate that demands teachers and schools provide services without providing the funding or tools to get things done.
Teachers absorb student trauma. Whether intentionally or not, students often hurt their teachers – emotionally and/or physically. Teachers sometimes hurt their students.
Teachers are not paid a fair wage for the work they do, the amount of education required to get the job, and the impact they have on the lives of their students.
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