Test & Punish & Civil Rights
The Murphy Amendment (Premise: the worst parts of NCLB are actually the best parts; let's give them steroids) was one more manifestation of the Civil Rights Argument for Test and Punish. Amendment proposer Chris Murphy (D-Conn) invoked that justification for his test and punish bill, saying that ESEA "has to be a civil rights law."
Kati Haycock is president and founder of the Education Trust, a Gates-funded test-pushing advocacy group that supported NCLB and helped craft the Common Core. She took to her website to call Lily Eskelsen Garcia a liar for claiming that test and punish policies are not a civil rights win. Haycock is just one of the many civil rights advocates who speak out in favor of test and punish. But there is now a large coalition of civil rights advocates who speak out against test and punish, as well.
I've written about this again and again and again and again. But as the reformsters have found a strong tactical advantage in using the civil rights argument to promote test and punish, let me see if I can distill the important points of the argument here:
There Is a Real Concern
The systemic ignoring, underserving, and general neglect of non-white, non-wealthy populations is a real problem. "Do nothing" and "Go back to doing what we used to do" are not viable solutions.
Testing doesn't tell us anything we don't already know
Actually, test scores don't tell us much of anything, because the Big Standardized Tests are narrowly focused, poorly designed, and extremely limited in their scope. Furthermore, we can predict test score results pretty well just using demographic information. So to claim that we would be fumbling in the dark without these tests, with no idea of how to find schools that were in trouble, is simply ridiculous.
Nobody is sending help
Advocates argue that test scores provide political leverage that forces "The System" to respond. - See more at: http://www.progressive.org/news/2015/07/188240/test-punish-civil-rights#sthash.0fK49M6V.dpuf
The Battle Over Education and Civil Rights
“This is a historic moment to end 13 years of legislative malpractice” NEA president Lily Eskelsen Garcia says of the federal K12 education law that Congress is currently hashing out.
Congress has failed to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act ever since George Bush rewrote the law and renamed it No Child Left Behind in 2002.
The original Act, signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson in 1965, was part of a civil-rights-era drive to rectify glaring inequality.
It dealt with disproportionate funding within and among the states. It created grants to help low-income students, built libraries and provided text books to schools in poor areas.
All of that changed with No Child Left Behind.
In the George W. Bush era, U.S. education policy switched from trying to do something about the corrosive effects of poverty to a focus on accountability and standards. Federal funding came with strings attached. Schools serving poor kids were ordered to improve test scores or face sanctions.
The Obama Administration’s Race to the Top initiative continued the basic thrust of No Child Left Behind, offering states flexibility on specific requirements of Federal law if they tied teacher performance evaluations to test scores and pushed other rigorous test-score-improvement plans.
But the backlash against what critics call the “test and punish” approach has snowballed into a major movement over the last two years.
The biggest, hottest debate about the federal education act reauthorization is about whether “test and punish” is a civil-rights cause.
On the one hand, civil rights activists and some of the biggest civil rights groups are suspicious of local school authorities in historically separate and unequal communities and see standardized testing as a legitimate federal effort to make sure poor kids and kids of color are learning to read and do math.
On the other hand, teachers and civil rights activists including Jesse Hagopian, who has united the local NAACP, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the opt-out movement to reject over-testing in Seattle, sees poor, minority kids getting shafted by a stripped down, test-focused education regime.
Progressive legislators who don’t want to side with the Obama-bashing, Common-Core-conspiracist Tea Party Republicans have been caught behind the curve on the popular movement against test-and-punish.
Teacher Steven Singer proclaimed in a recent blog post, “The Democrats May Have Just Aligned Themselves with Test and Punish—We Are Doomed.”
Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, along with almost every other Democrat in the U.S. Senate, supported an amendment to the federal education law that would have kept stringent testing, firing staff who don’t raise scores, and helping students dump schools that fail to measure up.
When Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, introduced the amendment, he said it was because the federal education act “has to be a civil rights law.”
Local civil rights activists in many cities, from New York to New Orleans, Chicago to Seattle,
- See more at: http://www.progressive.org/news/2015/07/188241/battle-over-education-and-civil-rights#sthash.YejVC2bo.dpuf
