the school-to-prison pipeline drains so many, so well
when a mayor bullhorns to a city of unions on big shoulders,
and says “no choice, no funding” stiff as a neckache, says eliminate fifty schools
and in the same breath heaves public dollars on a new stadium for DePaul,
and in the same breath regurgitates a request for more charter schools
he suffocates and strangles classrooms packed like sardines,
reeking of sweat & one teacher with merely two hands
not wide enough to hand out quality education
the only cutting in line students fear
is from their district’s budget
we are blaming public schools for being stumped
without looking at the root causes
since the third grade fed the illusion we have multiple choices
but when an unelected board
closes schools
in black and brown neighborhoods for the past decade
it is from new lumber we are hanging
by a thread sewn around our necks
what choices are we given then,
except to become pendants of freedom, too
a closed school means a door may block our entrance
but our people were born at the exit,
we stand, we fight back, and we organize,
even after tested by people who control our schools
who have never been inside of them, will never send their children there
because we have numbers, too.
because Santa is a black woman somewhere
wrapping her son’s gift to place it under a tree
not see a city hang his future from one
for our schools are pillars, not to be pillaged for capital gain
for our choice will not be determined by a Scantron,
or by politicians who make squad cars out of school buses,
or by developers who displace communities cloaked in an urban
renewal banner
or taken away by a board of education unveiling its splinters.
Modern-Day Slavery
Falmata Seid
The things that I found and will say
sway the opposition in ways that make you reassess your accusations.
We’re told the key to success is education, but what’s displayed in their legislation is intuitions designed to keep us chained in cages.
Pass back the fact that being black means you can’t match white wages
Pass back the fact that it’s always Goldman Sachs that drains your life savings
Pass back the fact that it’s all done in stages
Please open your eyes; this is modern-day slavery
I’ve come to the conclusion that these tests are an illusion.
A disguise, a mere mirage for their lies, their crimes, underfunding education, while at the same time feeding potential Einsteins
to school-to-prison pipelines.
It’s the system that I’m trying to undermine so if you don’t mind
please, let me state some of my own finds:
The US ranks seventeenth in education in the world,
but what we’re not told
is that it also ranks number one for the most people incarcerated—2.3 million.
Overcrowding jails to the point where there are more inmates
than there are beds to sleep in.
It costs 63 billion dollars a year to continue paying these businesses that profit off the exploitation of people?
Why is it that 37 percent of black males have not completed high school?
Why is it in Seattle there is a plan under way in my neighborhood to build a 210-million-dollar facility
for the incarceration of more youth like me.
It doesn’t make sense. To combat naïve crimes that are oftentimes
nonviolent
with a hostile environment.
Instead we should help these youth by creating programs
that offer jobs that actually will hire them.
Programs that let these youth pursue an education because the public ones don’t let them back.
And I’m not talking about creating more of these loosely regulated alternative schools where the only thing they do is groom these students to come back to the prison system because that’s cruel.
Start cutting 60,000-dollar costs per inmate and increase the state’s spending per student from 7,500 dollars.
See, Washington state spends over 80 million dollars a year on standardized testing. Administer exams like the MAP this spring but can’t exactly explain what the test brings?
It’s amazing.
These exams are the ones where teachers have no say on how to cater the test to a student’s learning
These exams are the ones measured by a metric decided by people who have never faced adversity in their life
These exams are the ones that belittle the hopes and aspirations of kids
who were told to dream big.
These exams are Malcolm X’s teacher that told him he couldn’t achieve his dreams.
See, Malcolm X dropped out of school at the end of eighth grade.
He was later known by the name Detroit Red.
Now, everything Malcolm did was to accumulate the bread
because he had listened to what his teacher said.
His dreams of becoming a lawyer were, “No realistic goal for a nigger.”
In Malcolm’s case he became much bigger
Than that worth his teacher slapped on the sticker.
But tell me, how much different are these tests? No really, how are they different?
They tell a student that despite his many talents if he does not shade in the correct bubble on a test,
that supposedly defines his intellect,
he is doomed to fall,
so next fall,
he contemplates whether he wants to come back at all.
Being a Future Teacher in the Midst of the Movement
How can you go into the field knowing what is happening to it? Why don’t you just stay away? Like most teachers going into the field, I chose to pursue this profession years ago to make a positive impact on students, similar to how my teachers have made an impact on me. Yet, with about two years being involved in the movement, I have been able to articulate my reasons for continuing to enter into the field with a more clear and concise reasoning: When you see something you love, something you know that needs to be defended, you do not simply run away and hide. You do not accept the attacks passively—you do not assume you have already lost.
No. You stand up and fight like hell to protect it.
