Dear White People, Your Kids Are Getting Screwed, Too!
The Atlanta cheating scandal and the White middle-class revolt against standardized testing have more in common than you think: They’re a repudiation of our failed education policies.
The Atlanta cheating scandal and growing White middle-class anger over the explosion of Common Core tests have more in common than you might think.
From Black teachers being imprisoned for forging answers on tests and Black parents being jailed for “stealing” a better education for their kids, to White middle-class parents organizing a nationwide revolt against standardized testing, we are seeing a repudiation of our failed educational policies. Many might see these as totally separate issues, reflecting the power of race and class, but each represent varied responses to an immoral national strategy that had its major impact on inner-city communities more than a decade ago and has now targeted suburban schools.
The architects of this policy, men with deep pockets like Bill Gates helped by George W. Bush and Barack Obama, decided to use standardized tests to achieve education “equity” despite their racist origins and character.
And even more strangely, many civil rights groups and leaders promoted testing by selling it as the answer to eliminating the notorious achievement gap, and encouraging their constituents to embrace this new form of oppression. So desperate to have some policies to promote equity when the country was turning conservative, civil rights leaders forgot their historic opposition to high stakes testing, with tragic results. And some groups became poverty pimps and virtue rackets that sold out for corporate money. At the end of the day, the rhetoric of civil rights set the stage for the educational holocaust in communities of color, and for the Atlanta scandal.
Where were the civil rights leaders when the Atlanta educators were arrested? Where were they when they were being given sentences worse than people participating in organized crime?
Historically, standardized tests have been the basis of narratives claiming the genetic and cultural inferiority of Black children. Throughout the early 20th century, these tests provided the “scientific legitimacy” for segregation, prompting widespread opposition from Black psychologists and sociologists who identified them as a White supremacist scheme.
The 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision did not result in an abandonment of racially biased testing. Testing data has since rationalized funding disparities, the achievement gap, and policies resulting in the cradle-to-prison pipeline. It would be akin to using Jim Crow to facilitate integration, or the KKK to bring about law and order. Oh, wait …
No Child Left Behind changed the whole testing landscape in Black and poor communities. Despite claims that testing will set us free, America’s great testing experiment has left Black and Latino kids behind.
The test results measure student achievement but also can be used in teacher evaluations, overall school report cards, and as high-school graduation requirements. Opponents say the exams distract from real learning, put added stress on students and staff, waste resources—especially in poor urban districts—and contribute to the privatization of public education. Schools that score badly are sometimes shuttered, turned over to management companies, or become charter schools.
If the goal of testing was to improve educational outcomes, the results have been as transparent as Dick Cheney’s racism toward President Obama. The testing industrial complex is not improving outcomes for Black children, teachers, schools, neighborhoods, communities or our nation. It is NOT making the U.S. more globally competitive. And it definitely will NOT prepare tomorrow’s workforce to thrive, unless of course the point is to train students to become compliant low-wage workers.
Consider a report released by the Schott Foundation for Public Education, which analyzed more than a decade of data on young Black males. Their prognosis: “Too little progress and evidence of recent deterioration. Despite stated intentions of federal education policies, gaps in scores in reading and math tests on the National Assessment of Education Progress between black males and their white peers continue to be wide. Nationally, 38 percent of white males scored at or above proficient on the 2013 NAEP assessment in reading, but only 17 percent of Latino males and 12 percent of Black males did. In math, 13 percent of Black males scored at or above proficient on the 2013 NAEP Grade 8 math assessment, while scores were 21 percent of Latino males and 45 percent of White males.”
And it’s no surprise that graduation rates suffered: The Schott Foundation reported that “of the 48 states where data were collected, in 35 states and the District of Columbia, black males remain at the bottom of four-year high school graduation rates. (Latino males were at the bottom in 13 states.) We as a nation have devoted enormous amounts of time and money to the focused goal of increasing test scores, and we have almost nothing to show for it.”
These failures were predictable, leaving one to consider if the goal was not improved educational success but instead privatization, and a systemic effort to dismantle and destroy public education within inner city communities. Schools were closed; teachers were fired; and culturally appropriate curriculum was left by the wayside. Kids were scapegoated for the failures of school districts while Black and Latino communities were terrorized with pressure to raise test scores under threat of additional school closure, lost jobs, and elimination of communal control.
For the first time, the test results were not just penalizing students who didn’t do well—teachers, administrators, and entire schools were punished. Since NCLB, thousands of schools have been closed around the country. Huge numbers of teachers of color have been removed. So what you have is a racial and ethnic cleansing of teachers of color in places like Houston, New Orleans, Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, and Washington, D.C. because of pressure to raise test scores. And then they were replaced by a revolving door of young White inexperienced teachers with no ties to our communities, or connection to our culture and our children.
This is where Atlanta comes in.
The culmination of this history, from Jim Crow testing to standardized testing, has been on full display in Atlanta, as 11 public school employees face up to 20 years for
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