Fighting back against mandatory school testing, Part 2
“The bottom line is that standardized testing can continue only with the consent and cooperation of the educators who allow those tests to be distributed in their schools—and the parents who permit their children to take them. If we withhold that consent, if we refuse to cooperate, then the testing process grinds to a halt.”
—Alfie Kohn, parent, author and education expert
(photo from Peg With Pen)
Jan. 7 has been declared National Opt Out Day by the grassroots organization United Opt Out National, whose goal is to eliminate high-stakes testing (HST) in public education. With the unreachable goal of 100-percent student proficiency in math and reading by 2014, the bipartisan No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act and its component standardized testing will result—in fact is designed to result—in an unprecedented, manufactured event of 100-percent school failure. Education privatizers are salivating like hyenas.
Fighting back against mandatory school testing: It’s my way or the highway, says No Child Left Behind—but is it really?
The red pillow takes the least space. The yellow pillow takes more space than the blue pillow. Which of the following is not true:
- The red pillow takes more space than the blue pillow.
- The yellow pillow takes more space than the red pillow.
- The blue pillow takes more space than the red pillow.
- The red pillow takes less space than the yellow pillow.
- The blue pillow is the one I will bury my face in while I cry myself to sleep because my frustrated child told me today, “I’m a loser.”
That there is a real homework question (mostly) from my child’s third week in first grade. She’s in a language immersion program and isn’t reading fluently in any language just yet, so problems like these need to be dictated to her. This is typical of the state-mandated curriculum taught every day at her public school and of the battery of tests she’ll take during the next 11 years beginning this past October. Never let it be said I didn’t offer you readers birth control.
Folks, if you think the people leading us today are fucked up, wait until you see what our schools are going to churn out in the next decade and beyond.
Exactly one year ago, San Diego Unified School District Superintendent Bill Kowba spoke on an episode of KPBS’s These Days radio show about a “lost generation” of children.
“If you were a kindergartner enrolled about 2007,” Kowba said, “and you moved forward, you’re in about the third grade now or so. All we have done is reduce the opportunities for you as a student.”
With the end of 2011 comes a much-needed four-week break for my generational refugee. For one month, she’ll be free from the barrage of multiple-choice, fill-in-the bubble worksheets and the drone of standardized-testing-based curriculum that now comprise the meat of our public-education system. Designed to prep the little ones for the revolving door of tests, the classwork being pushed is also perfect for squashing the curiosity right out of them.
According to Diane Ravitch, an education historian, former supporter of No Child Left Behind and outspoken critic of high-stakes testing, “No high-performing nation tests its students every year or uses student test scores to evaluate teacher quality.” That tells us a lot about our nation’s direction. Behold, our testing:
California students are to take federally mandated tests (the NAEP in grades 4, 8 and 12); state-mandated tests (STAR, which includes the CST, CAPA and CAMA tests for grades 2 through 11, and the CAHSEE in grades 10 through 12); and district-mandated tests (math-, science- and literacy-benchmark exams administered three times each year to grades 1 through 8 and end-of-course exams in grades 6 through 12—there are no cool acronyms for these). More tests are coming, too, thanks to Obama’s Blueprint. Are your eyes going all psychedelic kaleidoscope on you right now? Just wait. I’m about to add some neon.
Counted among the “voluntary” tests are the AP, EAP and IB exams. There are the college entrance exams—ACT, PSAT, SATI and SATII (how voluntary are these?)—that can be taken more than once! There’s the CELDT for new English-language learners and the infamous-amongst-parents GATE test because it supposedly identifies the cream of the crop. Of course, none of this includes the old-fashioned test—like the math and spelling tests my daughter takes at the end of each week.
With tests like these—and an ever-shortening school year—who has room for meaningful, inspiring instruction in any subject, let alone math and literacy? Certainly not teachers, who are at once hamstrung by the standards and made out to be the scapegoats of all that’s wrong with public education. Why anyone would want to be a teacher right now is beyond me.
I’ve said before that being a parent means going through school all over again. Nobody tells you this, and had I known way back when, I might have made a different decision about my future, settling on a reliable dog-sitter and lots of world travel instead.
More likely, I would have pressed ahead with my naiveté, thinking—like I did in 2005—How bad can it be? Schools have got to be better by the time my child is 5. Isn’t that quaint? The thought is so adorable that I want to pat it on the head and send it to bed with a warm cup of milk. And even if I’d been able to imagine a worst-case educational scenario, it still would’ve been a termite’s dust tower compared with the Mt. Kilimanjaro shit-pile that it is.
So, here I am at base camp of the shit-pile, faced with the daunting task of navigating my route to the top. Testing looms, and it pisses me off.
I’m angry that my kid is being held hostage to tests by a system that threatens to take away her school’s funding if she and her schoolmates don’t perform well. I’m angry that my child’s class spent an hour, during the math benchmark test in October, transcribing their answers from the test sheet to the Scantron sheet. I’m angry that whatever changes are coming to this system will not be soon enough—or even the right ones—to change the experience the “lost generation” will have.
I’m not willing to be complicit in it. So, we are opting out of the mandated testing. What? You didn’t know you know you can do that?
(Published Dec. 20, 2011 in San Diego CityBeat.)
A girl and her dog
Alternate title: Happiness
Another alternate title: This right here…
is really unfair to the rest of the world.
But I’m gonna go with title number one.
How much is too much to say?
I wasn’t going to write about the Penn State scandal, because what else could I add?
But yesterday, I watched former Penn State defensive tackle and ESPN analyst Matt Millen discuss the situation with SportsCenter anchor Chris McKendry. In the interview, Millen breaks down (around the 4:30 mark, if you decide to watch it). It’s heart wrenching. But what really struck me was the following exchange:
Anchor: I know as I mentioned Jerry Sandusky, he first spoke to you when he wanted to start the Second Mile foundation. Matt, who is he? Do you know right now?
Matt: What I thought I know or what I know? He is your next door neighbor, you know your whole life. A helpful guy. He is a light hearted guy. He is a smart guy. He is willing to help a person, everything you want. That is the thing that, just, could you see it coming? I sat here. I have known the guy since 1976. I have been in meetings with him. He has been in my home. I go back and think about it, I couldn’t even imagine this.
Millen’s expression when he spoke was one of disgust, exasperation, surprise. It was clear that, in the moment as he said the words “he is your next door neighbor…” he realized he was stating the very cliché that defines the child predator. It’s stunning to see his face as he says the very words that are so often spoken into television news camera by a perpetrator’s friends and neighbors. And it got me to thinking that, uh-huh. This is why we parents worry. Because we all know that the people who most often molest and sexually abuse kids are not random strangers. Too often, they’re people we trust, love and sometimes revere.
Like most parents, Sam and I do everything we can to ensure our daughter’s safety. That’s our job. We have her in our care as much as possible; we choose women child minders; and we opt for women instructors for things like swim lessons. But we cannot control everything. The older Ruby gets, the more she has her own life experiences that don’t include us and that do include exposure to people we do not know. Ruby has a male chess teacher, who has male assistants. She has a male tennis coach. We trust these people with our child. But I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t ever considered the ugly possibilities. I try to push such thoughts from my mind, but I pay close attention. To be clear, I am NOT saying that any of these men are predators. I’m simply saying that I cannot help but be aware that they could be.
So. Given the reality of the danger that 1 in every 4 girls, and 1 in every six boys will be molested in their lifetimes, we choose to talk with Ruby about it. We have a book to guide us on how to discuss the difference between appropriate and inappropriate touching. And once, about six months ago, I took an opening in one of these conversations, to tell Ruby that if anyone ever touches her in a way that makes her feel uncomfortable, and then warns her that she’ll get in trouble if she tells her parents, they are lying.
This was a very difficult conversation to have because I felt like I was introducing my child to an evil with which she shouldn’t be burdened. Should say this stuff to her? I thought. Or should I operate on the if-it-ain’t-broke-don’t-fix-it plan? The superstitious part of me worried that talking about it would somehow make it a self-fulfilling prophecy. But in light of this horrific story, and especially after watching Matt Mullin have that terrible A-ha! moment (“He has been in my home.”), I think I’d be undermining my child’s safety by not giving her the tools to protect herself.
What do you think?
Teaching to the test
My first grader is in a French immersion school where she is learning nothing but French all day, everyday, and therefore cannot read English. She will not have any English instruction until third grade. Keeping this in mind, here is tonight’s fill-in-the-bubble math problem from her math workbook (the same workbook that instructed her to measure lengths using cubes that we do not have at home):
The red pillow takes the least space. The yellow pillow takes more space than the blue pillow. Which of the following is not true (again, imagine bubbles instead of numerals, and the backward thinking in a language you don’t read):
1. The red pillow takes more space than the blue pillow.
2. The yellow pillow takes more space than the red pillow.
3. The blue pillow takes more space than the red pillow.
4. The red pillow takes less space than the yellow pillow.
5. The blue pillow is the one I will bury my face in while I cry myself to sleep because my frustrated child told me today, “I’m a loser.”
Revisiting and oldie, day one
Thanks to an email from a reader, I went back into my archives and re-read two pieces I published in CityBeat that I’m putting here today and tomorrow, not because I don’t have fresh material (do I ever have fresh material), but because both of them still apply. And this one, as serendipity would have it, was published on this day two years ago. Which completely flummoxed me. Had anyone asked me to estimate, I would have said I wrote this six-months ago. God, I’m getting old. Did you know I used to walk ten miles to school, always in a blizzard? Uphill both ways! True story.
******************************************************************
The first night we met Ruby, she pooped in Sam’s hand. It was 11 p.m. in a rented apartment in Chicago. We were exhausted from an entire day of travel, preceded by two sleepless nights spent absorbing the holy-shit-we-have-a-kid realization that most people have nine months to make. Just three days earlier, we were all, I know it’s late, but do you wanna go to the movies? and I think I’ll take a nap before dinner and Forget about dinner. We’re grown-ups! Let’s have martinis and ice cream! It was like we’d slipped through a wormhole and were suddenly wandering around in a parallel universe with zero resemblance to our previous life.
And now here we were, broiling in the oppressive summer heat, two fools crouched on the floor in our underwear, brought to our knees by an 8-day-old human. “How does the diaper work?” we asked each other. We were flailing. Badly.
That’s because we didn’t front load by consuming the What to Expect series like most anticipatory parents. Noooo. Instead, we took an intellectual approach and spent months educating ourselves about raising an adopted baby. An adopted black baby, to be exact. Swaddling’s for the birds, we thought. We will know how to discuss feelings of abandonment!
So we studied about loss, identity and connection, about transracial parenting, white privilege and black history. We took classes and watched documentaries. We learned about the racial hierarchy of adopted children and listened as black adult adoptees discussed the experience of being adopted outside their race. Determined to do right by our future child, we scoured the Internet for resources. And we sifted through reams upon reams dedicated to the importance and care of black hair. We had no clue what a receiving blanket was, but we were prepared for anything.
Except, of course, the need for receiving blankets. And, too, for what we’ve come to refer to as The Soft Serve Incident when—after having been parents for an entire three hours—Sam put his hand where the diaper should have been, in an effort to save the carpet.
After that, we jettisoned our course of study in favor of the less compelling but more pertinent 900-page User Manual. Still, as much as our kid just needed to be fed, clothed and cuddled, all of our diligent research came in handy when faced with every looky-loo and inquisitor who crossed our paths in Target. It was a prep course for something that one cannot prepare for. Truly.