Coming to Consciousness
I wasn’t always like this. Graduating from high school, I was every No Child Left Behind (NCLB) designer’s dream product. I listened to what I was told, never questioned authority or any information I was told, and lacked the capability to critically think about hardly anything. Obey, obey, obey. . . . It did not matter if I knew the HSPA and the TerraNova—our state tests—were a waste of time and failed to measure my or any of my classmates’ intelligence—this was just “the way things were,” and there was nothing I could do about it.
Further, just two years ago, I believed that Teach for America was the route to solving educational inequities. I imagined myself as a TFA Corps Member after graduating college. The idea and vision made me all giddy inside. Similarly, after doing a Google search looking for ways to begin working on education issues, I came across Michelle Rhee’s “StudentsFirst.” Believe it or not, there was a time I was only a few clicks away from submitting an application to be a campus representative for that organization.
So, how did I eventually see through the manipulative neoliberal rhetoric? And even more important, how did I come to realize that what we do not agree with as students and future teachers is not to be accepted but rather must be challenged and can be changed? In 2011, I first discovered the
inequities in our education system during my sophomore year of college. In my Introduction to Education course at Rutgers we read Spectacular Things Happen Along the Way: Lessons from an Urban Classroom by Brian Schultz. It was the first time I learned that there were youth right in our own country—hell, less than a hundred miles away from me—who were forced to endure some of the most oppressive education environments. The most extreme examples included stories from students about inadequate heat in the building, lunches eaten on the floors of the hallways, and classroom windows riddled with bullet holes.
Because of my experience in a suburban public school district in Egg Harbor Township, New Jersey, I assumed everyone approached school with a neutral lens as I did. I mean, my biggest concern about school growing up was wondering why we didn’t have an escalator like another school had, or why our cafeteria was only one floor rather than two. I was unaware that there were students less than twenty to thirty miles away from me who were struggling to afford pencils and notebooks.
Minutes after reading our assigned portion of this book, I could feel my face flush red with anger and confusion. I was not only angry at the mere fact that such conditions existed but also that I was just finding out about these inequities. I vividly remember walking into class waiting to see my classmates in a similar distress. Sadly, I was disappointed. How was it possible that no one else was heated enough to start flipping desks? To march ourselves out of class and protest to our local government? At this point in my life, I didn’t even know if protesting was an effective tactic; I just remember being pissed off and wanting to yell at whoever was responsible for such oppressive education environments. In the midst of my frustration, I was even considering changing my entire career path. I began contemplating the idea of becoming a politician, believing I’d have the opportunity to create direct change in our education system. Luckily, when I brought the idea of leaving the profession to my professor, she insisted that the most powerful work we can do regarding these inequities is right inside the classroom. She referred to the work that Schultz did with his students—incorporating civic education and social justice within his curriculum—and I realized that is what I would do, too.
After reaching this level of consciousness and awareness, there was no going back. Weeks after the semester ended, the book and what I had learned was still on my mind. That was how my blog Teacher Under Construction was born in January 2012. I figured if I could go through my entire K–12 education unaware of the existence of the blatant inequities in our education system, then there must be thousands of others out there in the same position. I came to this simple conclusion: nothing can be changed if no one even knows something has to be changed in the first place. I began writing as a hopeful means, as I phrased in my early blog postings, of “breaking bubbles of ignorance,” doing something similar to what the book and class did for me.
Shortly after I started my blog, I began to challenge every aspect of the education system. In essence, I was evolving into the type of student that the NCLB era wasn’t meant to produce. I began connecting, via Teacher Under Construction, with other like-minded individuals throughout the country with whom I shared a commonality: dissent against the education “reform” movement.
From Reflection to Action
Before I could fully devote myself to the education justice movement, I had to examine where I fit in the system. Throughout middle and high school, rarely did I raise my hand in class, rarely did I have confidence to share my points of view if they conflicted with the dominant opinion of my classmates. Sure, I was able to adapt and assimilate to succeed in the system, but what does that mean in terms of the education that youth of color like myself deserve? What does it mean to have the skills to adapt to a system that is designed only to benefit a select few rather than be emancipatory for all youth? This laid the groundwork for the direction my activism would take and for my role as a future teacher. When there is something you believe is worth fighting for, you are stripped of all fear. Fear is petty in comparison to the larger goal at hand. I have a clearer sense of what I am fighting for. I have gained the courage to take actions that previously would have been unforeseeable.
For instance, until 2012, a student organization solely focused on future educators at my university was nonexistent—I, along with about seven other students, worked to change that. Within this space, we have had open dialogues about various issues regarding education and the teaching profession ranging from the problems of Teach for America to merit pay and how the increase in high-stakes testing will affect us as future teachers. My fellow future teachers and I have now taken on the challenge of making our program more democratic in regards to coursework. I believe that calling for a democratic university can result in an increase in democratic practices in the classroom.
