Tuesday, February 10, 2015

The Network for Public Education’s 2015 Conference Together, we will save our schools.

The Network For Public Education | We are many. There is power in our numbers. Together, we will save our schools.:

The Network for Public Education’s 2015 Conference Together, we will save our schools.

Please join us for the Network for Public Education 2015 Conference in Chicago from April 24th – 26th – 2015! Click HERE to get the EARLY BIRD Registration rates now! These low rates will last for the month of January. The Network for Public Education’s 2015 Conference will be the place to be this spring, in the historic city of Chicago, home of the Chicago Teachers Union. The theme of the conference is:

“Public Education: Our Kids, Our Schools, Our Communities.”

Chicago from Schoolhouse Live on Vimeo.

The event is being held at the Drake Hotel in downtown Chicago. Here is the link for special hotel registration rates. Here are some of the event details. There will be a welcoming social event 7 pm Friday night, at or near the Drake Hotel — details coming soon.

Featured speakers will be:

Jitu Brown, National Director – Journey for Justice, Kenwood Oakland Community Organization, Network for Public Education Board of Directors
Tanaisa Brown, High School Senior, with the Newark Student Union
Yong Zhao, Author, “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon?“
Diane Ravitch in conversation with
- Lily Eskelsen Garcia, NEA President and
- Randi Weingarten, AFT President
Karen Lewis, President, Chicago Teachers Union

There will be a special optional luncheon on Saturday that will feature a conversation between Edushyster and surprise guests.

There will be dozens of workshops and panels offered by activists from coast to coast. Proposals for these sessions are being solicited by the NPE, and can be submitted HERE until the Jan. 20 deadline.

The organizers worked to make the conference as affordable as possible. Please be aware that the room reservations and food costs offset the use of the hotel space. This conference is priced as cheaply as possible so that the maximum number of people can attend. We are hoping to raise money to provide a limited amount of scholarships. HERE is the link for the scholarship application.

If you would like to make a donation to allow others to attend who otherwise could not afford participating, please go HERE and indicate that this is for the “NPE Conference Scholarship Fund”

WE ARE MANY. THERE IS POWER IN OUR NUMBERS. TOGETHER WE WILL SAVE OUR SCHOOLS.

On Moyers & Company, Diane Ravitch tells Bill Moyers, ”I think what’s at stake is the future of American public education. I believe it is one of the foundation stones of our democracy: So an attack on public education is an attack on democracy.”

A Teacher on Teaching: Confessions of a "Bad Teacher:" I Loved Teaching like a Crack Addict Loves Crack.

A Teacher on Teaching: Confessions of a "Bad Teacher:" I Loved Teaching like a Crack Addict Loves Crack.:

Confessions of a "Bad Teacher:" I Loved Teaching like a Crack Addict Loves Crack.

I'm sorry, I thought I was good. (I'm also sorry I thought the Bengals would win.)

My name is John and I have a problem. For thirty-three years I was a bad teacher but thought I was good. Denial. That’s all it was.

Then, Sunday, I stumbled across an excellent article by Dr. Michael Flanagan and his words gave me strength. You see he’s a bad teacher too.

Dr. Flanagan had to battle through the same agonizing process I must now endure, although he does admit there were sometimes “free bagels and donuts involved.” And I am a complete sucker for donuts.

(I’m sorry, when I salivate I digress.)

For nineteen years he taught, successfully, or so he thought. Oh, sure, he heard school reformers say that the big problems in education boiled down to bad teachers at the front of too many rooms. Still, he refused to face the truth. Like me, he kept pretending he was good. He’d get awards for excellence…and he’d believe those awards meant something too.

As for me, I’d be grading papers at 11:30 on a Wednesday night and I’d tell myself, “John, you’re doing a good job.” I had an addiction you see. Grading papers was a crutch, like a bottle of booze to a drunk.

I’d go to work on Monday and students would tell me they loved my class, and I’d delude myself and think they were telling the truth. I would arrive at school early and let kids come in for extra work and I’d skip lunch to help and stay late too. I was hooked.

I thought I was good.

Sure. There were times I wondered. I’d pick up the New York Times and read what the latest school reformers had to say. These reformers didn’t have the same problem I did because they always avoided trying to teach. But I wouldn’t listen, not even when Brent Staples said schools did a terrible job of screening and evaluating teachers, so that they hired “any warm body that comes along.” I heard what Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg told an audience at M.I.T., that the big problem in schools was too many teachers were plain dumb and still I refused to face the demons.

I’d go right back to my phone. I’d call Vicki’s parents and say, “I love having your daughter in class.” Too late now, I see that call was a cry for help. I loved teaching like a crack addict loves crack.

Again and again, reformers tried to show me how wrong I was. Michelle Rhee bashed teachers every time she opened her mouth. Campbell Brown hinted that teachers were sexual deviants, protected by A Teacher on Teaching: Confessions of a "Bad Teacher:" I Loved Teaching like a Crack Addict Loves Crack.:

Teachers Synonymous Badass Teachers Association

Badass Teachers Association:

Teachers Synonymous – by Dr. Michael Flanagan

Hello my name is Michael, and I am a public school teacher. Yes, I know in this day and age those are brave words to utter in a public forum, but the first step to any kind of healing is to admit you have a problem. Hundreds of thousands of American citizens suffer from this same affliction. That is why today, I am launching a movement known as Teachers Synonymous. Teachers must stand together.

Being a teacher today means you are made the punch line of jokes on Saturday Night Live, fodder for discussion on The View, the justification for lawsuits against due process rights, and the general object of scorn across the nation. We are vilified and scapegoated as the reason for failing schools. It is enough to give even the strongest among of us a complex.

At first I thought I must be the only one doing such a “lousy job”. I mean I did not actually believe I was a bad teacher, as I work quite hard at my job, earned the respect of my students, parents and fellow educators. I have been given awards for excellence in teaching and amassed 19 years of satisfactory evaluations written by more than a dozen administrators. But at almost every faculty meeting, my colleagues and I were basically told, “you suck”. Which was confusing, because after being regularly admonished for professional incompetence, I would occasionally receive emails from the Department of Education or an administrator expressing gratitude for my hard work and dedication. Go figure.

So you can see my dilemma. As I said, I have confidence in my teaching ability, but know I am not even the best teacher on my floor. I am surrounded by consummate professionals that any parent would be happy to have as their child’s teacher. Yet I was consistently lectured to about what a terrible job I was doing, while surrounded by others doing an equally poor job. At the time I assumed this brow beating was justified since we were provided with free bagels and donuts during these smack downs.

It was not until more than a year ago that I saw what a concerted effort was being made to push the “bad teacher” narrative nationally. I became a member of several grass roots groups of frustrated and angry educators who showed me I was probably not such a bad teacher. We were merely victims of political corruption and greed.

Those who claim to be education reformers are waging vicious campaigns against teachers and our unions, and their most potent weapon is our own internalization of their false narrative. Tell the truth: how many of us have walked out of our classrooms on any given day and felt that our entire career path has been a mistake? We question our own talent and ability so often we are occasionally not even sure if we can make it in to work the next day. I know many of you are shaking your heads in agreement, saying to yourself “that is how I felt today!” And that is my point. We care, and to the privateers, that is a weakness. They are using our souls, against us.

It has proved to be an effective strategy, until now. Teachers Synonymous will allow us to turn self-doubt into self-reflection. It is not a weakness to have a bad day, and question your abilities. It is a weakness to harbor those doubts and let them own you. We will re-direct our angst towards something proactive. Take our depression and turn it into aggression. Teachers have a habit of being complacent. We do what we are instructed to do, because we love our jobs. We are justifiably fearful of jeopardizing our careers. For that reason many of us do not speak out against high stakes testing, junk science evaluations and corporate backed political attacks. But those days are done.