Today, after four years of public parenting and being some sort of perceived expert on All Things Black for too many sheltered people, I admit, it can be tough to remain pleasant. I want to be an advocate for adoption, a staunch ally in the fight against racism and, mostly, to model the best possible responses for my child. But I sometimes struggle to find my balance between kindly addressing curiosity and lashing out at stupidity. I want to be approachable, but I also don’t want to indulge a never-ending cascade of questions from strangers while I’m in the pool helping my kid learn to use her big alligator arms. Not that alligators have big arms, but she doesn’t know that and the imagery is working.
Here’s the thing: Sometimes I just want to hurl my fantasy responses at the too-many nosey barkers of the universe.
I understand, Woman at the Zoo, that your brother’s wife’s uncle’s third cousin’s step-daughter is thinking of adopting if she can’t get pregnant with her second baby. Nevertheless, I will not tell you how much our adoption cost. Incidentally, did you crap yourself in the delivery room? Did you have an episiotomy or did you tear? Do tell!
I know that Ruby and I don’t look alike and that to some folks, this has all the excitement of a 12-car pile-up behind a jack-knifed big rig. But do you really need to know whether I like the color of her skin? Because I’ll tell you right now, Lady at Home Depot, I’m not so much digging the pasty look of yours. Also, you have a booger hanging out of your right nostril, which I would discreetly mention, but I’m not going to, since now you need to know whether I intend to tell my child she was adopted. My answer is: Un-unh. Shhhhh! It’s a secret between you and me!
I, too, learned that black absorbs heat while white reflects it. That doesn’t mean black people get hotter when out in the sun. Last I checked, 98.6 degrees is the normal temperature of a human being who isn’t fighting an infection or in the throes of a new love affair. And to the Woman Who Just Couldn’t Drop It, UVA and UVB rays cause cancer. Sunscreen is for everybody! Oh, and I promise you, there were actual black people living in England in 1968. Don’t argue, there were. They just didn’t live in your neighborhood.
No, I’m not babysitting. No, I’m not “just like Angelina!” And, no, you may not stroke her hair in wide-eyed wonder (though, had you asked first, the answer might have been different). And not that it’s any of your business, Mrs. Electric-Scooter-Rider at Henry’s, she’s not a crack baby; nor does she have Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. By the way, are you riding in that thing because you’re fat or because you’re lazy? I mean, in my opinion, you really could stand to do a little walking.
Look. I know you have questions about why my family looks the way it does. But if your question has to be prefaced with “I don’t want this to come out wrong…” or if you feel a little skeevy before you ask, it’s probably best to simply go on wondering. And if you can’t bear the not knowing, I suggest you jot a note to consult Google when you get home, and let me be just another mom parenting her child
(Shifting gears now…) Me as The Incredible Hulk
Mr. McGee, don’t make me angry. You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.” —David Banner
When you call the dad of your child’s schoolmate to find out if his kid is coming to your kid’s birthday party this coming Friday—since he didn’t RSVP, and your child has begged and begged for her friend to be there, and instead of letting it die like it should, like you’d planned to let it, you follow up, because you want your daughter to have The Best Birthday Ever—when that dad says, yes, his daughter will be at the party, and then adds, “You need to call me on Thursday night to remind me,” take notice. This is foreshadowing.
This is the dad, after all, who spent an entire school year using you by pulling up in his black Mercedes and expecting you to walk his kid the rest of the way to school; by calling to ask that you pay his field-trip fee because he’d forgotten to pay it and was “too tired to drive back to campus”; by asking you to watch his child moments before his on-the-calendar-for-months parent/teacher conference, which you do, only to find out later that he was a no-show. He is unreliable and predictable all at once.
You need to call me on Thursday night to remind me.
Bullshit. You wish you hadn’t called and know you should retract that invitation right then and there. But you feel sorry for his kid, so you decline to be his secretary. “See you Friday,” you say.