Similarly, in November 2012, I, along with other activists from Madison, Wisconsin, helped launch Students United for Public Education (SUPE). We took aim at reactionary, neoliberal organizations such as Students for Education Reform that manipulate students into advocating for corporate education reform. With this national organization, college students across the country had a means of fighting for various issues surrounding public education on their campuses. Some of our chapters’ most memorable actions included working with local Chicago youth and standing as allies at local protests, petitioning against the Parent Trigger Bill in Florida, and launching our first national campaign: Students Resisting Teach for America. Yet, some of the greatest “victories” and hints of progress do not only exist in relation to our actions and strengthening of organizations but in the very act of normalizing dissent against the corporate education reform movement. Simply raising questions in class such as “Aren’t there more effective ways to assess student progress?” or “How does high-stakes testing affect students in higher poverty schools compared to students at wealthier schools?” has proven to spur my classmates to think critically about the status quo.
What’s Really at Stake?
The impact of high-stakes testing was not always as clear to me as it is today. Growing up, test weeks meant a whole week of half-days in school—what could be better than that?! For a lot of us, state tests were seen as a joke. Few of us took our state tests seriously because many of us knew we would pass with little to no effort. Yet I don’t recognize the faults of high-stakes testing only through my own schooling experience; I am also seeing its faults and impact on students in the K–12 school system whom I mentor, tutor, and simply talk to today. As the focus of corporate education reformers’ policies is strongly based on increasing test scores and making profits, the focus on the real issues that should be dealt with is almost nonexistent. When I tutored at a local youth correctional facility in Camden, New Jersey, two students stood out to me. While I tutored them in elementary mathematics and grammar, they often told stories of their experiences within the K–12 system. They discussed how they rarely had support from their schools, that living in the most dangerous city in the country consequently meant having teachers and administrators with low expectations. One said, “It’s like they didn’t even feel like trying because they thought we’d just become drug dealers or gang members anyway.” The other said that he felt dropping out of school was the better choice. He said that he couldn’t relate to school, that what he was learning was boring. He felt that dropping out and spending more time working would get him farther and was the better option, especially because he didn’t see college as an affordable expense. Some would disregard them as “dropouts,” but it is more accurate to describe them as being systematically forced out by corporate standards of education, what’s also known as the school-to-prison pipeline. For them, what they were learning in school was pointless in comparison to the daily challenges they faced beyond the classroom. I came to realize that our system is designed to fail America’s youth.
The Left-Behind Children’s Call to Arms
As a student currently in a teacher education program, it is frustrating to be ta
ught how to adapt to the ever-changing, increasingly high-stakes testing school framework rather than have an open discussion on what this means, why it is happening, and, most crucial, what we can do about it. Recognizing this has illuminated the importance of finding ways and the courage to make that space where such a space was never meant to exist. When I am eventually in the classroom, I aim to provide a liberating education, not a standardized one. I hope to give my students an education that provides them the tools and opportunities to challenge the systems that oppress them rather than simply assimilate to them. Yet, I know this will be almost impossible if we do not continue challenging and resisting profit-based school reforms pushed for by neoliberals. In essence, I have to recognize that the most crucial challenges our students deal with will never be resolved in a multiple-choice bubble form. This leaves me, as an educator, unable to teach for liberation under the paradigm of high-stakes testing. If liberation is denied, resistance becomes necessary to education. Luckily for aspiring teachers, resistance has already begun.
The next generation of teachers—me included—are the students who were “schooled” in the NCLB era. It’s obvious in working with and talking to other future teachers that we’ve been conditioned to see standardized testing as inseparable from school, education, and—well, teaching. Getting those scores to meet that “standard” are what we know and what we grew up believing was elemental to an “education.” This becomes problematic because as “products” of NCLB, many future teachers won’t push back against something that has been ingrained as the norm—unless they recognize not only how boycotts such as that against the MAP in Seattle can in fact be victorious but also why they should boycott high-stakes testing, and what type of education can emerge when our schools are freed of these standards.
But, unfortunately, many future teachers believe that an education system freed from high-stakes testing is impossible. And this is one of the driving reasons I’m still pursuing the profession, and why I find it critical that we collectively work to assure that other future educators are aware of this movement and fight against high-stakes testing. We need to encourage future teachers to continually ask themselves: Why are you becoming a teacher? Because 99.9 percent of the time, the response will include some desire to positively change young people’s lives. We need to make sure we connect this desire to the movement against high-stakes testing.
More Than a Score Page 20