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In this week’s program, we take a closer look at how high
stakes testing is impacting what happens in classrooms, how teachers see
students, how students see themselves, and the kinds of society we are building
through how young people are being educated. The impact of high stakes tests is
both broadly social and intimately personal. Socially, high stakes testing
re-segregates our schools, marginalizes black and brown children, young people
who live in poverty and children who do not learn in traditional ways. High
stakes testing tells us who we will value, and who we will not value, and makes
room for us to criminalize youth, especially black and brown youth, opening the
path to the school to prison pipeline. It operates within and builds on white
supremacy, and exploits long standing privileges and oppressions. And, as with
any dominant discourse, high stakes testing enters our consciousness and begins
to structure how we see ourselves, each other, and the kind of world we want to
build.
We speak with Linda
Christensen, Director of the Oregon Writing Project at Lewis and Clark
College, author of Reading, Writing and
Rising Up among other books, and editorial board member for Rethinking
Schools about how, entering the classroom, even with a curriculum designed to
access student voices and knowledge, she discovered that the testing came to
stand between her and the students, and her work with students to reclaim their
knowledge and stories.
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| Wayne Au |
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| Linda Christensen |
Wayne Au,
assistant professor of education at University of Washington Bothell, and author of Unequal by Design: High stakes testing and the standardization of
inequality, talks about how high stakes testing locks some students out of
the curriculum and begins a process of devaluing - that changes how students
know themselves, how teachers know students, and how society sees young people,
especially young people of color.
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| Joan Grim |
Joan Grim,
teacher educator in special education at the University of Tennessee Knoxville,
helps us to understand how high stakes testing is undermining 40 years of
creating more inclusive classrooms by re-segregating both schools and the
broader community, diminishing the strength and pleasure of diverse
communities, and restricting the opportunities for young people with
disabilities within our communities.
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| Edward Brockenbrough |
We then speak first with Ed Brockenbrough, assistant professor at the Warner School of
Education at the University of Rochester, about how white supremacy, the
institutionalization of systems of power and privilege that advantage white
people, manifests in schools, the role of high stakes testing as
surveillance, and the school to prison
pipeline. Erica
Meiners, professor of education and women’s studies at Northeastern
Illinois University, furthers the connection from high stakes testing, to surveillance,
to the school to prison pipeline and, finally, our massive incarceration
system.
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| Erica Meiners (with Tim Scott) |
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We also hear from educators who are subverting these
destructive process in their classrooms, including Linda Christensen, and Monique Redeaux, fifth grade teacher in
the Chicago Public Schools, who talks about her experience within the high
stakes testing machine and how she and her students find their voices within
it. We close out the program a spoken word piece from Cadijah Hyacinth, a student from NYC.