OK, OK. Here’s where I have to admit that I didn’t make this call just for Ruby. I am not that altruistic. I can, and frequently do, say no to my child. Like when she wants a fourth sugary topping on her three heaping flavors of fro-yo. “Oh, you have got to be kidding me,” I say, pointing out that she already has Jimmies, white chocolate chips and mini peanut-butter cups. I draw the line at gummy bears.
But where, oh where, to draw the line in this abusive relationship?
I needed to know how much it would take before I would burn down the house and walk away forever. I needed to see if Mr. McGee (not his real name) could actually be a responsible adult and drop his kid at the house at 11:30 a.m. on party day. And so: The call.
Friday morning found me Swiffering my floors and waiting for the Scrubbing Bubbles to do their bathroom-cleaning magic while Ruby and my best friend’s daughter played in the backyard. I was prepping for the onslaught of 11 6-year-old girls, who would show up to trash the place and clog the toilet with absurdly large, scientifically improbable kid poo, when Ruby passed through the living room.
“Faith?!?” she said, looking out our picture window.
I looked up from the pile of dog hair swirling at my ankles, and there was McGee’s daughter standing on our front porch. Alone. Nothing but sunshine and the empty street behind her. It was 10:20 a.m.
My heart began to beat faster; my skin was hot; I could barely see. I was—as I’d learned days earlier in a parenting workshop led by the esteemed Mary Sheedy Kurchinka—entering the “red zone.” This is fight-or-flight stuff, the physiological response to which can include elimination. Parents, if your kid suddenly stops in the produce aisle at Henry’s and pees for no reason, you can be assured she is no longer in the “green zone.” Fortunately, I didn’t wet my pants.
Instead, I met Faith on the porch and calmly asked where her father was. “He had to go to work,” she said. I stood speechless for a few seconds, looking up and down the street as if I could will her father back with my gaze. I wondered if he’d just pushed the child out of his car as he rolled by, talking, as he always is, on his cell phone.
Just as Faith stepped over the threshold to our home, McGee tried to drive his fancy car past my house very fast, without stopping. He’d made a U-turn at the end of the block.
“MGGEE!” I yelled at him. He stopped his car and smiled at me, as if to say, Oh, hey! Funny running into you here! And that’s when it happened. My clothes may have remained intact, but no question: I became The Incredible Hulk. And a little bit Owen Meany.
“IT! IS! TEN-TWENTY!” I shouted, pointing to the spot on my wrist where a watch would be if I wore one. “YOU’RE MORE THAN AN HOUR EARLY! THAT IS NOT OK, MCGEE! THAT IS NOT OK!”
“I’m sorry,” he squeaked. “I have to go to work.”
“THAT IS NOT MY PROBLEM! YOU’VE TAKEN ADVANTAGE OF ME ALL SCHOOL YEAR! I’M DONE, MCGEE! THE PARTY ENDS AT 3! DO NOT BE LATE!”
Then, in slow motion, I picked up one of the chairs on our front porch and broke it over my knee, tossing the splintered legs and shredded rattan onto the walkway in front of me.
You know, our public school system could be flush with money, and that money could be well managed and effectively allocated, and teachers could be revered instead of vilified, and the glut of tests—forced upon America’s kids like Betty Draper forces Sally to eat her Thanksgiving dinner—could be done away with. And yet, the insurmountable problem of sorry-ass parents will remain like radioactive fallout choking the life out of the rest of us.
This was my thought as I turned to walk back inside but was stopped by three catatonic little girls with six very wide eyeballs. Blinking. Blinking. Blinking.
“Well,” I shrugged, as I recalibrated in the green zone. “At least I didn’t swear.”
(As published yesterday in San Diego CityBeat. Sans photos.)
Going the long way, sort of
Until about six weeks ago, we had planned on hopping in the car tonight to begin an epic family trek up the coast. We need to be in Lake Tahoe by Sunday at 2:00 PM because we are attending our first family camp with Pact. More about that later.
