Education Isn't Transactional, Either

An Arkansas state legislator has introduced a bill that would reduce breakfasts for students in schools that don't meet certain reading goals.

To wit: We're not gonna pay for food if the kids can't read. So there.

That'll fix 'em. Darn kids. Think they can get away with free food. They just stand by the trough and scarf. We're teaching them to be socialists, by golly.

Not that simple and he knows it. What he wants is better test scores, so then the cereal boxes can be opened wider. Making them starve a little for their breakfasts will teach them that there are no free lunches, darn it. Either.

This is what happens when first, we have a president who considers all wishes to be achievable through trade-offs and is thus open to having his methodologies copied up and down the line; second, when someone who follows him blindly thinks kids think the same way; third, we are tied to test scores as a measurement of learning so tightly that all deals can be made with them at the centerpiece; and fourth, that anything that ties something extra to government money spent justifies that attachment.

Underlying it all is, of course, race and the assumption of laziness that accompanies it. You're just not trying hard enough, is the hidden message here, as if to really try to read will gain the results it desires, especially with kids 6 or 7 or 8 years old.

What are they supposed to do, stare at the words longer and somehow they'll sink in, the way parents figure that if the kids sit at the dinner table and are made to stare at the liver longer, it'll somehow taste better? (It's good for you! Trust us!) Do the standardized tests get to be more fun with better concentration? That's not always easy to do.

I worked with union and teaching staff in Little Rock early during the last decade. I watched the results of standardized testing on both teachers and kids. It wasn't pretty.

Testing can go on for hours without a bathroom break. If you have to go to the bathroom while performing any task, don't you get a little uncomfortable? Don't you find it difficult to concentrate? And don't you finish what you're doing as fast as possible in anticipation of that bathroom break, perhaps making mistakes along the way?

Uh-huh. Doesn't that skew the test results? Too?

I mean, what if two kids had to go to the bathroom at the same time and, because they couldn't care less about yet another standardized test, they told each other the answers? And what if those answers were actually correct? Yikes! They might be mistaken for being--smart! (And they would be smart, the same way 45 is smart: smart at scheming to get around a system) Besides, that would also be evidence of cooperative learning, which is--breathe deep now--socialism!

The real kicker took place, and perhaps still does, when a test monitor (most likely a teacher) in Little Rock made the horrendous (?) mistake of directing a confused student toward a particular page. Apparently, they weren't supposed to do that. That supposedly skews the test averages because it makes one student's scores better than they would otherwise have been if they'd have taken extra time to find the correct page and, just maybe, finished all the questions instead of gaping around confused and using up the time--as if that would make the whole school look so much better.

With the swiftness of certainty that they had breached some kind of a locked-down chamber, the offending adults were escorted out of the building immediately and took weeks to get back inside. Why? Because the total average of scores would mean the difference between whether a school, and thus a district, received the aid they would have otherwise gotten, or not gotten. Once again, it was all about the scarce money, and the very idea that eight- and nine-year-olds might be pawns in this much bigger game of zero-sum, succeed-or-dry-up mentality. Trying to be helpful, therefore, is fundamentally dishonest, even though that defines teaching: It's what we do and what parents want us to do.

I had to represent some of these people. It still boggles my mind. And the one argument I couldn't make--that standardized testing is there for each individual and not to determine the competence of an entire school or district--was the one that would blow all this up and put it back where it belongs.

Small wonder about the enormous scandals that took in places like Chicago and Atlanta, where teachers were guilty of giving test questions to students ahead of time. My reaction was then and is now: What did you expect to happen? Who do you think you were kidding? The teachers might have been doing that out of compassion instead of greed, the likes of which might be lost upon conservatives who believe that competition should determine all outcomes.

And yet, and yet--Arne Duncan was appointed Secretary of Education partly because he blew up the scandal in Chicago. It was Obama's admission that the country had gone the standardized route and that it needed a tough overseer--to legitimize the testing, not to question, challenge, change or diminish the effects of it. The ugly monster in the room was too big to eject--wasn't worth the energy it would have taken after No Child Left Behind left that legacy behind--so it kept its seat at the table.

Both parties, then, contributed to our losing perspective about the meaning of standardized testing because both tied money to its results. It only stands to reason that someone, at some point, tries to tie it to paying for food, to dangle it in front of children so that they fill the bubbles correctly on those score sheets. If you're stupid, the thinking goes, you'll starve. So then you won't be stupid. Will you?

But at the other end of the economic spectrum, in the affluent place in which I taught, where table manners at banquets were the only food issue, I saw deals being cut between parents and students so that certain privileges would be given or removed according to grade improvements. And they worked for a while. They always work for a while. But never forever, because education is its own gain and has its own value. And can't be quantified.

So I get where this legislator is coming from. But if education becomes transactional the way this president wants to make everything else, we've completely missed the point of it. I haven't heard Betsy DuVos raise an objection to this awful proposal. Have you?

Once you go down the stairs, there's always the basement. We're just about there in education. Too.

Be well. Be careful. I'll see you down the road.


Mister Mark