We Get It: "Standardized" Tests Are Racist. Now What?

     Back in May, I proctored the RICAS math and English exams for my advisory of eighth-grade students. This experience opened my eyes as to how differently many of my students viewed such tests from how myself, my classmates, and other students did when I attended and student-taught at predominately white schools in Cranston and Coventry, R.I. In advance of the "high-stakes" tests, many of my students in Pawtucket complained about having to take them. A dozen or more asked myself, my co-teacher, and one of our assistant principals "why" they had to do this. I was slightly shocked at how openly they shared their unsolicited, unproductive opinions with us.

      On the RICAS test days, I was surprised to see two of my students drift off to sleep at their desks while everyone else got right to work. They didn't mention that in the testing manual, I thought. Although I spoke to those sleepy students and tried to get them on-track, I knew that my attempts to motivate them to take the tests seriously were futile. Still, I wondered why the majority of my students struggled to feel remotely enthusiastic about-- or even just power through-- the testing process. I thought, I did it when I was their age, so why don't they all do the same?

      Wayne Au's article "Racial Justice Is Not a Choice" provided me with several answers to that question. One of the reasons, he explains, was that "the pressures and endurance required are developmentally inappropriate and especially damaging for young learners." While reading and after teaching standards, I realized something: The idea of "standards" in education is bogus. That's because all learners are unique, and the strategies and knowledge that students gain in school varies based on their lot in life.

      It's not fair for school systems and states to hold students and teachers accountable for failing to meet standards and achieve uniform degrees of improvement for standardized tests. As scholarly studies have repeatedly shown, one effect of racism and social inequities is that students from poor and non-white backgrounds achieve less "growth," or numeric gains, in these tests and toward these standards, when compared to their better-off, white peers.

      In is writing, Au sums it up nicely. "High-stakes standardized tests," he writes, "do not serve students of color. They support white supremacy." He went on to explain that"Test scores correlate most strongly with family income, neighborhood, educational levels of parents, and access to resources - all factors that are measures of wealth exist outside of schools."

      That was kind of review for me, but something new that this article taught me what about the origination of standardized tests. Au writes that when they rolled out over 100 years ago, the results of standardized tests, "were used to prove that whites, the rich, and the US-born were biologically more intelligent than non-whites, the poor, and immigrants." That being said, remind me why we still administer these!? Seriously, does ETS (the company that makes the tests) lobby that hard to keep schools' business?

      It's sad to me that modern-day teachers are expected to prioritize the test and, therefore, "teach to the test." One casualty of this attitude, which Au connects to well-meaning, misguided federal education programs like "No Child Left Behind," is that some English language arts curriculums don't acknowledge or address and critical problems that face students from different socio-economic classes or racial backgrounds. Instead, they focus on responding to texts.

     I think that teaching standards are important because they provide teachers with some guidance on what they should be teaching students, but I think that the United States should replace standardized tests with acts of transformative justice, a concept that Au describes in his article. Restorative and transformative assessment, he writes, are alternatives to standardized tests. He says that they've both been proven more effective at lowering high school dropout rates and demonstrating students' true skills and learning than standardized tests. Best of all, both of these alternatives address the systemic and racist problems that exist among ethnic and socioeconomic groups in America.

      I wish that teachers and students were given more time to address on their needs and fix the systemic racism that plagues our public education system. In the meantime, I suppose, well-intentioned educators have to be subversive and teach what their students need and what is right, even if it's not going to be on a standardized test. 

That's the Power of Language (and Love)

L'Chaim! To life!

Even if you've never been to a Jewish wedding, or seen Fiddler on the Roof, I think that we should all shout this celebratory Hebrew exclamation a few times in our lives. That's because violently repressed cultures and oppressed people need everyone's support in order to be revived.

While I was reading Chapter 5 of Linda Christensen's book Teaching for Joy and Justice, I was struck by several of her ideas, including this one: “If you kill the Indian culture, you might as well kill the Indian because nothing about him is really him” (Christensen 212). My interpretation of this statement is that when people eliminate the language, art, or traditions of any group, they are basically cutting off the head of the group and waiting for the rest to drop dead.

To better illustrate the true meaning of that quote, I will share how it reminds me of another cultural group that was massacred not too long ago: Jews. I am obviously referring to the Holocaust, the horrific time when six million European Jewish men, women, and children were systemically murdered by the Nazis and their corroborators. This unthinkable atrocity is fresh on my mind for a few reasons. First, I am currently reading The Book Thief by Markus Zusak (2005). It's a fictional novel set in Germany during the Holocaust. Also, I had the pleasure of reading Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl with my eighth grade students last year. Finally, during my undergraduate years in college, I dated an Orthodox Jew-- to the point where I looked into converting to Judaism, a la Charlotte from Sex and the City. I learned a lot about Jewish traditions and religion from my ex-boyfriend and several Jewish friends. I was so fascinated by Jewish heritage that I took a Jewish religion and culture course at my alma mater. My professor was a practicing rabbi, and I learned a lot. This time in my life opened my eyes to the permanent damage that some hateful actions can have.

