I returned today from a long weekend in Virginia. There was a surprise party for my dad’s 80th birthday, and I flew 8000 miles for a trip that lasted less than 100 hours. It works out to an 80 mph weekend, on average. It’s tough attending family gatherings from so far away, but this was definitely worthwhile. It’s a good thing I don’t need to sleep much.

I took Jonathan Kozol’s Shame of the Nation [see Rethinking Schools' review] to read while I was enroute. Listen to Kozol’s excellent Counterspin interview (mp3). I found the book to be an engaging read, one that was both passionate and plain-spoken. Kozol documented the systematic disempowerment of Blacks and Hispanics through the agency of US education policy that has effectively constructed separate and unequal dual school systems for Blacks and Whites. Kozol focused his attention mainly on New York City schools, but he mentioned schools in many other parts of the country as well. He advocates active resistance to institutional inequity, and I’m left to wonder how long it will be until we begin to see organized efforts from the education profession’s rank and file.

Kozol noted the paralyzing effect of teaching to the reductive demands of high stakes tests, and noted how prevalent that practice is for students in schools with predominantly Black populations. He documented what, to me, would be unbearable conditions in which scripted “teacher-proof” lessons are mandated in underfunded, overcrowded schools plagued by high teacher turnover. I’ve heard and read about programs like Success for All (which promises “systematic, relentless teaching with early intervention when a child falls behind”), but never have I read in such vivid detail what they are like. Kozol quoted Thomas Sobol, former state commissioner of education in New York who is now “troubled by the unexpected consequences” of the standards movement:

We are giving kids less and calling it more, limiting what we teach to what we can easily measure, pushing our students to focus on memorizing information, then regurgitating fact. The student’s job…should not be only to absorb information, but to make connections, find new pattterns, imagine new possibilites….but imagination and inquiry are not a big item in the testing and accountability agenda….Thinking, feeling people are not given room to think and feel…Education involves the heart as well as the mind…Learning entails play and risk-taking as well as ordered study…As our students cram away in preparation for exams, what we are giving them now in many places is a stripped-down curriculum and instruction devoid of passion and meaning.

The book was on my mind this morning, still, when I opened my Bloglines and found a discussion on Wesley Fryer’s Moving at the Speed of Creativity that was initiated by Doug Johnson, who challenged the notion that teaching is an art, and wondered about the ethics of using progressive educational methods to “experiment” on students. Doug, your take on testing is provocative, and I thank you for raising the issue because it needs to be aired. As to whether “experimentation is ethical”, I say there has never been a bigger more misguided experiment than NCLB, which uses Skinnerian operant conditioning methodologies to coerce students and teachers into a mindless charade of learning in the name of efficiency and accountability. This devastatingly costly experiment may have NO research, other than the Texas Miracle to support it. Like the War in Iraq, it depends on one of the most destructive, ill-advised, immoral, racist government propaganda efforts that I have ever witnessed.

I am convinced that this law is rooted in racism, and my understanding of its racist mechanisms is becoming increasingly acute. My response will not be to run from it, or to yield, but to resist. Vocally. Actively. I intend to act as an ethical shield for my students as we find ourselves pushed irrationally in directions that I know to contradict learning, knowing, and believing in the truth that can be found in the meanings we, ourselves, make. We will be readers and thinkers. We will be mathematicians and logicians. We will be poets and storytellers. We will not be memorizers and slogan-chanters. I will not be doing “experiments” that demean the humanity, underestimate the intelligence, or paralyze the creative spark that is my students’ own unique gift, which is what education policy is driving many of us to do. If by allowing students to imagine a better world, one that does not yet exist, I am somehow in error, then I choose to be wrong.

I take heart from the demonstrations on behalf of immigrants to this country that we are currently witnessing. I suggest that parents, students, and teachers who object to this misguided, demoralizing attempt to “reform” education consider a march on Washington as well. I can be there in 12 hours. It’s a long flight, but I’ll do it again for a good enough reason.