John Thompson: Time to Kill the Testing Vampire
Guest post by John Thompson.
My three decades of experiences dealing with the crack and gangs era of the 1980s, and then teaching in inner city schools, taught me to have an even keel. I'll never forget, however, the Friday night in 1993 driving home from our football game. Stunned, I wondered if we were witnessing the collapse of society as we knew it.
During the 1980s AIDS epidemic and after the "Hoova" set of the L.A. Crips street gang took over my part of Oklahoma City, I fell in love with children in my neighborhood who had endured trauma beyond anything that I could conceive, and I became a teacher. Virtually overnight, Supply Side economics spurred deindustrialization and wrecked families. Within a decade, almost every good-paying manufacturing job disappeared from our town. Our state had long been known for its tragic history of booms and busts, hopes raised and crushed. As an academic historian, I had documented some of the worst suffering in modern American history; now I saw the unfolding of the same type of tragedy.
Were we now experiencing a world historical collapse comparable to the Dust Bowl or the Okie Movement?
My memory may be playing tricks on one point. A couple of years later, I often drove over a hill on NE 23rdstreet, saw the smoke and rubble of the Murrah Federal Building and wanted to cry. That night, as I recall, I was briefly cheered by the distant beauty of that doomed edifice.
That evening, every five or ten minutes, I broke up a gang-related fight or a drug deal. I was part of a team of parents, police, deputy sheriffs, and teachers who just tried to get us through the night without a disaster. We sure didn't try to restrain the dealers or the combatants. It was simply a matter of keeping the teens moving for 3-1/2 hours.
Briefly, during our team's goal line stand, it looked like we could watch some of the game. ThereJohn Thompson: Time to Kill the Testing Vampire - Living in Dialogue - Education Week Teacher: