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Memories & Messes

Chapter 2

 

Yellow. Symbolically, the color represents optimism and hope. Ironically, it also signifies cowardice. When I found the little yellow note From the desk of Principal Parks, I grinned. Which way would it go? Maybe she wanted to thank me for helping out with the Jimmy Benson episode. I kept my glass half full.    

I taught English/Language Arts and also served as the E/LA team leader, a position with a single-digit percentage pay increment, zero administrative authority, and 100% responsibility to handle whatever issues, needs, and problems administrators threw my way. I loved the work. Teaching E/LA is the best job in the world. In what other do they pay you to read, analyze, and discuss the literature of the ages? What’s better than interacting daily with Shakespeare, Poe, Saki, Fitzgerald, Lee, Sandburg, Dickinson, Angelou? I’m a dying breed—an English major. This meeting with Parks didn’t breathe new life into me.

“Mrs. Stanton, your students’ scores were disappointing.”

Hello, or how are you, or nice weather? No. She jumped right in.

My smile, and whatever was in my glass, evaporated.

“They did their best, Rikki,” I said.

“I’m sure in your mind they did.” She paged through the loose-leaf binder in front of her, which held the test reports. “The numbers, though, are what I have to focus on.”

“Okay,” I said. “Let me ask, though. Which students’ scores are you looking at as disappointing?”

“Your ninth graders.”

“Oh. So, the others, the tenth and eleventh graders’ scores are okay?”

She scanned the papers before her. “Hm. Yes. They’re quite good. Most are in the top tier.”

I beamed. “So, eighty-five percent of my students did well.”

“Yes.”

“Isn’t that not disappointing?”

For my twenty-seven years teaching English, I guided students to read, learn, and explore the classics and find value in their themes. But recently, standardized testing infiltrated the public school classroom. Reading and learning took a backseat.

That day testing was the topic of my meeting with Parks. It was supposed to give teachers an unbiased view of the effectiveness of their instruction, identify the aptitudes of each student, and provide information on whether a school’s curriculum gave students what they needed to keep up with their peers across the nation. The idea was to treat kids as though they were exactly like kids in every other school and test them often to see how they measured up to kids across the country. Standardize them. The goal? Rank schools.

The federal and state governments encouraged this by calculating, in a simple funding formula, goodness or badness. If a school’s students scored high, the school achieved goodness, and the district could count on money from the government to fund the schools. If they scored low and didn’t improve in a year or two, the school was bad, and money would slow. American capitalism at its most efficient. No child was left behind. Much learning, however, was.

For the school principal, the formula was simple, too. If the school’s scores were in the higher percentiles, she was first-rate. If she was new and the scores jumped into the higher percentile in her first or second year, she was a genius—and was rewarded with early tenure and a hefty pay raise. And her school’s federal and state funding were guaranteed. Why? The higher percentile boosted the school’s state and national ranking. This made the politicians and school board happy because homeowners and realtors could point to the ranking when they advertised homes for sale. I won’t get into the real estate elements of selling a home in a school district with a high ranking. Put simply, a seller could say “Show me the money” to the buyer and never look back. American capitalism at its best.

Parks knew this better than any principal. "Raise those BS scores" became her mantra.

So back to me—and countless teachers like me—and my meeting. I prepared my students to do their best on these tests each year. But my best wasn’t good enough for principals like Rikki Parks. 

“I want to focus on the future.” Parks moved on. “Perhaps your approach to teaching ninth graders how to take a standardized test needs work.”

“Okay. Any suggestions?”

“Test prep. Lots of it.”

“I do test prep. Doing any more will take away from the curriculum, from reading novels, plays, poetry, working on grammar, usage, writing skills.”

“Those are not our primary focus. Raising test scores is.”

What was in her bag of tricks to do that? She added other methods to test prep —data mining, bulking up basics classes and eliminating the arts, rewarding and threatening teachers and students.

The rest of our conversation was not unexpected.

“So, what’s the plan, Rikki?” I asked.

“I am requiring teachers, like you, whose students didn’t perform well, to incorporate test prep into their lesson plans at least two days each week.”

“And the other parts of the ninth curriculum? Are we dropping it? Like Romeo and Juliet?”

“Read the first act, show them the movie for the middle acts, and read the last act. They’ll get the gist.”

“And To Kill a Mockingbird?”

“There’s a movie, right? Same. Read the first five chapters, use the film to fill in the middle, include some nonfiction, you know, essays, analyses like they’ll read on the Annual Assessment of School and Work Preparedness Enterprise, read the last five chapters.”

My blood never boiled before. But when she referred to the standardized test that teachers and students called by its acronym, AASWPE, pronounced as though it had an I in it, I felt a gurgling in my veins.   

“You’re serious?” I asked.

She looked up at me, leaned forward, and said, “Yes. Let me repeat. Test prep two days each week. When you do your lesson planning, incorporate it.” She sat back, closed the binder, and pushed her chair back from her desk. “And our school board, most of them, support my plan. Thank you for coming by, Kassi.”

I was dismissed, along with any further arguments I might want to make.

This isn’t a story about Parks or standardized testing, though. At the end of the last academic year, I accepted her ways as the wave of the future for public schools. She was the engineer, and her train was prepared to leave the station. I knew I had to decide whether to get on board or be left on the platform waving goodbye to my teaching career. Other circumstances, though, would make my decision for me.

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