Teachers Synonymous is an effort to turn the anti-teacher propaganda of privatization around. Teachers need to be reminded they are not the problem. We are professionals who care about our students. We will enable educators to stand up and admit to being teachers, without the fear of admonishment or repercussions. We can openly discuss our addiction to education and inability to surrender our profession to a bunch of greedy privateers. We are teachers, and proud of it!

I know what you are about to ask, “How will we fight these people, they have all the money and power, all we have are number 2 pencils?” One technique I suggest is to call out the real criminals in our midst. For years we have seen so many of our students fed into the schools to prison pipeline, it is time we shed light on the Election Booth to Prisons Badass Teachers Association:

Department of Education to Raise High Stakes…Even Higher | The War Report on Public Education

Department of Education to Raise High Stakes…Even Higher | The War Report on Public Education:

Department of Education to Raise High Stakes…Even Higher

By Wayne Jebian

Arnie Duncan and the United States Department of Education appear to be sold on the concept of VAM (value added model), so much so that they are taking the concept to the next level. The idea behind VAM is to crunch students’ standardized test scores to separate “good” from “bad” teachers.

In public debate, VAM is often discussed in the context of fixing failing schools and raising individual student achievement. However, if Education Secretary Arnie Duncan has his way, the use of VAM will mean that elementary school students will also be deciding issues of federal funding for graduate and professional teaching programs. The stakes in high stakes testing are about to get a whole lot higher.

The DoED released its proposed new rules for teacher preparation programs on December 3, 2014. The public was given until January 2, 2015 to comment on fiscal aspects of the new rules, and until February 2nd to comment on issues of substance. The timing of the document is one of its major problems. The brevity of the comment period, plus the fact that it straddled final exams, Christmas, Hanukah, customary vacation periods, New Years, the beginning of school, and the Super Bowl, strongly suggest that it was engineered to minimize actual public comment.

The second and larger problem is that the new rules’ reliance on bad science eclipses any legitimate concern about bad teachers. Test scores are affected by many factors, and there are many influences more important than the individual teacher, such as the family situations of the students and the general income level of their neighborhood. The use of VAM could be seen as a disincentive to work in a poor neighborhood for the individual student of education when seeking work. However, the new rules also invite a whole host of consequences.

Now, a college or university’s professional education program or school of education will be graded according to these same VAM statistics derived from school kids’ test scores. If these rules are implemented, in addition to being responsible for their teachers’ job security, the children will be determining the eligibility of graduate schools to receive federal TEACH grant money. If student VAM statistics reveal that a school of education is producing “bad teachers”, then under the new rules, it can be cut off. According to the report, “These proposed Department of Education to Raise High Stakes…Even Higher | The War Report on Public Education:

Billionaire Suspends Prize Given to Schools - NYTimes.com

Billionaire Suspends Prize Given to Schools - NYTimes.com:

Billionaire Suspends Prize Given to Schools

Eli Broad, the Los Angeles-based billionaire philanthropist, has suspended a prize his foundation has given annually to an urban school district for more than a decade, saying he cannot find school districts doing enough good work to merit the award.

The $1 million Broad Prize, which 12 districts have won since 2002, has rewarded large urban districts with high numbers of students of color from low-income families. The judges have looked for improvement in test scores, graduation rates and college admissions.

“Both the review board and the selection jury were disappointed with the overall progress in urban public schools,” said Karen Denne, chief communications officer at the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation. “They wanted to set a higher standard and a higher bar. They wanted the prize to mean something.”

Members of the prize review board said it had become more difficult to identify school districts that were pushing test scores or graduation rates up.

“Districts have had a heck of a time in sustaining improvement,” said Christopher Cross, a former Education Department assistant secretary who has served on the Broad review board for a dozen years. Last year, the board recommended only two districts for the prize — Orange County in Florida and Gwinnett County in Georgia — said Mr. Cross, chairman of Cross & Joftus, an education consulting firm. Both shared the award in September.

With districts coping with entrenched poverty, slashed budgets, testing scandals and growing opposition to new academic standards and testing, progress has been difficult, some education experts said. “There’s no real urban system in the country that any of us would regard as better than mediocre,” said Frederick Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

But critics of the Broad Foundation said suspending the prize was an acknowledgment that the foundation’s approach to reform, with its focus primarily on test scores and other metrics, might be waning. The foundation has also backed the Partnership for Educational Justice, a group that was started by the former CNN anchor Campbell Brown to file lawsuits challenging teacher tenure in various states and that has donated $47 million to education causes including charter networks last year.

“Eli Broad was wrong about what was needed to improve public education,” said Diane Ravitch, the education historian and activist, in an email. “He thought that management and charters could overcome poverty, and his cancellation of the prize is his admission that he was wrong. The problems are deeper than he imagined.”

Julian Vasquez Heilig, associate professor of educational policy at the University of Texas at Austin, said, “I think that parents and stakeholders are a lot more suspicious of these types of reforms because we’ve been at it for more than a decade and they haven’t really moved the needle.”

Ms. Denne of the foundation said the urban school district prize might be outdated in its focus on traditional systems. She said the foundation hopedBillionaire Suspends Prize Given to Schools - NYTimes.com:

"Billionaire Suspends Prize Given to Schools"

Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: Beating Rahm's SuperPAC

Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: Beating Rahm's SuperPAC:

Beating Rahm's SuperPAC

Progressives Scott Waguespack (left) and John Arena, targeted by Rahm's $2 million super Pack

I braved the cold yesterday and went over to the library to cast my early vote against Rahm and for Ald. Scott Waguespack (32nd). I don't mean to sound gloomy about the weather, but if I should somehow freeze to death between now and the 24th, at least my vote will be counted.

Waguespack is a member of the City Council's Progressive Caucus and Rahm's $2 million super PAC specifically targets him and Caucus member John Arena over in the 45th Ward, for defeat. We won't let that happen.

I also got to vote YES on the Elected School Board referendum and I'm sure it will carry.

I had to laugh when a voter in a nearby booth asked the judge, "How can this person, Doody-Jones, be on the ballot when she doesn't even live in our ward?" He is referring to Waguespack's opponent -- Rahm's puppy dog, Elise Doody-Jones.

The confused but responsive judge gets on the phone and calls the Board of Elections. She actually connects with a live human being (nice going, David Orr) and asks for clarification on "Dooty-Bones" ballot position. Turns out, it's legal. But it's a damn good question anyway.

Dooty-bones, indeed. She may not live in the 32nd, but she will pick up a nice chunk of change from the SuperPAC. She promises that she will move over here if elected. Another great reason to vote for Scott.

You have to love Chicago ward politics.

Class War...Mark Brown has a good column in today's S-T about Rauner's escalation of class warfare (thus far one-sided) against organized labor. Brown has good instincts for this kind of stuff and comes by them honestly. He writes:

My first thought upon learning of Rauner’s move was of Fort Sumter and the cannon Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: Beating Rahm's SuperPAC:

Pearson and Testing Buddies Try to Shut the Barn Door (But the Info Is Already Out) | Alan Singer

Pearson and Testing Buddies Try to Shut the Barn Door (But the Info Is Already Out) | Alan Singer:

Pearson and Testing Buddies Try to Shut the Barn Door (But the Info Is Already Out)

PineappleGate continues

In response to one of my recent posts on Common Core and high-stakes assessments, I received an email asking, "Why are Pearson tests so bad?"

The short answer to this question is actually provided by the now defunct Pearson Foundation on their "Five Things I've Learned" website. Pearson Foundation claimed to present "great examples of the best in education" from "education leaders devoted to improving the fortunes of others through learning." One "leader" highlighted isAndreas Schleicher, a data collection specialist with the OECD, the organization that develops the international PISA tests in collaboration with Pearson. The tests are used to compare performance by students from different counties and justify calls for increased high-stakes testing in the United States.

In the posted interview, either Schleicher or Pearson let the cat out of the bag. According to Schleicher, "The skills that are easiest to teach and test are also the skills that are easiest to digitize, automate and outsource."

Educational decisions should not be about what is best for students, what is most important to know, or what promotes active citizenship in democratic societies. Decisions are made based on what is easiest to test, digitize, and outsource. Schleicher does not say it outright, but the implication for a company like Pearson is clear. Educational decisions should be based on what is most profitable - for them!

The longer answer is the way Pearson and its testing buddies, groups like Stanford University's SCALE, the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE), New York State Education, and the federal Education Department, try to ignore or silence critics who have the audacity to raise questions about the validity of their testing programs. They make inflated claims for the value of their products, diligently buy-off supporters in academia and the press, and the rest of us are supposed to remain quiet. Anyone who wants to participate in the design of better tests is required to sign a non-disclosure agreement to ensure that they cannot participate in open discussion about what they are selling.

Pearson is now under federal investigation for inappropriate contact with Los Angelesschool officials prior to being awarded a lucrative contract. Its now defunct not-for-profit foundation agreed to pay a $7.7 million fine in New York State for providing perks to school officials, including free trips to "conferences" where Pearson promoted its products.

Pearson's influence is also spread in other ways. It is a major exhibitor at national educational conferences sponsored by American Educational Research Association,ASCD, the National Science Teachers Association, and the National Council for the Social Studies, helping to fund the conferences and distributing swag to participants. Pearson also provides workshops and speakers for these conferences, advertises in their publications, and invites prestigious and influential speakers to participate in Pearson-sponsored events.

I guess, or hope, I have become so much of an irritant, Pearson and its testing buddies do not want me at their shows. Actually they do me a favor. I do not really want to speak at their conferences or serve on their committees. But I cannot resist applying, to find out what they are up to.

I was not really surprised when my offer to keynote or conduct a workshop at the SCALE edTPA conference in October 2014 or to evaluate teacher certification tests for Pearson and Testing Buddies Try to Shut the Barn Door (But the Info Is Already Out) | Alan Singer:

No profit left behind - Stephanie Simon - POLITICO

No profit left behind - Stephanie Simon - POLITICO:

No profit left behind

In the high-stakes world of American education, Pearson makes money even when its results don’t measure up.

The British publishing giant Pearson had made few inroads in the United States — aside from distributing the TV game show “Family Feud” — when it announced plans in the summer of 2000 to spend $2.5 billion on an American testing company.

It turned out to be an exceptionally savvy move.

The next year, Congress passed the No Child Left Behind Act, which mandated millions of new standardized tests for millions of kids in public schools. Pearson was in a prime position to capitalize.

From that perch, the company expanded rapidly, seizing on many subsequent reform trends, from online learning to the Common Core standards adopted in more than 40 states. The company has reaped the benefits: Half its $8 billion in annual global sales comes from its North American education division.

But Pearson’s dominance does not always serve U.S. students or taxpayers well.

POLITICO examined hundreds of pages of contracts, business plans and email exchanges, as well as tax filings, lobbying reports and marketing materials, in the first comprehensive look at Pearson’s business practices in the United States.

The investigation found that public officials often commit to buying from Pearson because it’s familiar, even when there’s little proof its products and services are effective.

The North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, for instance, declined to seek competitive bids for a new student data system on the grounds that it would be “in the best interest of the public” to simply hire Pearson, which had done similar work for the state in the past. The data system was such a disaster, the department had to pay Pearson millions extra to fix it.

Administrators at the University of Florida also skipped competitive bids on a huge project to build an online college from scratch. They were in a hurry. And they knew Pearson’s team from a previous collaboration. That project hadn’t been

Teacher Anon: PARCC Test is Just a Spoiled Child - Living in Dialogue

Teacher Anon: PARCC Test is Just a Spoiled Child - Living in Dialogue:

Teacher Anon: PARCC Test is Just a Spoiled Child

By Anonymous Actual Teacher (AAT), Maryland, Feb. 10, 2015

Does everyone remember having to deal with spoiled classmates or spoiled kids in the neighborhood when they were younger? Maybe other parents looked the other way when the little angel would throw a fit to get her way. Well, we hope you can use that experience to help get ready for upcoming PARCC assessments.

The PARCC assessments have evolved into the spoiled child rewriting the rules for a birthday party. She tells the children what to wear, what to buy her for presents, gives little advance notice to prepare, and tells the children, “By the way, I don’t want to have a party – we are having brunch.”

As a teacher preparing students for PARCC assessments, we are told that the PARCC assessments won’t allow certain special education accommodations. So apparently the folks at the US Department of Education who monitor special education compliance are either okay with this or in the dark with this. So our district notified staff in mid-January, via meetings and trainings attended by administrators, test coordinators, ESOL teachers, and special education staff, that we need to hurry up and put temporary changes into children’s official documents on special education just for the purpose of the PARCC assessments. Spoiled child 1, School Districts and Special Education Law, 0.

If your child was read to before, maybe not now! Spoiled child gets her way. If your child was able to use a calculator before, maybe not – new criteria! Too bad, students with disabilities! PARCC staff must know best, without norming data available for how children with disabilities will do, PARCC mandates that this happens. Go back and read your invitation again. It’s all there. The PARCC website has information on accommodations. Usually, test sites don’t contain that – the state departments of education have an accommodations manual on their site. Spoiled Child 2, State Department of Education and Children with Disabilities, 0.

Let’s follow the process – States adopt Common Core, states do away with their state tests, Common Core requires new testing, PARCC offers new testing, PARCC decides (and their director apparently has little or no special education experience, based on her bio on the DC Board of Education web site) that some accommodations for students with disabilities simply won’t be allowed. What this decision is based on is questionable, since obviously there is no norming data or scientific research on this in terms of PARCC assessing what it purports to assess – or why wouldn’t states already have eliminated those Teacher Anon: PARCC Test is Just a Spoiled Child - Living in Dialogue:

New Orleans' All-Charter School System Is Struggling, But Bobby Jindal Wants It To Be A Model | ThinkProgress

New Orleans' All-Charter School System Is Struggling, But Bobby Jindal Wants It To Be A Model | ThinkProgress:

New Orleans’ All-Charter School System Is Struggling, But Bobby Jindal Wants It To Be A Model

BY ALICE OLLSTEIN POSTED ON FEBRUARY 9, 2015 AT 12:23 PM UPDATED: FEBRUARY 9, 2015 AT 8:12 PM

Louisiana Governor and likely presidential candidate Bobby Jindal (R) released his new “roadmap” for reforming K-12 education Monday morning, focusing on the importance of deregulating and privatizing public schools and holding up New Orleans’ all-charter Recovery School District as a model for the nation.

“I’m proud we’ve increased the number of charter schools, nearly doubling them,” Jindal told an audience on Capitol Hill. “I get so frustrated when people tell us to wait for incremental gains. We have seen remarkable gains.”

But new data calls the supposed gains into question. Most of the class of 2014 graduating from the 100%-charter New Orleans Recovery School District scored so low on the national ACT test that they didn’t meet the minimum requirements for Louisiana’s colleges.

According to numbers crunched by Louisiana public school teacher and doctor of statistics Mercedes Schneider, just over 6 percent of high school seniors in the Recovery School District scored high enough in English and Math to qualify for admission into a Louisiana four-year college or university straight out of high school. Five of the district’s 16 high schools produced not a single student who met these requirements.

The district’s test scores were extremely low prior to Hurricane Katrina and the charter school conversion, but despite Jindal’s claims of “remarkable gains,” there has been only a 2 point improvement in New Orleans’ Recovery School District ACT scores since 2005. The class average is now 16.4, one of the lowest in Louisiana. There was a 0.6 decline statewide.

The minimum requirement for a scholarship to a two-year Louisiana college is 17, while a high school graduate must score a 20 to be eligible for a four-year college scholarship. The number of Recovery district students who qualify has increased since the charter takeover, but remains in the low teens.

Besides the rapid conversion from public to charter schools, Jindal also touted his controversial voucher program, which steers taxpayer dollars to private, religious and even for-profit online schools.

“The single most important thing we did was to let the dollars follow the kids instead of the other way around,” he said on Capitol Hill Monday morning. “Instead of having a ‘one size fits all’ approach, we should accept that every child is different and the people who know best are the moms and dads.”

In 2013, the Justice Department took Jindal’s voucher program to court, arguing that it was making racial segregation worse in the state’s schools. In 2014, a judge ruled to allow the program to continue, but the federal government is closely monitoring its impact on segregation and could sue again in the future.

Others have raised concerns about the quality of education at the private schools receiving voucher-funded pupils. A Mother Jones investigation revealed that some Louisiana schools were teaching that humans and dinosaurs walked the earth together, that the KKK did helpful community organizing, and that dragons were real. Others used textbooks that characterized 1960s anti-war protesters thusly: “They went without bathing, wore dirty, ragged, unconventional clothing, and deliberately broke all codes of politeness or manners.”

Additionally, in the text of his plan, Jindal acknowledges that the rapid change was only possible after Hurricane Katrina destroyed the city and its schools. “New Orleans’ New Orleans' All-Charter School System Is Struggling, But Bobby Jindal Wants It To Be A Model | ThinkProgress:

By Any Dreams Necessary, Malcolm X and the Problem of High Stakes Testing | Yohuru Williams

By Any Dreams Necessary, Malcolm X and the Problem of High Stakes Testing | Yohuru Williams:

By Any Dreams Necessary, Malcolm X and the Problem of High Stakes Testing

Imagine a child whose father is no longer in the home. His mother's debilitating illness forces him and his siblings into foster care. Imagine that same child, coming from abject poverty; exposed to violence and the juvenile justice system early, he enters a world socially and culturally foreign to him. He becomes the target of daily aggressions and micro aggressions and deals with the oppressiveness of low expectations. He is denied the one, best opportunity for success available to him - a good education.

While this describes the experience of scores of black and brown youth, both native and immigrant in inner cities across the United States today, it was also the experience of Malcolm X.

February 21, 2015 will mark the 50th anniversary of the assassination of the fiery orator and icon of the Black Power Movement. His early life mirrors that of many young people now. Although the parental absenteeism he suffered did not come as a result of the high rate of incarceration among Black and Latino fathers or the social and economic alienation often experienced by women of color, there are profound similarities that make his life a cautionary tale about the dangers of corporate education reform and high stakes testing. Malcolm's entire life was a repudiation of the underlying tenets of corporate education reform and the testocracy that threatens a whole generation of American youth.

Violence and racism punctuated Malcolm's early life. Born in Omaha, Nebraska in 1925, he reported that the Ku Klux Klan murdered his father. Later, his mother, struggling to maintain a household of seven children, was committed to a mental institution. As a result, Malcolm and his siblings entered the foster care system. In the seventh grade, Malcolm earned an expulsion from school for a minor prank that in today's highly punitive school culture would likely have resulted in a similar penalty. As punishment, authorities transported him to a juvenile home in the nearly all-white community of Mason, Michigan to await a transfer to reform school. Malcolm was given a second chance when the family in charge of the detention home allowed him to stay with them and enrolled him at nearly all-white Mason Junior High School. In this well-funded institution with lots of attention from his teachers, Malcolm thrived, not only earning straight A's but also winning election as the president of his class.

This touch of academic success inspired Malcolm to think big. In his autobiography, he recalls his encounter with his English teacher Mr. Ostrowski who had been one of his biggest supporters. "I had gotten some of my best marks under him," Malcolm recalled, "and he had always made me feel that he liked me." Although Ostrowski clearly recognized Malcolm's talent, he nevertheless discouraged him from aspiring to anything beyond the rigid bounds determined by his racial caste.

Thus, when young Malcolm confided his desire to be an attorney, Ostrowski was firm. "Malcolm, one of life's first needs," he soberly advised, "is for us to be realistic. Don't misunderstand me now," he continued. "We all here like you, you know that. But By Any Dreams Necessary, Malcolm X and the Problem of High Stakes Testing | Yohuru Williams:

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