The idea was to meander up the coast, stopping when we wanted, wherever we wanted, playing it all by ear. We were going to pack snacks. We were going to play car bingo.
We were going to sing songs and have bonding family time, creating memories that Ruby would cherish for the rest of her life. Of course, that is the ideal version. The reality could have involved threats of pulling over and letting mama out of the car immediately so she could walk home. And in fact, this is likely closer to the reality, since, as luck would have it, the Los Angeles Department of Transportation chose this very weekend to close ten miles of what is arguable the busiest freeway in America, the very one we would have needed to take to get to our destination on time (and don’t believe that photo in the article for a second; the 405 rarely looks that barren).
So serious is this closure, that the DOT has, for the last six weeks, been begging people who do not live in Los Angeles, not to come and telling those that do, to stay home. The closure of this freeway will impact every other freeway in surrounding the general LA area. Which is why we ended up buying overly priced plane tickets. Although, they were less expensive than the divorce that might have resulted from any attempt to drive under these conditions. And fortunately, we’ll still have what is supposed to be a two-hour drive. Bingo, anyone?
If you’ve ever taken the I-405, then you know well the impulse to want to stab yourself in the face. And you also understand what that means for anyone needing to get anywhere this coming weekend. It means something like this:
Six
Then…
And now…
Together we are stronger
A teacher at Ruby’s school organized a rally last Wednesday morning to show support for the six teachers who have in their possession, at this very minute, layoff notices (Ruby’s kindergarten teacher is one of Golden Ticket holders). Yay for creating a healthy work environment! Pfffft. The rally was also aimed at expressing frustration with the district’s handling of…oh…pretty much everything. Parents, teachers and students were instructed to wear red and meet an hour before school. Signs were to be provided.
I woke Ruby early, packed her lunch and over a breakfast of eggs, mixed berry applesauce and vitamins—don’t forget the vitamins!—I explained why we’d be stepping between the raindrops that morning. The discussion went swimmingly. I told her about silly people firing teachers, and she responded with, “Mama, Ella is the best dog in the whole world!” I told her about buses becoming extinct like the dinosaurs, and she sang out “I got no chicken in my chicken pot paahhhh!” When she stood to shake her booty to the sound of her new chant, I knew the conversation was over. I grabbed our umbrellas and hoped something had sunk in.
When we got to the rally, we found that we were the rally. Just the two of us, sign-less in our rain boots, standing on a damp sidewalk as cars whooshed by. Because I don’t usually check my email at 7:40 AM, I missed the rally-canceled-due-to-rain notice to disarm. To think: Thousands upon thousands of folks stood in snow and sleet and freezing temperatures for more than a month in Madison, Wisconsin, this past winter. They slept in their capitol building, too. But here in San Diego, a little marine layer rolls in off the ocean and we need chains on our tires. That is if we don’t call off the job. I’m convinced this type of halfheartedness is why Chargers fans are the only thing lamer than the Chargers.
I was miffed and voiced my opinion to the appropriate source. Poor guy. But I got over it and focused on the so-called teachable moment. On the way to the drop-off area, I talked to Ruby about apathy. Then she placed one kiss on each of my cheeks before wiggling off to class singing, “I got no chicken in my chicken pot paahhhh. I got no chicken in my chicken pot paahhhh.”
The rally was rescheduled for yesterday, and because I support our teachers and our school, and because I want my daughter to learn to stand for what she believes in, I woke her early, packed her lunch and reminded her over breakfast why we were going to stand with teachers in the glorious morning sunlight.
Tonight, when she told her dad about the rally, she said to him, “TEACHERS! YES! TEACHERS! YES! LAYOFFS! NO! LAYOFFS! NO! COUNSELORS! YES! COUNSELORS! YES! CUTBACKS! NO! CUTBACKS! NO!”
I’ll tell you what: That girl most definitely has some chicken in her chicken pot pie.