Something else that those experiences taught me about Hebrew is that it is a written language-- not spoken--, and the only time you might hear it spoken is when people are reading from the Torah (or maybe at a Jewish wedding). As far at the Holocaust is concerned, it was precede by a barrage of antisemitic propaganda, which was coupled with a series of laws against Jews. These laws eliminated many Jews' freedoms and thus, their humanity. For instance, Jews were forbidden to run businesses, which is why Anne's father Otto had to put his establishment under the name of one of his employees. Unfortunately, as we all know, things got much worse from there. Otto was the only one of his family to survive, and if he hadn't, then he wouldn't have published his daughter's diary entires, and we wouldn't have been able to glean such insight into the terrible times that the Franks and many others faced at that time. It would basically invalidate it. In The Book Thief, Nazis round up all the Jew-written literature that they can find, and they burn it. That book is a strong piece of historical fiction, so it's no coincidence that its plot mirrors the anti-Jewish laws I've mentioned.

I am not Jewish, so I can't claim to understand the continuing pain that Jewish culture and people have faced since the Holocaust ended, but getting to know my ex and his family, I learned just how traumatized some European-descending American Jews still are because of it. For my ex's mother and grandmother, that pain translated into a palpable, open distrust of all non-Jews, especially those with European lineage.

Why does this matter to English teachers? To bring it back to Christensen, she says that “I need to teach students how and why some languages have power and others don’t.” Clearly, she writes this in her book to suggest that readers and teachers follow her suit. She's absolutely correct in her assertions, because all students should know that there's a reason why English is our primary language, just like there's a reason why white people make most of our laws and rise in political rankings. It's not because of merit. Whether it's Native American, Mexican, Indian, Jewish, or another oft-repressed culture, the story's the same. Throughout history, people have played dirty to gain power. Powerful people get to make the rules, and thus, a vicious cycle plays out repeatedly. It's our job as educators to draw attention to it and shine light on repressed cultures as a means of breaking it.

The Call of the Words: My Journey Toward Becoming a Better Writer and Teacher of Writing

       I. Bitten by the Byline Bug

Believe it or not, when I was an elementary school-aged child, I was a prolific author. My third grade teacher, Mrs. Hudson, gave me the writing bug. She had all of her students maintain writer’s notebooks, which were full of our scary stories, poems, and other original literature. We also wrote, constructed, and illustrated our own original books for her class. Outside of school, I often wrote into the Providence Journal to enter their kids’ contests. One time, I won $25 and had my writing featured in the paper. “Just Call Her Flipper” was the title of the blurb that announced my winning paragraph on why I would be a dolphin if I got to choose to be any animal. My aunt and father talk about it to this day, and my aunt still has the saved clipping!. These were formative experiences for me which combined to boost my confidence as a writer and scholar. This intensified when I got into middle school and heeded one teacher’s advice. She put it this way: “Want to know the scoop? Join the student newspaper.” In actuality, what the paper’s staff produced was a one-sheet news bulletin. Still, I felt intrigued, so I signed up and became part of the staff. The rest is herstory…

       It was then, when I was a sixth grader at Western Hills, that I became interested in being a reporter. My first story detailed how our school’s enrichment program had recently been “swept under the rug.” My sense of accomplishment with coming up with the article’s concept and seeing it through to fruition, paired with the positive feedback that I received from one or more classmates’ parents who’d read the article, further boosted my ego and newfound identification as a writer. In high school, I worked my way up from entertainment editor to managing editor of our school’s newspaper. The editor-in-chief and I gladly accepted a New England Newspaper and Press Association award in Boston for our work on the West Wind as well as the broadcast counterpart, The West Watch. We received an honorary mention and certificate for the paper as a whole, and I took home a certificate for writing and anchoring a West Watch news package for my review of our school’s production of “Fiddler on the Roof.”

This is a fellow staff writer and myself in front of

    Fenway Park on the day we accepted the NESPA award.

This is a photo of myself (center), the editor-in-chief (right), and

a staff writer for The West Watch that we took in high school. We

had a blast working on the student publication and developed

strong friendships.

Other than the school paper, in high school, I took a creative writing class and was in AP English. One time, outside of school, I attended an open mic night at the Arcadia YMCA and shared a poem I’d written. It was about a substitute teacher who I had a crush on. Besides my friend and classmate, who’d attended with me, no one in the who heard me knew who the poem was about, but I still felt weird for sharing it. I haven’t mustered the courage to read any of my work aloud in public since then. That night reminds me why some of my students may not like sharing their work, especially if it is personal. As an educator, it’s my job to know that it’s ok for them to hold back. I shouldn’t push them.

        The Best Thing I Ever Wrote

The biggest milestone of my adolescence happened during my sophomore year, when I wrote an op-ed piece for The West Wind entitled “Excuse Me While I Drop the ’ette Bomb.” Basically, in my piece, I said that it was a shame that the many decorated academic clubs and teams at Cranston West weren’t celebrated as much as our dance and cheerleader squads. The dance squads were called the Falconettes and Westernettes, hence my story’s title. Some girls on the dance squads misinterpreted what I’d written as me saying that the dancers were sluts, which was a huge reach; however, I did mention that they were somewhat of sex symbols in school in the story, so I understand where that came from. Students’ reactions were strong. One girl, a Falconette captain, even cried in the hallway because she felt like I’d tried to tarnish the squad’s reputation.

Pretty much everyone at school read the article on the day that the newspaper was distributed, and people either loved me or hated me for what I’d written. We ran out of copies of the issue that day, which hadn’t happened in years. Even my creative writing teacher got into the spirit, instructing us to read and discuss what I’d written as a class. The hallways were like that scene in Mean Girls when Lindsay Lohan’s character imagines all hell breaking loose, except instead of me attacking the popular girl, all types of student,-- some I knew, and some I did not-- approached me to tell me what they thought of what I’d written. 

Later that year, at a talent show, the ’ettes used my words-- I’d referred to them as “the almighty ’ettes once in my op-ed-- and repurposed them as “mighty ’ettes, which they displayed collectively at the end of their performance. Each dancer wore a letter on her back. As an audience member, I found that clever, but I still thought that the squad’s negative response was over-dramatic. As an adult, now I can understand how a young person may feel upon reading her peers’ seemingly hateful comments about the team. Although I am still proud of what I wrote and its impact, this experience gave me a crash-course in the so-called “power of the pen.” I realized how important it is to say exactly what I mean in everything that I write, and to be respectful and kind. I still make mistakes, but I have improved.

           Making Sense of It All

     I think that the biggest reason why the experiences I’ve mentioned were positively impactful on me was that they always included supportive teachers. Looking back, my teachers not only helped me to develop and maintain a love of writing; they shielded me from a lack of a strong student-teacher relationship and from non-constructive criticism and from others. Yes, my third-grade teacher (Mrs. Hudson) bolstered my writerly ego with praise and encouraging words, prompts, and projects. She also served as a buffer among my classmates and I, though. For instance, when we had our weekly meetings where we could share our writing and opinions freely, our teacher guided us toward staying on-topic and offering only positive feedback to one another. In college, I learned the meaning of the expression, “You don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone” when I had one journalism professor who didn’t “get” my ideas (so my final writing projects were muddied by our divided vision of where the stories should go, which made them-- wait for it-- confusing!), and at least one teammate on our student music media organization belittled the writing that I did during an internship. When he playfully called me out for using the verb “croon” too frequently in my Billboard song reviews, his words damaged my writerly spirit a little-- so much so that I vividly remember them and-- the feeling I had up upon hearing them today--, almost ten years later. Because of that particular conversation with my classmate, I realize how strong words can be, especially if they’re directed toward someone’s work. When I teach writing, I am careful not to belittle anyone’s work, instead opting to offer constructive feedback that’s couched in kindness. Once I get to know a writer or learner, then I know how blunt I can be when delivering my thoughts and ideas for improving his/her/their work.

How My Background and Resources Influence My Teaching

Thinking about my upbringing, I know now that I was relatively privileged. I did not  I realize that subconsciously, I’ve embraced parts of my given identity more than others. These are the white, middle-class, and educated pieces of who I am. This shows up in my work as an English teacher because, although I am struggling to work my way up in life, I feel like I owe it to my students to “pay it forward” whenever I can and whenever it is necessary. I also feel strongly that most of my students need the physical books to do their best reading and writing, and to help develop their love of reading that is, for the most part, currently nonexistent. 

On the bright side, I have the knowledge, experience, and means to purchase and acquire books for my students to read during English class and while doing silent sustained reading for enrichment.  If I am ever in a pinch, though, I am tech-savvy enough to figure out how to incorporate ebooks and audiobooks into my classes’ lessons. This is thanks to the fact that I have a storied relationship with digital media, one that dates back to my middle school days. At the time, I had a private blog that was housed in a Livejournal account. I recorded almost everything in there, and it was mostly trivial, pre-teen stuff, like recollections of going ice skating with friends. Today I have a Penzu blog. It’s another free, web-based writing program that can be private or public. I use a Macbook and also a Chromebook regularly, and have been obsessed with Google Drive since it was only Google docs. I have been using social media platforms since I was a teen, starting with Facebook in 2006 and then signing up with Twitter in 2010. I also use Snapchat and Instagram-- though not in my work as a teacher-- and this helps me to relate with my students who utilize those as well as blogging platforms. Sometimes, we discuss what we’ve seen on one or more outlets, and other times, I am able to refer to them when discussing different types of writing and reading in our English class.

  When I worked at a public relations and marketing agency a few years back, I learned how to use content management systems like Wordpress to manage websites and was also trained to send professional, friendly emails. The latter skill has helped me to “cold call” many, many people via email since. Usually, I do this to gather information for articles that I write for Motif. Sending lovely-sounding emails is part of my current digital identity, as is my proficiency with Google, word-processing programs, Google Classroom, and other digital tools. Being a journalist, occasionally, I like to record my interviews. I have a digital recorder, but if it’s broken, I can use my cell phone or a Garage Band-type application (in college, I recorded numerous interviews that way). When I teach, I try to vary the technology that my students and I use. I know that some students enjoy and are more comfortable using certain software than others. Since no two learners are identical, it’s important that I constantly switch things up and am open to suggestions and feedback.

         The Next Twenty Years

I feel like I’ve been a real writer since I was in the third grade, back when I sat on the classroom rug in Mrs. Hudson’s class with my writer’s notebook in my lap. It’s crazy to think that I’ve identified as a writer for more than twenty years! If I felt jaded about writing, or didn’t want to do it anymore, I could’ve stopped at any time, but I still feel excited to discuss my passion for expressing myself with written words. By helping others learn to write and discover an appreciation for writing, I’m fulfilling one of the biggest dreams I had when I was a kid. My dream was to have a positive effect on the world. At the very least, I know I’ll pass along the joys, memories, and insights that I’ve gathered onto my students. 

Poetry Appreciation Post! Elizabeth Acevedo’s The Poet X

Image courtesy of Harper Collins

     I have always loved poetry. I enjoy hearing it, reading it, deciphering it, and creating it. It makes me feel free of literary and life constraints. That is why, when I realized that the one non-textbook book that I was required to consume for the “teaching writing in secondary schools” class I’m currently enrolled in was comprised entirely of poems, I got  excited. The book is called The Poet X. Written by Elizabeth Acevedo and published in 2018, it earned a National Book Award, Michael L. Printz Award for excellence in young adult literature, and Pura Belpré Award. So far (about 50 pages in), I feel strongly connected with this work.

     Poetry aside, one of the reasons why I appreciate this young adult novel is that Acevedo’s writing allows me to hear the voices of my seventh-grade students in main character/narrator/poet/writer Xiomara (AKA “X”) Batista. I say this not because Xiomara is Latinx (that’s the non-gender-binary way of saying Latino/a), but instead, because the stories and introspective wonderings that she includes are highly believable. I relate to X’s musings on female adolescence on a personal level as well. When X got her period, for instance, and her mom didn’t think she should learn how to use tampons at that age (fifth grade), I was reminded of a similar experience I had. Like X, my mother was devoutly religious as a school-aged child, and her views on sex and anything remotely sexual reflect that. Also, regarding X, although I didn’t go to school in an inner-city, I work in one now. Finally, I lived in New York City for a year during college, and Harlem has a very special place in my heart. That being said, some of the language Acevedo has X use and the issues that she deals with at school remind me of what I see and hear at my job. I feel just as happy, however, to hear a strong young female sharing her story in a candid and original way-- wherever she might live and attend school.

  The structure of The Poet X is unique because it’s not just a collection of interrelated poems. Rather, its separate parts form a linear, cohesive narrative that has already taught me, one of its readers, about two things. The first is the young female experience. The next is exactly what it was like for X character to be a first-generation American-born Dominican whose mother did not come here of her own volition. Interestingly, volition is the operative word that X meditates on when she sits at her church’s confirmation class one day.

  Moving forward with my reading of this exciting new book, I wonder how much of a connection Acevedo has with her speaker/poet. I am also curious as to what events may unfold as X gets older, especially relating to her high school career and involvement in Church, plus her relationship with her twin brother and former bestie.