Sometimes it takes a comedian to make a serious point.
about the standardized tests and Common Core State Standards being
rolled out in his own children’s public schools, he brought to mind
other instances where comedians have broken through the fog of typical
policy debate to reflect how most people really feel about an issue.
roasted then-President George Bush at the White House Correspondent’s
Dinner in 2006. His hilarious send-up of the Bush administration’s
horrendous decision to turn the tragedy of Sept. 11 into a reckless and
nonsensical invasion of Iraq was acknowledged to be, as one
writer put it, not just a blistering critique of Bush’s policies but
also a ridicule of the “ever-cheapening discourse that passes for
political debate” about those policies.
But what people often
forget about Colbert’s remarks is that they got huge attention by media
at a time when they were mostly ignoring
occurring in the streets. Colbert revealed what a lot of the populace
already knew: that the causes for war were trumped up, and the
administration was colluding with policy circles in Washington, D.C.,
and the mainstream media to prop up false arguments for the status quo.
Similarly,
what Louis C.K. said about current education policies like standardized
testing and the Common Core occurred against a backdrop of popular
dissent.
When new standardized tests Louis C.K. railed against rolled out in New York,
skipped the tests.
,
so many parents opted their students out of the tests the teachers were
told they were no longer needed to proctor the exams. At another
Brooklyn school, 80 percent of the students opted out.
,
41 school districts in Nassau and Suffolk counties reported thousands
of students refusing to take the test, and an additional district
reported hundreds more.
What is happening in New York is indicative of a groundswell of popular dissent – what Peter Rothberg, a journalist for t
he Nation
and a New York City parent, called a “nationwide movement” – against
the overuse and abuse of standardized testing in public schools.
The
National Center for Fair and Open Testing, an independent organization
that works to end the misuses and flaws of standardized testing, keeps a
running count of the test resistance on its website
Fairtest.org.
When education historian Diane Ravitch recently reviewed the tally, she
found “stories about test protest and reform activities – as well as a
few victories – come from more than a third of the states,” which she
listed on
her personal blog.
Fair Tests’s executive director, Monty Neil, recently wrote for a blog at t
he Washington Post,
“The testing resistance movement has exploded across the nation.” Neil
listed major concerns that drive the parent and student protesters,
including:
- “There is too much testing. It crowds out other
subjects, even recess, depriving children of an engaging, well-rounded
curriculum.
- The tests are not useful to teachers, parents or
students because they don’t assess important areas of learning,
questions and answers are secret, and scores are not returned in a
timely manner.
- Parents, teachers and students object to
spending millions of dollars on testing and computer infrastructure for
online testing while schools suffer increased class size and cuts to
arts, sports, and other engaging activities.”
Volunteer
activists in the test resistance movement who formed United Opt Out in
2011 have become so disruptive to the standardized testing establishment
that
their website was recently
“hacked into and destroyed – along with a great deal of their web-based
educational tools,” according to a report at
Alternet,
including “years of research, with an archive of guides and tutorials
for opting out tailored specifically to almost every U.S. state.”
The
Alternet reporter quoted Denver UOO organizer Peggy Robertson who said,
“It’s clear we pose a serious threat … it’s not the typical hack job.
It was malicious.” The website has since been restored.
Breaking Through the Bland Rhetoric
Much
in the same way that Colbert broke through the cheap dialogue about
“patriotism” and “strength” that surrounded the Iraq War, Louis C.K.’s
plain speaking about his daughter’s education seared through the bland
rhetoric about “standards, expectations, and achievement” that dominates
the debate about education policy. He explained what is rapidly
becoming the reality about schooling everywhere in America: “It’s
changed in recent years. It’s all about these tests. It feels like a
dark time.”
Speaking from a parent’s point-of-view, he described
his daughter’s schooling as a “massive stressball.” He questioned the
role of test-makers like Pearson who now seem to figure more prominently
in his children’s education than their teachers do.
Those who defend the Common Core, in particular, were quick to put up blog posts at
Newsweek and
Vox
explaining how Louis C.K. had gotten the new standards “wrong.” Of
course, his criticisms weren’t even about the standards explicitly. It’s
doubtful Louis C.K. has ever even read them. Among those who have read
the standards, some like them, some don’t.
But the truth is, no
one actually knows, in an objective way, whether these new standards are
any good or not because they’ve never been piloted anywhere and
evaluated based on their results with actual students. There’s no proof
anywhere they will produce “more rigor in the classroom” or solve the
problems of educating “disadvantaged kids,” as so many contend. So the
debate about whether the standards represent “high quality” is just so
much conjecture.
It’s also true that standardized testing did not
begin with the Common Core. And standards aren’t anything new either, as
most states had standards prior to adopting the Common Core.
But
the current heightened emphasis on standardized testing is an effect of
the policies of the Obama administration, for sure. In order for states
to get grant money available from Race to the Top and obtain waivers
from No Child Left Behind, they had to link scores on standardized tests
to their evaluations of teachers and principals. This has heightened
the “stakes” in high-stakes testing.
Even ardent supporters of the Common Core are having their doubts. In a
Salon
interview by Josh Eidelson, American Federation of Teachers president
Randi Weingarten warned the new standards “may actually fail” due to a
host of problems going beyond testing and the poor rollout to issues
with being “developmentally inappropriate for the earliest of kids” and a
government copyright that “suggests they’re fixed in slate, and that’s
just wrong.”
The Big Picture Most Miss
What’s
so often lost in the debate over education policies is that criticisms
of the Common Core and testing are symptoms of much larger problems with
education spreading across the country. Last year in Chicago there were
three days of protests against the city’s decision to close their
neighborhood schools for the sake of “reforming” them.
Similar
protests occurred in Philadelphia where communities of black and brown
citizens openly defied civic leaders’ decisions to cut education
spending and close neighborhood schools, again, in the name of
“reforming” them.
Waves of discontent with current education policies have washed through Newark,
Portland, Oregon;
St. Paul, Minnesota; and Bridgeport, Connecticut.
These
events, and others, reveal an emerging Education Spring – a
counterargument now slipping into the mainstream of American opinion in
opposition to the education policies championed by the likes of Michelle
Rhee and Education Secretary Arne Duncan.
What’s generally not
understood is that these flash points of resistance are driven by common
grievances – a grass-roots “common core” if you will – that is shaping
the rapidly evolving education debate.
Behind nearly every protest
to the status quo education policies are common grievances that our
local schools are being appropriated from us, and thus, teachers,
parents, students, even whole communities increasingly feel they have
less control over their education destinies, while at the same time,
they see that governing policies are driving more control to testing
companies and other powerful entities we never chose.
Louis C.K.’s joke, this time speaking on the
David Letterman
show, that when the kids don’t do well on the tests “they burn the
school down” is not too far from the truth. And his follow-up comment
that “the tests are written by people nobody knows who they are” is no
joke at all.
Of course, the folks in charge and much of the
courtier crowd of policy and media types who follow them around are the
ones who are most immune to these realities. As a parent writing to
President Obama explained, in a letter posted at the Washington Post
blog of
Valerie Strauss,
“We have something very important in common: daughters in the seventh
grade … Like my daughter Eva, Sasha appears to be a funny, smart, loving
girl … There is, however, one important difference between them: Sasha
attends private school, while Eva goes to public school … Sasha does not
have to take Washington’s standardized test, the D.C. CAS, which means
you don’t get a parent’s-eye view of the annual high-stakes tests taken
by most of America’s children.”
That parent’s-eye view Obama
misses all too clearly sees that “the standards won’t succeed if the
tests used to assess them are confusing, developmentally inappropriate,
and so hard that even good students can’t do well on them.”
Confusing
… inappropriate … so hard that even good teachers, parents and students
can’t do well – that pretty much captures how most Americans
increasingly feel about current education policies.
“Everything important is worth doing carefully,” the comedian tweeted. “None of this feels careful to me.” Amen.
Queens (Districts 30, 24)
