Confederate public school names do harm

This past May, some colleagues and I published an article in the Journal of Cases in Educational Leadership (JCEL) about a high school in Virginia (it's a composite) named for the leader of the secessionist Confederate Army, Robert E. Lee. I blogged about that article here. I have watched and studied the issue of Confederate-named public schools and mascots with great interest over the course of the past few years, bookmarking dozens of articles (maybe someday I will do a study about it).  However, I have more than a scholarly interest in this.

Ever since Charlottesville, across the state of Virginia, and country, counties and cities have been reconsidering their Confederate-named schools and mascots. In Virginia alone, so far I know of efforts in Arlington, Fairfax, and Prince William Counties. There's one Virginia county, however, where the School Board is studiously not reconsidering their Confederate-named schools and mascots, and that's the county where I live, Hanover.

About five or six years ago, I realized the importance of local and state education policy and decided to get much more active at those levels. I wrote about that here. I have been very open and public with my advocacy efforts, but I have mostly privately expressed consternation about and advocated for holding public discussions about the two Confederate-named schools and mascots in Hanover County Public Schools (note: these schools are not in my district, or part of the county): Lee-Davis High School (mascot: Confederates) and Stonewall-Jackson Middle School (mascot: the Rebels). The names promote white supremacy and are shameful and harmful to students and community members. Needless to say, my efforts have not resulted in any movement.

Certainly, other Hanover County Public Schools stakeholders have also advocated about the name and mascots over the years, but after Charlottesville happened, advocacy around this issue got new urgency.  More Hanover residents and Lee-Davis High School and Stonewall-Jackson Middle School community members and alumni started speaking up. For example, an alumnus named Ryan Leach, started this effort on facebook which includes an eloquent and compelling statement as to why the names should be changed, and which led to this larger petition addressed to the School Board. I came across this letter written to the Hanover School Board by another alumna, Mary Murrell, about why the names and mascots should be changed. I don't normally post about local matters here but I was so impressed with how well-written and -researched Mary's letter was and thought it so relevant to the greater issue, that I asked her if I could share it.

Here it is:

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August 24, 2017

Dear Hanover County School Board,

I am a graduate of Lee-Davis High School (class of 1981) and have recently joined hundreds of people in signing a petition asking you to change the name of Lee-Davis High School. As I have additional thoughts about the name, I wanted to write you directly and lay out why I believe this action is urgently needed. I also want to include Stonewall Jackson Middle School, which I attended in 1977-78, to the discussion.

The Context in which Lee-Davis Was Named

As you likely know, when the name of Lee-Davis was chosen in May 1958, Virginia was defiantly refusing to integrate its public schools. At that time, Virginia remained one of only seven states that still maintained segregated schools, even though the Supreme Court had handed down its unanimous ruling in Brown v. Board of Education four years earlier.[i] Successive Virginia governors had called for statewide “massive resistance” to that ruling, and Virginia’s legislature passed a series of laws that defied federal orders to desegregate its schools.[ii]

In 1958, despite Brown vs. Board of Education, the county was busy planning two new all-white high schools: one for the eastern end and one for the western end. Black students would continue to attend the county’s only “negro” high school, located in Ashland.[iii] The School Board chose to name the eastern end high school Lee-Davis. According to the minutes of the May 6, 1958, School Board meeting, the Board did so “in the memory and honor of two prominent members of the Confederacy,” Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis.[iv]

How and Why the Name Lee-Davis Was Chosen

Various rumors have circulated about how and why the School Board arrived at the name Lee-Davis. I have looked into what evidence exists in the public record. At the time of the May 1958 naming, the Richmond-Times Dispatch reported only that the School Board approved the name “on recommendation by a special committee.”[v] The Herald-Progress provides more precise details.[vi] The new eastern end high school was to consolidate two existing overcrowded high schools (Battlefield Park and Washington-Henry). Earlier in the year, juniors from the two schools independently considered names for what would become their new school.[vii] Each group of students submitted just one name: the Battlefield High students recommended the name Jefferson Davis; the Washington-Henry High students recommended the name William White, in honor of a teacher at both high schools who had been killed in World War II.[viii]

Later, the County School Board would choose a different name: Lee-Davis. The new name came from B. W. Sadler, the School Board member representing the Henry district.[ix] The school was in a hurry to name itself, as it was already May and officials were hoping the school could open in September. Because students at Battlefield Park were nicknamed “the rebels,” and the students at Washington-Henry were nicknamed “the statesmen,” Sadler thought that his name captured a bit of both. Jefferson Davis, he reasoned, had been a rebel, so his name fit with the Battlefield Park side, and Robert E. Lee, a general and a statesman, suited the Washington-Henry side. Sadler also added that the combination of the two names Lee and Davis into one hyphenated name had “individuality.”

The Context of the Naming of Stonewall Jackson

Even after the last of the massive resistance laws were ruled unconstitutional in 1959, Virginia continued to fight school integration. Some school systems were closed entirely rather than admit black students. Full integration would require the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964. And yet, even with that landmark legislation, Hanover County was among the last counties in Virginia to fully integrate its schools.[x] Spurred on by a lawsuit brought by the parents of black students, Hanover County finally fully integrated its public schools with the 1969-70 school year—a full fifteen years after Brown v. Board of Education and ten years after Lee-Davis opened.

That first year of full integration, 1969, presented an opportunity to replace the name Lee-Davis with a more inclusive or at least neutral name such as Mechanicsville High. Unfortunately, that renaming did not happen. Rather, the Hanover County School Board chose for its new junior high school, adjacent to Lee-Davis, yet another confederate name: Stonewall Jackson Junior High.

Why the School Names Need to be Changed

Public schools have the legal obligation to provide an education to all children and to treat their students equally. Public schools are powerful institutions that shape and influence their students for years to come. School names such as Lee-Davis and Stonewall Jackson – along with their attendant mascots and nicknames – are as much public symbols of the Confederacy as monuments, statues, and the Confederate flag.[xi] When the Hanover County School Board chose in 1958 to honor prominent men precisely for their association with the Confederacy, it sent a message to the public and to its students. This message said, and continues to say, that public authorities in Hanover County esteem and celebrate the Confederacy. It is wrong for the Hanover County Public Schools to do this for the following reasons:

Paying homage to the Confederacy through naming, mimicry, and memorialization disdains, insults, and alienates black students. No matter how common or “normal” symbols of the Confederacy are throughout Virginia, they are never neutral. Confederate symbols convey a message of domination and exclusion. When a public school honors the Confederacy, it conveys a preference for the concerns and interests of the historically dominant social group (whites) in the South at the same time that it conveys a lack of sympathy and even contempt for the historically dominated group (blacks). When a public school honors the Confederacy, it tells non-white students that Hanover is a white person’s county and that they don’t belong in the same way that whites do. By sending these messages – not limited to those I’ve listed – a public school betrays the spirit of equality that is fundamental to public education. When our public authorities continue to pay homage to the Confederacy, black (and also immigrant) students can never be sure they will be treated fairly. A community cannot prosper if any group of citizens is alienated or feels targeted for discrimination.

Virginia and Hanover County’s defiance with regard to school integration during the Civil rights era is a regrettable legacy that needs to be redressed not perpetuated. It has been shown that Confederate symbols spiked in two distinct historical periods.[xii] The first period was the early 20^th century, after Reconstruction, when white supremacy again took hold in the South, the Ku Klux Klan gained power, and southern states passed Jim Crow laws that terrorized black citizens. The second spike occurred during the civil rights period from 1950-1970, when Southerners forcefully resisted federal efforts aimed at integration. Both Lee-Davis and Stonewall Jackson were named during this period. Lee-Davis was named amid Virginia’s “massive resistance,” and Stonewall Jackson was named in very year that Hanover County belatedly integrated its public schools for real. Notably, no schools in Hanover have been named after Confederate figures since this time. The School Board has chosen non-controversial place names like Atlee, Pole Green, and Hanover for the newest schools. This is all for the good but it does not alleviate the prior problem of Lee-Davis and Stonewall Jackson.

The Confederacy was founded upon and committed to abhorrent beliefs, and public institutions should not in any way associate themselves with such beliefs. Southern states, including Virginia, seceded from the United States in order to preserve slavery in the South and to extend it into the territories. Since the 1950s, there is no longer any dispute among academic historians about the reasons for the Civil War.[xiii] Slavery was a system of oppression under-girded by the belief that white people were superior to black people. Its leaders, such as Alexander Stephens, did not believe, as the Declaration of Independence declares, that all men were created equal but, rather, that slavery was “the natural and normal condition” of black people.[xiv] There is no “racially friendly” case for the Confederacy, no matter how passionately some people, including many in the Lee-Davis community, insist there is.

Celebrations of the Confederacy depend upon discredited history that was promulgated after the South lost the Civil War, and, as such, these celebrations mis-educate young people about the past. After the defeat of the Confederacy, its former leaders (and others) cultivated a revised version of events that sanitized the Civil War as one fought over states rights, “Southern honor,” the South’s superior agrarian way of life, and so forth. This new version of history gave rise to the romantic myth of the Lost Cause. This myth remains stubbornly popular -- especially, but not only, in the South – but, regardless, it is still a myth. A public school teaches history not myth. I am certain that Lee-Davis teachers teach proper history. But outside the classroom, students confront other ideas about the past. Lee-Davis calls itself the “home of the Confederates,” titles its yearbook The Confederate, incorporates two Confederate figures into its logo, and takes as its motto “Tradition and Pride.” In what traditions should its students be proud, exactly?

Honoring the Confederacy imposes a false heritage onto white students. Many students that attend or have attended Lee-Davis, including myself, do not consider the Confederacy to be part of their heritage, or, if they do, they do not take “pride” in it. I love many things about Virginia, and can find many things about its history and culture to be proud of, but its leadership in the Civil War and its continued tendency to defend and whitewash the Confederacy is not among them. The schools’ names should be changed because they encourage white students to believe that the Confederacy and its “traditions” are something that they should value and embrace, and that the Confederacy is a positive part of who they are and a positive source of their identity. A public school violates the public trust when it imposes such associations and values upon its students. Children in Hanover County schools – of any color or background – are not confederates. They should not be taught to carry the Confederacy in their hearts or to derive values from it.

What’s even more concerning is that Neo-Nazi groups are currently engaged in something similar. David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard, equates Confederate symbols such as statues, flags and schools with “white culture,” and Neo-Nazi groups, like the Klan before them, have embraced Confederate symbols, as seen at the recent Charlottesville “Unite the Right” march. These extremists have no hesitation in admitting that the Confederacy was about white supremacy—that’s why they want to associate with it.[xv] The Hanover School Board needs to seriously consider whether it is any longer possible to disentangle the Neo-Nazis’ Confederacy with the “romantic” Lost Cause Confederacy.[xvi]   

A Duty to Overcome the Discrimination of the Past

In discussions of changing Lee-Davis’s name, I have witnessed a lot of strong feelings. I believe such strong feelings arise precisely because current and former students have come to see being a “Confederate” as somehow an important part of their history, culture, and identity. I have argued throughout this letter that a public school should not play a role in promoting such an identity. But many people in the Lee-Davis community nevertheless do feel that “pride” that they have been encouraged to feel. You therefore cannot look to the current and former student body to resolve this issue through voting or petitions. They are likely only to deliver the status quo.

You will be criticized for whatever you do, I recognize that, but doing nothing is not an option. The Confederate names were chosen a long time ago. That was not your doing. But today you have the privilege and the power to undo them. The problem is not going to go away as long as the names remain. Small tweaks like saying “C-fed” instead of “Confederate” at football games do not solve anything; they only point to the problem that won’t go away. The divisiveness that surrounds the discussion of name change is already embedded in the names themselves. That divisiveness cannot be avoided, but it can be overcome. Changing the names is the way forward.

In 1966 a federal judge wrote, “The duty rests with the [Hanover County] School Board to overcome the discrimination of the past.”[xvii] It is 2017 and Hanover County has still not overcome the “discrimination of the past.” Lee-Davis’s mission statement says that the school aspires to “assure a quality education for success in a changing world.” Hanover County is part of that changing world. Please find new names for Lee-Davis High School and Stonewall Jackson Middle School.

Sincerely,

Mary Murrell, 

Class of 1981

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[i] Kristen Green, Something Must Be Done About Prince Edward County: A Family, A Virginia Town, A Civil Rights Battle (New York: HarperCollins, 2015), p. 165.

[ii] There is a large literature on this subject. Bob Smith, They Closed Their Schools: Prince Edward County, Virginia, 1951-1964 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965); James Latimer, “The Rise and Fall of ‘Massive Resistance,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, Sept 22, 1996, A1, A9-A12; Ira M. Lechner, “Massive Resistance: Virginia’s Great Leap Backward,” Virginia Quarterly Review, 74:4 (1998); Matthew Lassiter and Andrew Lewis, eds. The Moderates’ Dilemma: Massive Resistance to School Desegregation in Virginia (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998); George Lewis, Massive Resistance: The White Response to the Civil Rights Movement (Oxford: Hodder Arnold, 2006), pp. 52ff.

[iii] Given the size of the county, some black students, especially those in the eastern side of the county, had to endure two-hour bus rides to school, in dilapidated and segregated buses—or not go at all. “Gandy High Alumni Reflect on School Days,” Herald-Progress, September 10, 2009, p. 1.

[iv] Hanover County School Board minute book, May 6, 1958.

[v] “Hanover School Named Lee-Davis,” Richmond-Times Dispatch, May 7, 1958.

[vi] Dan Sherrier, “The History of Lee-Davis and Patrick Henry High Schools,” Part II, Herald-Progress, October 2, 2008, pp. 2, 6.

[vii] In 2009, a student from the first graduating class told a reporter covering the 50^th anniversary celebrations: "I remember sitting in Washington Henry and going through all these names…. We were trying to be really creative." Richmond Times-Dispatch April, 17, 2009.

[viii] Whether intended or not, the latter suggestion would have resulted in an all-white high school with the name “White High School.”

[ix] Sadler later became the School Board Chairman and, in 1966, earned lasting notoriety after the School Board banned To Kill a Mockingbird. Claudia Durst Johnson, “The Issue of Censorship,” pp. 3-22, in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 2006). Sadler died in 1976.

[x] Herald-Progress, July 11, 1968. Cited in Dan Sherrier, “The History of Lee-Davis and Patrick Henry,” Part X, Herald-Progress December 11, 2008. See also Rebecca Bray and Dr. Lloyd Jones, The History of Education in Hanover County, Virginia, 1708-2008 (Ashland, VA: Hanover County Public Schools, 2010).

[xi] For a comprehensive list of Confederate symbols, including schools, see Whose Heritage? Public Symbols of the Confederacy. Montgomery, AL: Southern Poverty Law Center, 2016. Available at: https://www.splcenter.org/sites/default/files/whoseheritage_splc.pdf.

[xii] See Whose Heritage?

[xiii] James M. McPherson, “Southern Comfort,” New York Review of Books, April 21, 2001.

[xiv] McPherson, “Southern Comfort.”

[xv] For examples of white supremacists embracing the Confederacy for its racist ideology, see: Campbell Robertson, Alan Blinder, and Richard Fausset, “In Monument Debate, Calls for an Overdue Reckoning on Race and Southern Identity,” New York Times, August 18, 2017.

[xvi] Some political operatives in the state appear to have trouble telling the difference. See Washington Post, August 12, 2017. https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginia-politics/va-gop-northam-turned-back-on-heritage-by-calling-for-confederate-monuments-to-come-down/2017/08/23/a5b3edf6-882d-11e7-a50f-e0d4e6ec070a_story.html

[xvii] Herald-Progress, February 3, 1966, Cited in Ben Sherrier, “History of Lee-Davis,” November 13, 2008, p. A-9.

Getting More Aggressive with Relational Aggression

My fourth (and final--so much for my play to post there once per day) post at Joanne Jacobs' blog riffed off of an article in the Wall Street Journal about "relational aggression" in early childhood education settings. I spent a few days writing the post because I had so much to say after having spent much of the last ten years parenting and teaching younger children. Unfortunately, I didn't quite do the topic justice--although the post was long, I didn't feel I was able to portray adequately the layers of complexity and nuance that goes into guiding young children in navigating relational aggression. But I did my best:

First of all, I love having a specific and fitting term for this. I wish I had had it a long time ago. And, while I don’t think children or girls in particular have gotten any meaner, I am glad to see more focus on relational aggression in early childhood education circles. Certainly, laying the foundation for fine and gross motor skills, for literacy, for independence, for academics or subject matter, for self-care is vital but socialization is a major part of all of the above, though, really, none of those groups of skills and knowledge exist in isolation.

I hope you'll read the whole thing.

On seeking out in summer what should happen all year

My third guest post chez Joanne Jacobs riffs off of a lovely Jessica Lahey piece (she's such a great writer) about unstructured time for kids in the summer. I think this is a wonderful routine (hahaha) to get into, though I first felt I had to acknowledge that:

• For many reasons, many kids in America do not have the luxury of a having a healthy free-range, unstructured summer.

• With so much emphasis on testing and test prep in K-12 public schools, many structured and less structured activities that should take place during the school year, like in schools as part of the curriculum, don't. Hence, they get pushed to the summer.

 Please read the whole thing.

Reading aloud to my babies

My second guest post over at Joanne Jacobs' blog riffs off of one of Diana Senechal's guest posts about reading to babies from birth:

First of all, I found this rather surprising as I didn’t realize the policy was new. I think I remember being told by University of Virginia (of all places) pediatricians shortly after the birth of each of my children (I have fraternal twin boys and a younger daughter) that I should be reading to them. . . .

My husband and I generally have found reading books to our children to be pleasurable–it’s a nice way to spend quiet time close to them, and our family and friends enjoy it for the same reason. I also love many children’s books, especially the artful ones.

Please go read my thoughts in full here.

Are standardized testing and absence of oversight civil rights?

During the next several days, when I am taking breaks from my budding career as a statistics wonderkid, I will be guest posting along with Diana Senechal and Michael Lopez over at Joanne Jacobs' blog.

My first post is in response to Politico education reporter Stephanie Simon's article about the tensions in Louisiana between Bobby Jindal and John White:

Now, this isn’t a post about the merits of the Common Core Standards or their associated assessments, though that is fodder for many long and complex conversations (to see what I have said about the Common Core, go here), nor is it about the politics behind Jindal’s about-face. Rather, it is about John White’s hysteria and perversion of the term “civil rights.”

Please head over and read the whole thing.

A DCPS Teacher Resigns

A few summers ago at the SOS March & National Call to Action, I met a young and enthusiastic, but independent-minded and healthily-skeptical DC Public School elementary teacher, named Olivia Chapman (on twitter: formerly @sedcteacher, now @NGCoachLiv). Olivia has done two guest posts for this blog thus far, one about lessons learned during her first year with DCPS and one about testing season in the same system. This is what I said about her in October 2011:

I was so impressed with Olivia (plus I'm always looking to feature the voices of teachers and education professionals who are on the ground) that I solicited a guest post from her. If she is symbolic of the young, smart, dedicated, and energetic teachers that neo-liberal reformers so often talk of attracting and keeping in the teaching profession, from Olivia's account below, they're not doing a very good job. Who, especially with all those qualities, lasts long in a stifling and absurd environment such as Olivia describes? For our nation's sake, I pray that Olivia and so many of the discouraged newer teachers I've talked to in recent years stick it out. We need you!

I am sad to announce that after five years of teaching in DC Public schools, Olivia has resigned and to start her own business with a like-minded friend and former teacher. Olivia received her Professional Coaching Certification and now coaches adults and teens to reach their personal, wellness and career goals. Still passionate about teaching, Olivia's company, Natural Greatness Coaching offers a character education workshop for young ladies in grades 5-10. 

Olivia wrote the following in response to DCPS's question on the "Declaration of Intent to Not Return Form for Resigning or Retiring Teachers" :

What could DCPS have done to retain you in the district?

I truly don't think that there is anything that you could have done to retain me in the district. Our educational philosophies do not align, specifically what those philosophies look like in action, not necessarily how they are written and presented. Although it would seem that your will and proclaimed dedication to educating all students and improving struggling schools are aligned to my own beliefs; stating your beliefs and acting on them can be extremely different.

In my opinion and based on five years of experience in a struggling school (which I believe you now call a "40-40" school), the actions that you have imposed that are supposed to be helping to educate all students and improve the education of underprivileged students are backfiring. I know some of your test scores are going up, but that means so little when morale decreases and discontent from the community, teachers and students increase. Additionally, student behavior continues to worsen as their teachers are "impacted out", the students are over-tested and the constant change in leadership causes students to lose faith in anyone sticking around long enough to invest in their successes. Your standards are higher while our resources are lower and the teachers are less effective because of constant turnover and poor training programs (Yes, I am referring to Teach for America and DC Teaching Fellows).

IMPACT and high stakes standardized testing are deteriorating education. I have enjoyed working with each and every one of my students, as challenging as some of them may be, but I can no longer participate in a system that is tearing them down, wasting their time and breaking their spirits. I can no longer participate in the rigid guidelines of IMPACT/Common Core/Standardized testing; it is not what my kids need or ever needed to be successful. Yes, they need quality teachers, learning standards and assessments-but the manner in which you have delivered these three essential components of education are not effective. I have been witness to this for five years. You can throw data and numbers at me all you want, but it is not working for my students nor my school, and I know I am not alone in stating this, especially in Ward 8. You have poured enormous amounts of money into IMPACT and testing and not nearly enough into professional development, technology or character education programs for students. We have lacked the supplies and trainings to properly implement Common Core for the last three years. Honestly, you can call the standards whatever you want, revise them, increase their "rigor", do whatever you please; but until communities, families, parents and students are held accountable for their participation in education, none of this matters.

I believe that every child can learn and has potential to do something great with their lives. Unfortunately, I do not believe that the testing regimen implemented by DCPS is a positive way to show off their potential, their greatness or even their basic intelligence. Also, I do not believe that all of them are cut out for college. I don't believe all children should go or need to go to college to be successful. I believe that what they need are supportive communities of people that help them to maximize their potential and turn their interests and passions into careers (which may or may not require a college degree).

DCPS' commitment to turning children from reds and yellows to greens and blues in reading and math, while simultaneously cutting extracurricular activities and special subjects are 100% contradictory to my moral and educational philosophies. A positive outcome for me at the end of the year is a student who has improved in all subject areas, including the arts, a sport, a hobby or a special interest. Of course, I also want them to improve their reading, as I believe that if a child can read they can do and learn ANYTHING, which is empowering in itself. I truly hope that they understand that as well.

More imperatively, my goal is that each student leaves my class with an increased desire to learn and a more directed focus in regards to what they are interested in, and how they can turn these subjects or passion-based interests into careers. To be honest, whether students score high on a standardized assessment means almost nothing to me. If I cared a little in the past, it was for selfish reasons like trying to stay in the district and not have myself be "impacted out". It wasn't because I actually thought it meant something for the child or their future.

I have battled with guilt over not caring more about test scores, as well as for disappointing my colleagues and school leaders because I refuse to buy into the hype of testing. I refuse to buy into spending hours on test-prep and practice sheets as well as the spirit week and the pep rally the week before DC-CAS begins. I have felt guilty that I may be a liability to my school because I believe that children should be allowed to go to the bathroom during testing, as well as be told that they are on the wrong page of the test booklet, or told to look over their work before they hand it in, or god-forbid, read a book when they have finished their test. I'm sure that by me not falling victim to the intended fear that they try to instill in teachers in regards to cheating and overall testing procedures have been a pain in the butt for my administrators. I just cannot take the whole testing mentality seriously. When I know what my students' real issues are and what the world that they actually face is like when they walk out of our school's doors it is just a reminder of why what you are doing is not really working for these kids.

At this point, I think you have a clear understanding of why I must leave DCPS; it would be a disservice for me to stay any longer pretending that I believe in what you are doing. I believe that the contradictory philosophies are confusing to my students, a pain for my administrators and a burden that I can no longer bear. I will miss the students because their potential has energized me. Their will to learn meaningful content as well as learn about themselves is what brought me back every year. This was a difficult choice to make, because I have really loved watching my students make progress and grow each year. I hope that I will see many of them again.

Thank you for employing me for the past five years, and for giving me the opportunity to educate hundreds of students in DC. Although we do not see eye to eye on what a quality and meaningful education looks like, I do hope that DCPS will one day find success in implementing a program that genuinely improves the education of all district students, especially the struggling schools in Ward 8, who deserve so much more than what they are given.

Book Review: First Class: The Legacy of Dunbar, America's First Black Public High School

The following guest post is written by Jeff Tignor. Jeff has undergraduate and law degrees from Harvard and Duke University, respectively. He lives in Washington, DC, where he is a telecommunications lawyer and fellow at Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy, researching how local communities can use the internet and wireless technologies to foster civic engagement. 



In the excellent new book First Class: The Legacy of Dunbar, America’s First Black Public High School, Alison Stewart tells the story of one of the best and most important American high schools of the 20th century. The stories that Ms. Stewart shares of the tight-knit African-American community in Washington, DC with high school teachers with master’s degrees and PhDs sending students from a segregated high school to the best colleges and universities in the country amplify stories I’ve heard throughout my life. My father, paternal grandparents, two uncles, a great aunt and a cousin all attended Dunbar. After receiving his master’s degree from Columbia, my grandfather returned to Dunbar to teach English. My father and one of my uncles both left Dunbar for Yale and went on, respectively, to become a professor at Yale’s School of Epidemiology and Public Health and a surgeon in Kokomo, Indiana and part-time professor at Indiana University. My Dunbar family tree is filled with educators. The legacy of Dunbar has deeply influenced and affected me, even though I did not grow up in Washington, DC. For example, a few years after I moved to DC as an adult, I decided to run for Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner for my neighborhood. On election day, as I stood in the rain handing out flyers, a woman said, as my opponent attempted to reach out to her, “Sorry, but I’m voting for Mr. Tignor’s Grandson.” I won.

Dunbar was a groundbreaking educational institution born in Washington, DC, as a result of a unique set of circumstances and later hobbled by home rule politics, social class conflicts, and racial desegregation without integration. In the first half of the 20th century  this public school produced numerous leaders in medicine, science, education, law, politics, and the military. With the end of segregation, the conditions that resulted in Dunbar’s creation ceased to exist. Ms. Stewart, an award-winning journalist who has worked as an anchor and reporter for several major commercial TV networks, as well as NPR and PBS, and whose parents graduated from Dunbar in the 1940s, uses Dunbar as a lens for examining the history of education in Washington, DC. The book covers three distinct eras:  First, from 1807-1954, a detailed history of African-American education in Washington, DC, and of how Dunbar became America’s first African-American public high school; second, beginning with the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education and Bolling v. Sharpe decisions, a transitional period in the years surrounding school integration; and third, Dunbar’s post-1960 full transformation to the neighborhood school it is today, struggling with the challenges of urban education. As someone whose family history in Washington, DC, dates to the post-civil war 1800s, I learned new facts about DC’s history and was struck by the irony of Dunbar alums arguing for desegregation at the Supreme Court and then seeing their prestigious and beloved alma mater fray as the unconstitutional system of segregation was dismantled. I was moved by the heartbreaking stories of students and educators trying to honor Dunbar’s past and simultaneously create a present and future that will allow the school to once again become a launching pad for great careers.

Dunbar came to be because unlike in much of the South, there were no laws restricting the education of free blacks in Washington, DC.  Small schools such as the Bell School and the Normal School for Colored Girls begat the Preparatory High School for Colored Youth, M Street High School, and ultimately in 1916, Dunbar High School. As the only academic high school for African-Americans in Washington, DC, Dunbar effectively became a magnet school. Students from DC had to pass an 8 to enroll and students transferring into Dunbar as part of the Great Migration had to take an entrance exam. Dunbar’s curriculum focused on English, math, the sciences, ancient history, music, Latin, French and German. Many of Dunbar’s teachers and administrators, like my grandfather, had advanced degrees and included doctors, lawyers, and two of the first three African-American women to receive PhDs. Dunbar sent students to prestigious colleges such as Harvard, Yale, Brown, Amherst, Williams, Dartmouth, Wellesley, and the University of Michigan. Notable alums include Edward Brooke, the first black US Senator elected by popular vote; Charles Drew, the creator of the blood bank; William Hastie, the first African-American Federal judge; and, Wesley Brown, the first African-American graduate of the Naval Academy.

In 1954, Charles Hamilton Houston and two of his fellow alums from the M Street School, Dunbar’s forerunner, were key members of the team that successfully argued for outlawing legally segregated schools in the states in Brown v. Board of Education and in the District of Columbia in Bolling v. Sharpe. From 1955 onward, Dunbar became a neighborhood school, with attendance solely based on the boundaries within which a child resided. One educator commented at the time that First & O, NW, was infamous as a gathering place for young men who were unemployed, out of school and “indecent in their public conduct.” Ms. Stewart writes: “It is bitterly ironic that three of the key players in dismantling legal segregation…learned their lessons at a school that became an unintended casualty of necessary civil rights action.” In a July NPR interview, Ms. Stewart described Dunbar's benefitting from the glass ceiling segregation placed on Dunbar’s highly educated teachers as a “perversity.”

By the mid-1960s, Dunbar and several of its alumni and former teachers, who had moved on to other leadership positions in education in the city, found students not nearly as interested in the tradition-bound lessons that began in 1807. My grandfather, Madison Tignor, found himself having to answer tough questions from students such as: Why doesn’t Eastern High School have an Afrocentric curriculum? Architect of school desegregation, now Howard University President James Nabrit was asked: Why is Howard Law School no longer serving the needs of African-Americans seeking equality? Marion Barry came to prominence. Dunbar never did integrate. From the 1970s forward, “the economic and social woes of DC were Dunbar’s woes.”

Over the years, there have been periodic signs of hope; a pre-engineering magnet program focused heavily on the sciences and partially financed by corporate sponsors, a Dunbar graduate becoming a Stanford graduate, and most recently, the track coach who will pick up girls at home as early as 3:30 am to get them to practice and who can point to every girl in a team photo and name where she is in college. Ms. Stewart ends on a positive note suggesting that given the demographic changes in the neighborhood maybe Dunbar will make history again, as its founders would have wished, “as the first truly, organically integrated school in Washington, DC.” Here's to hoping she's right.

Ssshhhh! Testing in Progress

This is a guest post by a DCPS teacher who wishes to remain anonymous due to fears of reprisal by administrators.

"Ssshhhh! Testing in Progress" 

These signs hang on every classroom door and throughout the hallways of the elementary school where I teach. Bulletin boards throughout the building are plastered with test-taking tips, countdown to testing days, and even testing-themed poetry. Teachers are feverishly reviewing the pages and pages of rules, regulations, and routines that will serve as a survival guide for the next two weeks. Administrators walk around inquiring about the happenings in each classroom, wanting to know how each lesson will contribute to the students' achievement on the upcoming standardized tests. Flyers are sent home describing the stress that will ensue in the following weeks and how we will cover up this anguish with a makeshift “spirit week.” Pajama day, crazy sock day, class color day. I momentarily found myself reminiscing about the days of high school homecoming, but this is no homecoming. Our school has become a den of bubble-sheet masters, nervous teachers, and strangers with clipboards, taking notes on every move made and the potential breaches of test security. 

I’m not sure what's worse, the testing itself or the preparation and anxiety built up beforehand. As I sat through a DC-CAS pep rally, the magnitude of this testing madness hit me like a freight train. This is what children are getting pumped up for? This is what teachers have been “working towards all year”? This is the “pinnacle” of our teaching? I felt like I was in some creepy twilight zone as I watched other teachers and administrators chant and watched the confused students cheer. To see the students get excited about their potential success on the test was not the point of contention for me. The fact that the students are subject to poorly-conceived, low-quality tests and used as pawns to determine educational funding, as well as the fate of their teachers, is not something worth cheering about. 

Other than the pep rally, teachers spent the week prior to the testing in meetings being lectured on the importance of test security, the protocols that would be our bible for the next two weeks, and on just exactly what would happen to us if these rules were not followed. The plans outlined what would happen from the moment the students entered the classroom until the last test was signed back into our testing coordinator. We were instructed to go over the plans, ask any questions we had and be prepared in the weeks to come. Due to the fact that our school was under scrutiny for previous allegations of cheating, we were warned that any negligence in conforming our classrooms and ourselves to these guidelines would result in an investigation and strict consequences.

I planned lessons throughout the meetings and graded papers in the background, only contributing my thoughts in areas which I found to be egregiously unreasonable or unjust. For example, lined paper for scrap paper, smiling at students (this is what they say is “coaching”), and allowing students to stand and stretch during testing would absolutely not be tolerated. As I listened to these rules, I pictured my bubbly bunch of eight year olds' faces. Then, the real bomb was dropped: Absolutely no bathroom breaks during testing unless the child was showing physical signs of distress. In addition, we also needed to prevent multiple bathroom trips by determining how badly each child had to use the restroom. Well, any teacher knows that once one student has “an emergency,” they all have emergencies. How am I to be the judge of the content of each child's bladder? To this I was told it would be easier to deal with angry parents of a child who had wet themselves, than to have to explain the situation to the monitors from central offices. 

I decided that I'd be escorted out by authorities before I let nervous eight year old test-takers wet themselves on my watch. Are we that afraid of losing our jobs that we relinquish our humanity? Are we that desperate to prove that we are not cheating on these  McTests that we deny children their basic needs? This is the “pinnacle” of insanity. This is the “pinnacle” of what an era of high-stakes testing is doing to our children and to our educators. 

As testing was underway I became more and more irritated with not only the rules, but the fact that teachers’ discretion was being undermined by outsiders claiming to be experts on data, but not on children. Who are these people moving chairs from place to place around my room to see my test administration from multiple angles? Why are these strangers writing pages of notes on the condition of my classroom and my position in the room? The thought crossed my mind of just throwing the pile of test booklets in the air and screaming of its insanity, but what good would that do? I wouldn’t be allowed to finish the year with my students who had to put their science projects on the back burner for the two-week testing period. I would never get to see how they turned out if I was punished for breaching test security. I had already been scolded for allowing children to read books after they finished the test, as well as for allowing them to go to the bathroom. I decided to not push any further.   

After being stalked throughout the building for two weeks in order to ensure that I would not change any test answers and spied on from just beyond my classroom door, my anxiety and disgust became overwhelming. After being witness to little children crying with anxiety and acting out in resistance and being forced to sit for hours completing endless assessments that they would most likely never see the results of, my faith in public education was diminishing. Why are teachers subject to this level of disrespect and distrust? Why are students subject to this much of a loss of real learning  time?

Every day, more and more evidence comes out that challenges the reliability and validity of test results and demonstrates the unfairness of using these results to evaluate teachers. But I will comply with the rules and regulations--if for nothing else than to see my students' science projects and to see how much more they will accomplish this year; I am committed to my students and their learning even as I am opposed to the insane high-stakes testing regime that has been imposed on them. I will not, however, allow my students or myself to be de-humanized in the process.

How much longer can we allow our schools to feed the high-stakes testing machine rather than feed students’ imperative to learn? How much longer can we let testing replace teaching and learning? And how much longer can we remain silent throughout it all? 

Rather than Choosing "Best" Teacher, Parents Should Seek Best Match

I have another guest post up, this one over at Nacy Flanagan's Education Week blog, Teacher in a Strange Land. In it, I respond to the matter of letting parents choose their children's teachers.

Check it out.

Legislating to the Test

Recently, the Virginia Senate passed a bill that would eliminate the 3rd grade SOL (Standards of Learning) Tests in Science and Social Studies. That means less standardized testing! As a Virginia public school parent, I should be thrilled, right? Not necessarily.

See my post on this over at The Core Knowledge Blog.

School "Reform" in DC: Is the Problem Choice or What Compels Families to Choose?

After reading the New York times op-ed on school choice in DC, I asked some folks close to what's happening in education there for their thoughts. Mary Levy sent me what is written below and (with her permission), I decided to use it as a guest post. Mary Levy has analyzed DC Public School staffing, budget and expenditures, and monitored the progress of education reform for thirty years. She is a major source for fiscal, statistical and general information on DCPS for the media, government officials and non-profit, business and civic groups. She directed the Public Education Reform Project at the Washington Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights & Urban Affairs for 19 years, during which she played a major role in developing the District of Columbia’s school funding systems, wrote numerous reports on DCPS, and participated in every major reform planning initiative. Previously, in private practice with Rauh, Lichtman, Levy & Turner, she did civil litigation in civil rights, labor law, and school finance, including major litigations in New York  and Maryland.

I share Natalie Hopkinson’s frustration, as expressed in an op-ed in today's New York Times and have for a long time. Unfortunately, some of her facts are wrong (Has the New York Times now dispensed with fact checkers?) Furthermore, the larger problem in the District isn't choice per se, but why families feel compelled to exercise choice. 

To address some of the inaccuracies, what Congress has done is little compared to the work of DC's own elected officials. In 1995 Congress produced only the charter law and there was nothing about an option to transfer. The DC Council at the same time separately enacted a parallel law. Congress never did a choice policy for DC. Vouchers, which came later, were in fact, much to the chagrin of some of us, endorsed by our elected officials, including the Mayor, the Council Chair, and the President of the Board of Education. As for performance on tests, charter schools in DC on average have test scores somewhat higher than DCPS schools, though not by a lot. As to the closure of schools whose students struggle the most, the schools that then Chancellor Rhee closed on the whole actually had higher test scores than the schools to which their students were later sent; they were also more likely to have made Adequate Yearly Progress. And a reminder: Rhee was not appointed by Congress but by the popularly elected Mayor Fenty.

The argument about choice has been going on at least since I become involved in DCPS in the mid-1970s and probably before that. Many school activists from east of Rock Creek Park argued passionately against out-of-boundary placements, even when they were (allegedly) based on need. The assumption is that if the government forces people to stay in neighborhood schools, the parents will stay and make the schools be good. The result here has not been so felicitous--those with the means, or the moxie to get outside help, move to the suburbs or pay for low-cost independent or parochial schools. In fact, part of charter growth is from those schools, rather than from DCPS. I have watched over thirty years while determined parents tried to make their neighborhood schools better--and were mostly rebuffed or ignored. Even west of the Park, where my children attended DC Public Schools, we spent the majority of our efforts trying to neutralize the damage done by the DCPS administration. Still, we were more successful than those east of the Park. 

With the appointment of Michelle Rhee and the end of any avenue for meaningful parent involvement or influence, the situation is even worse. The schools west of the Park and some in gentrified Capitol Hill are favored, and DCPS administration is more authoritarian and unresponsive than ever to the rest. It is also elitist, and more uninformed, more unstable, more arbitrary, and less competent than before the mayoral takeover--a distinctly dubious achievement, since the situation was pretty bad before. That’s why so many people--both families and good staff--leave.

Now our elected officials and their appointees are threatening to close more neighborhood schools and bring in outside charter operators. Currently, charter schools in DC are city-wide by law and may not give preference to neighborhood children. Many current DC charter schools are local products, started by DCPS parents, teachers, principals, and social service providers who couldn’t take any more of DCPS. They’re going to be under threat too--because of the latest “reform” panacea, closing schools in order to bring in new operators and their programs with no little or no evidence of effectiveness, and new teachers and principals, many poorly prepared and foreign to communities here. I see the advent of charter school chains as trading a remote DCPS bureaucracy for a remote private bureaucracy located elsewhere in the country. 

In the old days there was a lot more out-of-boundary space in the schools west of the Park; in addition, though few people realized it, there was a lot of out-of-boundary placement within neighborhoods and wards. Now, due to demographic change and favorable treatment, there is not much out-of-boundary space in schools west of the Park, so we could get a test of the parents-can-make-their-neighborhood-schools-good proposition east of the Park. But only if the schools stay open and only if the parents stay. 

Remake the university? How about we understand its purpose first.

Today's piece is a guest post by Michael Lopez. Michael is a few of my favorite things: an attorney-philosopher-graduate student-educator. He previously guest posted here on our shared alma mater and he also guest posts at Joanne Jacob's blog, Linking and Thinking on Education. His own blog is Highered Intelligence.


"But the truth is that nobody has any business to destroy a social institution until he has really seen it as an historical institution." -CK Chesterton.

Preliminarily, I'd like to thank Rachel for inviting me to guest-blog here once more. I've immense respect for her education writing and am honored to be a part of it. She's asked me to write a "response" to this article  in The New Republic about Rick Perry's "higher education vision." The author of the piece is Kevin Carey, the policy director of Education Sector, a DC think tank. And he apparently thinks that Rick Perry has great ideas for the university. So let's do two things up front (besides reading the article): let's identify Perry's ideas, and identify why Carey thinks they're so great.

The article itself provides a link to Perry's "7 Solutions". Carey also provides this brief summary of the relevant steps:

Taken together, the seven solutions are remarkably student-friendly. Four of them focus on improving the quality of university teaching by developing new methods of evaluating teaching performance, tying tenure to success in the classroom, separating the teaching and research functions within university budgets, and using teaching budgets to reward professors who excel at helping students learn. The fifth solution would give prospective students choosing colleges more information about things like class size, graduation rates, and earnings in the job market after graduation. The sixth would make state higher education subsidies more student-focused, and the seventh would shift university accreditation toward measures of academic outcomes.

So what's so wonderful about these efforts on Carey's account? Well, the long and the short of it is that both Carey and Perry share a vision of the role of the university in our society, a vision that has quite a grip on our collective consciousness these days. That vision has a few assumptions behind it: (1) that the role of the university is primarily economic; (2) that the university is part of the "social assembly line" that our elementary and high schools have become in which institutions produce citizens something in the way a screw machine turns out screws; and, (3) that college benefits (or should benefit) everyone who attends, and, specifically, does so through advancing their career prospects.

We can see these assumptions at play throughout Carey's article. For example:

A landmark study of college student learning published earlier this year by the sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa of NYU and the University of Virginia found that “American higher education is characterized by limited or no learning for a large proportion of students, and persistent or growing [race- and income-based] inequalities over time.” Fixing this problem ought to be a bipartisan concern.

That Carey assumes that these findings "should" be a universal concern convinces me that he doesn't even entertain two notions: (1) that university might not actually have as its mission teaching everyone equally; and, (2) that the university may not be a suitable a tool for eliminating at least some race- and income-based inequalities. These aren't implausible views, in my estimation, and they deserve at least consideration.

The balance of the article is really more about progressivism than it is about Rick Perry. (Although one might have guessed this by looking at the last sentence of the first paragraph, the traditional location of the "thesis statement."--Carey's doesn't mention Perry at all, despite the title and the picture.) His conclusion is, essentially, that progressives should be seriously committed to their goals of equality-through-social-engineering, that they should treat the university as a tool to accomplish those goals, and that they shouldn't allow party-line loyalty to interfere with their vision. Carey is, in other words, calling for a more consistent progressive idealism that pursues goals over political positioning:

Making college more accessible and affordable is, of course, the foundation of progressive higher education policy. Yet Democrats in Texas have almost uniformly denounced Perry’s plans.

Running through much of this discussion is a common theme: that students aren't getting everything they should from college, that some professors are not great teachers, and that the university is failing in its primary mission to educate the population and prepare them for the workforce. And there's no doubt in my mind whatsoever that universities are, indeed, failing to prepare students for the workforce. Carey and I agree about that. 

Where we disagree is that I question whether universities should be in the workforce-preparation business in the first place. That might seem like a bit of heresy these days, when the phrase "get a college degree" is almost ubiquitously followed with the words "in order to get a good job." But the fact of the matter is that while certain portions of the university are geared towards employment preparation--schools of engineering, education, law, medicine, and the like--the undergraduate curriculum is typically a curriculum in the liberal arts. That is, it is a preparation not for employment, but for life as a free, educated member of the civic body. The university has always had this split, since its inception: there was the arts curriculum on the one hand, and then there was advanced study in Theology, Medicine, or Law on the other.

The study of the liberal arts-- the preparation to live a civic life--is primarily about maturity, reflectiveness, and grounding in culture and philosophy. It's about the development of reason and the contextualization of experience, all so that one's "wider view" of the world might be brought to bear in the course of one's life. Public universities were established in order to make this sort of personal development more available to the populace, on the theory that an informed citizenry is a better citizenry, not necessarily a wealthier citizenry. (Please note that I am referring only to the more common programs at colleges of Arts and Sciences; there is a difference between the purposes of liberal arts programs on the one hand, and technical colleges such as Texas A&M on the other.)

Now perhaps this is something that we should hope for everyone, and maybe college should be more accessible, and cheaper. But if so, it's not because college is simply the last step in preparation for the workforce. The benefit of college (in the sense I'm talking about) isn't economic and the outcome of a college education should not be judged in terms of either economic outcome or economic parity.

This vision of the university does not see the professor as a content-delivery system. That is the role of the teacher in high school, which really is an institution developed and geared towards the distribution of foundational skills for use in one's economic life. Indeed, the K-12 system was developed after the university system, and can credibly be seen as a way to fill a foundational-skills void that the university system was never designed to address. A college professor is not a high school teacher; a professor is there because he or she ostensibly has a subject-matter expertise that makes him or her a resource for those who would like to learn about those things. The burden of learning, however, is on the student; the college student should be one who can teach him or herself, and who can use the professor as a resource in their own educational development.

The high school, by contrast, is an institution for imparting foundational skills that enable students to pursue their own goals and interests. If we see education as the project of providing students with the ability to lead good, flourishing lives, we can see high school as providing the student with the means, the capacities for action, while the liberal arts curriculum helps refine the student's goals.

Yet somewhere along the line--I suspect it was in the 60's--someone decided that college should become the new high school, that a college degree should be the natural continuation and culmination of the basic-skills acquisition that the K-12 system was designed to impart. Progressives like Kevin Carey see college as a way to level the playing field, to achieve their dream of economic egalitarianism. But I think it's the wrong tool for the job, and by leaving it to colleges to pick up the slack left off by a failing high school system that has substantially abandoned any attempt at hard and fast academic standards, we're asking colleges to deliver something that they are not originally equipped to deliver.

It's hardly a surprise that colleges fail at tasks for which they are, by design, incredibly ill-suited. That failure may be a problem, but by proposing seven-point reforms like those advocated by Perry, we're not "fixing" the university, but rather reshaping it into something else.

Now maybe that's really for the best. So far, I've been merely descriptive, offering an alternative vision of the university. It happens that, historically speaking, my vision is much more accurate than Perry's or Carey's. But that doesn't mean it's the best vision for our future. Nevertheless, I think that it's important that we understand what we are doing, and that we avoid the fallacy of Chesterton's Fence, that is, the reform or changing of institutions without regard to the purposes for which they were initially constructed. (Megan McArdle discusses that fallacy here. Please, especially read the block quote from CK Chesterton.) We have universities that provide a liberal arts curriculum for a reason--presumably because the society which attends to such things is a better society. If we "reform" the university, we do so at the risk of losing the benefit of that original purpose. To overstate the case somewhat, by transforming that which gives us a vision of the good life into that which gives us financial success, we risk pursuing money at the expense of our national soul.

I hope readers will excuse me if I'm not quite as eager as Perry and Carey to sprint down that road.

A Lesson on Failing

This summer at the SOS March & National Call to Action, I was pleased to see some young and enthusiastic, but independent-minded and healthily skeptical teachers. Among them was DCPS elementary school teacher, Olivia Chapman (on twitter: @sedcteacher). Olivia dual-majored in special and general education at The College of Saint Rose in her native upstate New York  and then worked for a year as a substitute teacher in Albany, New York, before accepting her current position. I was so impressed with Olivia (plus I'm always looking to feature the voices of teachers and education professionals who are on the ground) that I solicited a guest post from her. If she is symbolic of the young, smart, dedicated, and energetic teachers that neo-liberal reformers so often talk of attracting and keeping in the teaching profession, from Olivia's account below, they're not doing a very good job. Who, especially with all those qualities, lasts long in a stifling and absurd environment such as Olivia describes? For our nation's sake, I pray that Olivia and so many of the discouraged newer teachers I've talked to in recent years stick it out. We need you! As one of my children's teachers told me as we talked about the limitations of standardization and high-stakes testing were doing, "The pendulum is always swinging; I'm just waiting for it to swing in the other direction." In too many schools and systems, teaching rich, meaningful, and varied content and leading our children to embrace the beauty of the life of the mind has become an act of defiance when it should be an ethos. Here is Olivia's piece:

A Lesson on Failing

We hear a great deal these days from the media and education reformers about our “broken” public school system and about “failing” public schools. While I certainly haven’t been to all public schools and seen them for myself, I see and read about success in public schools often enough to know that not all public schools are “failing.” Unfortunately, though, I happen to work at a school that is failing and I used to be part of the reason for that failure.

Just to be clear, I'm not referring to a label of “failure” often placed on schools due to their failure to meet No Child Left Behind's lofty and unattainable AYP (Adequate Yearly Progress) requirements. My school is failing because of what NCLB’s mandates have done to the students, teachers, and to the community. My school is failing because morality, honesty, compassion, and values have been replaced by an obsession with data, accountability, standardized testing, and evaluations.

Authentic, creative, and innovational learning experiences have been replaced by practice tests, overwhelming amounts of interim assessments, multiple choice drill and practice sheets, and an inundation of mandated programs and paper work that have little impact on real student learning.  I have seen genuinely good, veteran teachers lose touch with their morals out of fear. I have seen children bow their heads in shame upon the revelation that their test scores labeled them below basic in reading or math. I have had parents refer solely to their children’s test scores to describe their abilities, telling me that their children are good at math, but bad at reading and vice versa. I have witnessed cheating and lying to save careers. I have witnessed the stealing of materials and resources because budget cuts have allowed for very little funding for what our students really need. This is the harsh reality and this is failing. We are failing ourselves and we are failing our students. We are neglecting to truly educate our students because teachers aren’t allowed to be innovative and creative. Instead, we are overwhelmed by the task of producing robotic test-takers rather than thoughtful, lifelong learners.

When I was hired at DC Public Schools I was told that if I couldn’t get the students' test scores up, I was dispensable. Teachers who have students with high test scores are put on pedestals and those without are stigmatized, humiliated, and downright disrespected by the administration. This was the culture that I was thrown into as a first year teacher. At first, I was determined to succeed at attaining this highly esteemed respect from my colleagues and my principal.

I spent my first year teaching relentlessly chasing this prize. I drilled, I practiced, I taught test-taking strategies. I made the students want to stay in for recess to practice testing by rewarding them with dollar store surprises and animal crackers. I begged and pleaded for parents to get their kids to school early and stay after for more standardized test review. I thought that if my students had awesome test scores, I would earn the veneration I had yearned for. More importantly, I thought that this would prove that I was a good teacher. In reality, I lost sight of who I was and why I had become a teacher. Oh, and my students test scores turned out to be pretty low, despite my sixty-hour work weeks and endless nights spent grading bubble sheets. In addition, at the end of the school year I was rated "minimally effective" due to my students’ low test scores.

I spent the summer after my first year reflecting on why I had become a teacher and thought about quitting and traveling the world. But I soon realized that it wasn't teaching that was the problem, it was the environment I was teaching in (not to mention I didn’t have enough money saved to even travel locally)--the high-stress intensity of the testing atmosphere, the "walking on eggshells" feeling that you get when you know something bad is going to happen despite any precautions you may have taken. I decided to scrap the entire test prep regimen that I thought, and was told, was crucial to student success. I figured I had one more year to improve my rating before being terminated, so why not teach the way that I thought would be most effective, most compelling, and most beneficial to my students? Why not teach my students the way that my best teachers had taught me?

Last year, for my students' sake as well as for my own, I took the focus off of testing. I told my students that standardized testing was something that we had to do in order to prove to the city and to the nation that they have good teachers and that they are learning at school, and my head-strong group of fourth graders was determined to prove themselves. I reassured them regularly that I would not refer to them by a label determined by their test scores and that they were so smart and had so much knowledge that they did not need to worry about taking the silly old test. I treated the test as if it were just another thing on our fourth grade “to do” list. This constant reassurance gave them confidence to take on the test, but it also took the emphasis off of the end-all-be-all aspect of high-stakes standardized testing.

With this weight off of our shoulders, I moved my students on to more authentic learning. Genuine, meaningful learning cannot prosper when the burden of bubble sheets, arbitrary teacher firings and terms like “below basic” are clouding our brains. For the most part, I replaced weekly multiple-choice assessments with projects that met the standards as well as met the students' interests. We read materials that sparked intellectual curiosity, debates, and critical thinking.  I stopped using the “preferred” textbooks and found ways to fund class sets of books and magazines that were engaging and appropriate for my demographic. In the end, their test scores were fine. No, I didn’t produce any miraculous increase in proficiency levels, but these kids now know how to think, they gained content knowledge, they know a few things about the world around them, and they genuinely care about learning more.  

Critics of my anti-teaching-to-the-test approach often ask, “Well, how do you know that the students actually learned without looking at data from their test scores?” I look at tons of data! I listen for conversation skills, I review projects, I read reports, I observe debates and discussions, and I use rubrics to assess skits and videos. Sure, I throw in some multiple-choice style tests when appropriate and yes, I look at that data too. More importantly, I know that these students learned because they left my class with authentic means to express and apply their knowledge. These students still stop by my room to tell me what they are learning and doing in school. They value what I taught them because they see the importance of each lesson in their everyday lives. Furthermore, they look to deepen their understanding of topics of interest. They still ask me for help selecting books that will interest them and help them expand their knowledge. Some of my former students still check our class facebook page for extra learning activities to do at home. They ask me questions like, “Ms. Chapman, do you have any friends who are doctors/lawyers/engineers/authors that I could write to about how they got their careers?” Their fifth grade teacher informed me that during the earthquake, my previous students climbed under their desks because they had learned what to do during natural disasters by becoming “meteorologists” and writing live weather reports in class last year. 

I read somewhere that teachers whose students do not excel on high-stakes standardized tests are probably the best teachers.  I don’t necessarily agree with that. However, I do believe that teaching to the test makes children dislike school and makes teachers loathe teaching. I have realized in my first three years of teaching that the aspects of public education that are “failing” are our current education policies, reforms, and those who are pushing them, those who think that spending large sums of money on testing and teacher evaluations will make children smarter. Then administrators continue the “failing” by pushing these policies onto teachers, and in turn, so do the teachers who reluctantly choose to go along with them.

My school did not make AYP again this year. We now have a new principal who never ceases to express his endless devotion to getting an 80% pass rate on this year’s tests. I'm sure that my defiance of his test-prep regime, of his mandated ten multiple-choice question bi-weekly formative assessments, and of his failure to see the students he is supposed to educate as anything more than test scores will cause great controversy. I have been warned that I walk on thin ice because of the test scores that are tied heavily to my evaluation. In spite of this, what I fear most is not a poor rating based on a single test. What I fear most is failing my students and their community again by believing that my students' success and my own is based on teaching to that single test.