Schooling in Orange Jumpsuits
Common Dreams - Something has broken apart in our society - an unspoken agreement about sanity, a truce between play and order. The authoritarian strain, always present, of course, has been ratcheting up to ever more absurd levels for a decade now.
The image that flashed into my mind was: schools in orange jumpsuits.
The "underperforming," low-testing schools - the ones that get shut down, emptied out, metaphorically forced to don the orange jumpsuits - are always in low-income communities, where children struggle against enormous obstacles, at home and on the streets, that schools cannot control. Rather than take a holistic approach to the educational challenges of these communities, rather than mandating smaller class size, the equitable allocation of resources and other changes that would do immediate good, test-pushing pols seek to punish convenient scapegoats, start over and change nothing.
But my most serious complaint against the mania for standardized testing is the way it straitjackets education itself, converts classrooms, in the words of Bill Bigelow, writing a decade ago for the Rethinking Schools website, "into vast wading pools of information for students to memorize without critical reflection."
Education that joyously encourages creativity and discovery is out of the question. The exaltation of the standardized test, however flawed, to the status to supreme authority, breaks the connection between teacher and student. Suddenly school is just another battleground - us vs. them - with Blackwater security guys guarding the right answers.
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