Manipulating test score release: “First, you’ve got to get mad!”
Why is it important to write about Cami Anderson’s decision to manipulate the release of the latest results of state test scores? Here is why:
Imagine your life, your livelihood, is based on a set of numbers over which you have no or, at best, very little control. Depending on how those numbers go, you will or will not have a job. Will or will not be able to pay your mortgage, your kids’ tuition, your car payments, your utility bills, your grocery tab.
Imagine these same numbers are important to a group of strangers who have a very different agenda than yours. Strangers who don’t care what happens to you or your life but they do very much care about their own ambitions. One of them, for example, wants to be, of all things, the president of the United States. Another is a woman who, from a distance, would appear to mental health specialists as, at best, a narcissist and megalomaniac who thinks—for no good reason—she’s got the answers to persistent questions about the best way to educate children. There are others involved as well—unelected political bosses whose fortunes depend on how you are treated, legislators without spines, union leaders who are empowered to calculate risks for you but who may be factoring in their own chances of keeping their jobs.
Imagine, also, that, because your jobs are supported with public funds, legions of twits believe—without the least bit of informed evidence—that a national history that includes slavery, suppression, Jim Crow laws, economic inequality, and grinding racism, has less to do with whether children learn than your own personal Manipulating test score release: “First, you’ve got to get mad!” | Bob Braun's Ledger: