Edu-Incarceration and The Big Mac Effect

President Obama baffles me. He is clearly an incredibly intelligent guy, for the most part he believes in what I might call, "the right things," he's highly educated, and the child of incredibly educated, curious parents, he has lived in a variety of places which should have given him a global perspective...

And yet...

Listen, Barack Obama isn't amoral like Mitt Romney or immoral like Newt Gingrich or a potential Taliban leader like Rick Santorum or even a guy totally confused about the meaning of "society" like Ron Paul, but he appears, as I've thought about it, to lack anything resembling empathy.

I don't want to pick and choose from the President's words, so let me quote the entire education section of his State of the Union address, and then, break out a few things.

"At a time when other countries are doubling down on education, tight budgets have forced States to lay off thousands of teachers. We know a good teacher can increase the lifetime income of a classroom by over $250,000. A great teacher can offer an escape from poverty to the child who dreams beyond his circumstance. Every person in this chamber can point to a teacher who changed the trajectory of their lives. Most teachers work tirelessly, with modest pay, sometimes digging into their own pocket for school supplies - just to make a difference.

"Teachers matter. So instead of bashing them, or defending the status quo, let's offer schools a deal. Give them the resources to keep good teachers on the job, and reward the best ones. In return, grant schools flexibility: To teach with creativity and passion; to stop teaching to the test; and to replace teachers who just aren't helping kids learn.

"We also know that when students aren't allowed to walk away from their education, more of them walk the stage to get their diploma. So tonight, I call on every State to require that all students stay in high school until they graduate or turn eighteen.

"When kids do graduate, the most daunting challenge can be the cost of college. At a time when Americans owe more in tuition debt than credit card debt, this Congress needs to stop the interest rates on student loans from doubling in July. Extend the tuition tax credit we started that saves middle-class families thousands of dollars. And give more young people the chance to earn their way through college by doubling the number of work-study jobs in the next five years.

"Of course, it's not enough for us to increase student aid. We can't just keep subsidizing skyrocketing tuition; we'll run out of money. States also need to do their part, by making higher education a higher priority in their budgets. And colleges and universities have to do their part by working to keep costs down. Recently, I spoke with a group of college presidents who've done just that. Some schools re-design courses to help students finish more quickly. Some use better technology. The point is, it's possible. So let me put colleges and universities on notice: If you can't stop tuition from going up, the funding you get from taxpayers will go down. Higher education can't be a luxury - it's an economic imperative that every family in America should be able to afford.

"Let's also remember that hundreds of thousands of talented, hardworking students in this country face another challenge: The fact that they aren't yet American citizens. Many were brought here as small children, are American through and through, yet they live every day with the threat of deportation. Others came more recently, to study business and science and engineering, but as soon as they get their degree, we send them home to invent new products and create new jobs somewhere else

"That doesn't make sense."

OK, now, piece by piece:

 

It is clear that Barack Obama cannot be bothered to do the
math when the impact is on people unlike his family.

The Big Mac Effect - and - its the teachers' fault: "We know a good teacher can increase the lifetime income of a classroom by over $250,000. A great teacher can offer an escape from poverty to the child who dreams beyond his circumstance." This is the Horatio Alger nonsense peddled by the American right for years. There is nothing wrong with our schools, if only those lazy, unionized teachers were better... poverty would disappear. First, the President bases his claim on a suspect study which does indeed suggest that a "great" teacher (that is, one who raises test scores) might raise the weekly earnings of an impoverished student by almost enough to buy a Big Mac each week.

It is surprising, in light of all the publicity, that the differences produced by the high value-added teachers are relatively small. Baker shows that the income gains are only about $250 a year over a 40-year working span for each of the students.

As [Rutgers University Professor Bruce] Baker writes: "One of the big quotes in the New York Times article is: 'Replacing a poor teacher with an average one would raise a single classroom's lifetime earnings by about $266,000, the economists estimate.' This comes straight from the research paper. BUT ... let's break that down. It's a whole classroom of kids. Let's say ... for rounding purposes, 26.6 kids if this is a large urban district like NYC. Let's say we're talking about earning careers from age 25 to 65 or about 40 years. So, $266,000/26.6 = $10,000 lifetime additional earnings per individual. Hmmm ... no longer catchy headline stuff. Now, per year? $10,000/40 = $250. Yep, about $250 per year."

Obama's disregard for the facts when it comes to escaping poverty is only one example in this one quote of his empathy and understanding problem. "A great teacher can offer an escape from poverty to the child who dreams beyond his circumstance," which, obviously, implies that the reason we have so many people in poverty right now is that we don't have many great teachers. Take that all you fools who waste your days with our children. Now, yes, to be honest, we don't have great teachers everywhere, just as we don't have great people everywhere in any job - even President - and I'm the first person to criticize bad teaching, but, Mr. Obama, teachers are not the cause of poverty.

To explain this let me first turn to Chris Lehmann of Philadelphia's Science Leadership Academy:

"The nation - or at least its politicians, its pundits and its billionaires - has made this debate about labor (read unions) by atomizing this debate down to the teacher level. And while there is room for conversation there, it misses the larger picture. Our schools are structurally dysfunctional places which, therefore, makes teaching and learning much harder than it needs to be, so that teachers -- and students -- have to succeed despite the system, rather than because of it.

"As long as high school students have to travel to eight different classes where eight different teachers talk about grading / standards / learning in eight different ways, students will spend far too much trying to figure out the adults instead of figuring out the work. When that happens, too many students will fall through the cracks and fail. If we built schools where there was a common language of teaching and learning and common systems and structures so that kind people of good faith can bring their ideas and creativity and passion to bear within those systems and structures and help kids learn, we will find that more teachers can be the kind of exemplary teachers that Mr. Kristof wants.

"As long as there is little to no time in the high school schedule for teachers and students to see and celebrate each other's shared humanity, too many students will feel that school is something that is done to them, that teachers care more about their subjects than they do about the kids. As long as teachers have 120-150 kids on their course roster, and there is little continuity year to year so that relationships cannot be maintained, too many students will be on their own when they struggle. If we build schools where teachers and students have time to relate to one another as people - if we create pathways for students and teachers to know each other over time, so that every child knows they have an adult advocate in their school, we make schools more human -- and more humane - for all who inhabit them.

"Let's stop falling victim to the soft thinking that just finding more "great teachers" and getting rid of all the bad ones is the way to reform education and start asking ourselves - "How do we create schools that make it easier for all students and teachers to shine?" '

and then let me quote from David Britten of Michigan's Godfrey-Lee Public Schools:

"None discussed the need to address the growing funding gap between rich and poor school districts, and the resulting lack of equitable opportunities for disadvantaged kids to achieve the same goals as every other child in Michigan. Of course not, since that would not be self-serving panning to their respective constituencies.

"It’s ironic that the legislature and governor would tout the term “best practices” while at the same time they employ some of the worst practices in public school funding. Purposely ignoring the needs of disadvantaged students, who by the way are expected to achieve the same goals as students from more affluent areas, is not what I or any person of intelligence would consider to be a best practice."

Simply put, Mr. President, perhaps if you and our national leaders start to do your job regarding our children, great teachers will be able to do their job, and, I'll bet, a whole lot more teachers will look "great."

The Hypocrite - or - why does Barack Obama think we're stupid?: "Teachers matter. So instead of bashing them, or defending the status quo, let's offer schools a deal. Give them the resources to keep good teachers on the job, and reward the best ones. In return, grant schools flexibility: To teach with creativity and passion; to stop teaching to the test; and to replace teachers who just aren't helping kids learn." Really? Why would this man assume that we are all "that dumb." Does he think we have not been watching the work of his Department of Education since 2009? The mandates, the requirements, the curriculum written by Pearson and friends. Obama and those governing the American states have denied us the resources children need in order to cut Mitt Romney's tax bill. Teacher pay has been slashed in many places, class sizes have grown, budgets shrunk, meanwhile, do anything Arne Duncan and his Ministry of Re-education doesn't like, and you'll be labeled a failure.

Sorry Mr. President, I know that dealing with the NEA Leadership and your "Reform" friends may have given you the wrong impression, but some of us in education are smart enough to know the gap between your words and deeds.

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Edu-Incarceration - or, why would anyone stay in an Arne Duncan school if it wasn't the law: "So tonight, I call on every State to require that all students stay in high school until they graduate or turn eighteen." Well, there's the answer. Our schools have become miserable dungeons of worksheets and tests under the Obama Administration, and many are deciding to Walk Out, so the solution lies in one more giant step toward criminalizing adolescence. We can't be bothered to create better schools, but we sure can lock the kids in.

Yes, I know the President, the son of two PhD students and a private school student who is now a private school parent, cannot comprehend children not being in school. It is simply beyond his rather inflexible grasp, but he ought to at least know that coercion is not the answer. "The president’s proposal is therefore merely the latest example of our tendency to craft policies that address the symptom, and ignore the root. And that’s not change I can believe in," says Sam Chaltain in the Washington Post.

Mr. Clueless about university costs: "So let me put colleges and universities on notice: If you can't stop tuition from going up, the funding you get from taxpayers will go down." This is tough for an Ivy League graduate, I know, and to make it all funnier, good ol' Justin Hamilton, Arne Duncan's Press Secretary - @EDPressSec - DMed during the speech to insist that I was wrong - that universities were spending more than ever,1 but those in Washington might want to know that the actual cost of running public universities has been going down. Those who have been on public campuses during this administration have seen budgets - yes Mr. President and Little Justin - that's the total cost of running the institutions slashed. 

Universities aren't spending more Mr. President,
but students are.

Here's why tuition has gone up boys. These "State Universities" which were once strongly supported by their governments don't get that kind of support anymore. "In the 1970s, the state covered three-fourths of university costs and the rest was covered by tuition. Now it’s almost reversed– state funding provides one-quarter and the rest is tuition," says Michael Boulus, executive director of the Presidents Council, State Universities of Michigan, with, "funding for higher education has been reduced by [an additional] 15 percent for 2012... higher education has lost a billion dollars in state aid over the past decade, amounting to cuts of more than $2,000 per student."

Yes, we need lower costs Mr. President, but the way to do that is not to threaten our universities as you threaten Iran. Not all of us can - or even want to - go to the places you were educated and taught.

You know Mr. President, there were probably parts of your speech which I might have approved of. I surely, for example, appreciate the difference between you and Mr. Romney et al on the automotive industry. I favor, unlike Republicans, people paying reasonable taxes. I wish work were taxed less and sitting at home living off unearned money was taxed more...

But it isn't just that I work in education which makes me so angry about your complete lack of empathy, your complete lack of understanding regarding our children and our schools. I am angry because you are leading an assault on our future, and you are doing it simply because you will not open your eyes.

I expect better from you Mr. President. I really do.

- Ira Socol
1 - "You don't have your facts straight (though that's not new). Sticker price and net price have skyrocketed." from @EDPressSec around 10:00 pm on January 24, 2012

Dyslexia and Life

It is probable that struggling to read alphabetic text is "more normal" than reading well. That "struggle," that "difficulty," also might provide some very human advantages... except, of course, in school, or elsewhere among the "print-centric." 

"Dyslexic children use nearly five times the brain area as normal children while performing a simple language task, according to a new study by an interdisciplinary team of University of Washington researchers. The study shows for the first time that there are chemical differences in the brain function of dyslexic and non-dyslexic children," said a 1999 University of Washington study.

'"People often don't see how hard it is for dyslexic children to do a task that others do so effortlessly," added Berninger, a professor of educational psychology. "There are learning differences in children. We can't blame the schools or hold teachers accountable for teaching dyslexic children unless both teachers and the schools are given specialized training to deal with these children."'

So, when I received this wonderful birthday card last month, I thought about all of this. And I thought about the young Mr. Justin Hamilton, @EDPressSec on Twitter, who called me "a bomb thrower" in a Twitter direct message when I called his Department of Education's "crackdown" on alternative testing for special education students, "child abuse." (I could not respond to Mr. Hamilton privately, since he refuses to follow me on Twitter, as he refuses to follow virtually any other actual educator.)

But we know that if, for example, the United States Department of Education insisted that you could not graduate from high school without running a sub-6 minute mile - and offered no exemptions for those who might use a wheelchair or walking supports - we'd see that as abusive. Imagine that video, the kid who can't walk trying to drag himself around the track. And there is nothing at all different from that image than Arne Duncan and Justin Hamilton insisting that a dyslexic student "read" the way Arne and Justin and Barack prefer to - forcing a student who - genetically cannot do something "that way" - to struggle and find themselves, their teachers, and their school communities punished for their "failings."

This, like much of what happens to dyslexic kids during school reading programs, is abuse. It is an insistence that people be converted from who they are, at any cost. And this is true of Reading Recovery, of Success for All, of all the KIPP Academy reading efforts, even most of what you hear at TEDxED.

'"Dyslexia is a lifelong condition, but dyslexics may learn to compensate for it later in life. We know dyslexia is a genetic and neurological disorder. It is not brain damage. Dyslexics often have enormous talents in other parts of their brain and shine in many fields, e.g. Thomas Edison and financier Charles Schwab."

"In the language tests, the boys heard a series of word pairs that consisted of either two non-rhyming words such as "fly" and "church," two rhyming words such as "fly" and "eye," a non-rhyming real word and non-word such as "crow" and "treel," and a rhyming word and non-word such as "meal" and "treel." The boys were asked if the word pairs rhymed or didn't rhyme and if the pairs contained two real words or one real and one non-word. They responded by raising a hand to indicate yes or no. In the music test, the boys heard pairs of notes and raised one hand if they thought the notes were identical and the other if they believed them to be different.

"While the dyslexic boys exhibited nearly five times more brain lactate activation during a language task that asked them to interpret the sounds of words, there was no difference in the two groups during the musical tone test. This means the difference between the dyslexics and the normal children relates to auditory language and not to nonlinguistic auditory function, according to Richards and Berninger"

That 4.6 times the brain area, why does that matter? Speaking with a colleague's class of sophomore future teachers a few years ago one of the students asked, "If you could read "normally" - they did use their fingers to make the quotation marks, which I appreciated - wouldn't you want to?"

"What would I have to give up in exchange for that?" I asked in return. The class was confused, so I tried to explain that the 'clumsy' 'inefficient' form of reading I do is just part of what I consider a vastly different brain system which just might be far better at processing the complex imagery of multitasking (which "good readers" often claim is impossible) and multi-level perception. I think of all the things I have been "good at" in my life - design, storytelling, visual memory, police work, comprehending differing cultures, and I think all of those successes are due, in part, to the way my brain processes information - that "disorder" called dyslexia. If I could process print efficiently, would all that be lost? It seems likely, which is probably why "poor reading" is far more common among humans than "proficient reading."

Dyslexics do not use the left temporal region (as "good readers" do)
to sound out words. In fact, dyslexics and other poor readers
even avoid using that region when "successfully
compensating." (Shaywitz, 2003)

The world of evolution chooses "winners," and the multitasker, the multi-level comprehender, the visual thinker, remains extraordinarily valuable in many places around the earth.

The fact that, as one example, the United States has never, in over 150 years of trying, gotten two-thirds of Americans beyond the sixth grade reading level (what NAEP calls "proficient) suggests that facts are facts, more struggle with reading than succeed. More brains are wired "abnormally" - by school standards - than are wired "normally."

This was a gigantic problem during the Gutenberg Era, but thankfully, the Gutenberg Era is pretty much over everywhere but in school, and for everybody but the U.S. Department of Education. We don't read manuals anymore, we find the right clip on YouTube to lead us through a process. We don't write checks anymore, we swipe cards or punch numbers into our computers or phones, or we bump phones, or our phones get scanned. We don't use handwriting anymore, because it is slow and difficult to read, although our Windows tablets can convert our handwriting into real text. And if we struggle to read alphabetical text stamped onto paper or displayed on a screen these days, we turn on our reading software, and convert it to audio.

Even "out in the real world," where once menus written in fancy script like the one on the front of the above birthday cards had generations of American boys telling waiters "I'll have what she's having" on our dates, we can now go online, pull down the menu, convert it to normal text or audio, and act like we belong in the world when that waiter arrives.

But in schools, and especially on Duncan-promoted high stakes tests, none of these current century rules apply. Instead, we're back in the 1950s when dyslexia was often called "minimal brain damage" or minimal brain dysfunction," and those who "had that" disease were called - without any code words being used - "retarded." ("Retarded" meaning, since the 1870s in U.S. education, "unable to operate at the "normal" grade level for your age.")

We don't teach kids how to use these solutions, we don't teach them to choose the right solutions, and we don't evaluate them on how they'll actually function when they escape school. Instead "we" - starting with Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and his flak Justin Hamilton - bully these kids, and torture them on standardized tests, and call them, and all who try to help them, "failures."

And sorry Justin, insult me if you must, but this is child abuse. There is no other way to describe it. And we need to stop it, and realize Gutenberg is dead, and we need to give students the tools they need to access communication and information, and to express themselves.

Because the alternative is awful. I want Justin and Arne to know that. I've even written a book, in part, about that. And if Mr. Hamilton or Mr. Duncan won't order it from Amazon (or the accessible pdf form), if they ask, I'll send them that chapter. Maybe, using their preferred reading method, they can read it, and start to understand. And then maybe they can go down the hall and actually listen to Karen Cator, and read her plan, and start to make education less about force from above, and more about letting the most kids succeed.

- Ira Socol

Testing cannot be anything but political - and abusive

Last week Anthony Cody, teacher and blogger, did something The New York Times couldn't be bothered to do... he reported intelligently on a fascinating moment in education in America.

Asked an actual education question by a student for the very first time President Obama blasted his own education policies, clearly, and without equivocation. (In the President's previous visits to schools questions had been limited to "Do you like living in the White House?" and other celebrity nonsense.)

"... we have piled on a lot of standardized tests on our kids. Now, there's nothing wrong with a standardized test being given occasionally just to give a baseline of where kids are at.

"Malia and Sasha, my two daughters, they just recently took a standardized test. But it wasn't a high-stakes test. It wasn't a test where they had to panic. I mean, they didn't even really know that they were going to take it ahead of time. They didn't study for it, they just went ahead and took it. And it was a tool to diagnose where they were strong, where they were weak, and what the teachers needed to emphasize.

"Too often what we've been doing is using these tests to punish students or to, in some cases, punish schools. And so what we've said is let's find a test that everybody agrees makes sense; let's apply it in a less pressured-packed atmosphere; let's figure out whether we have to do it every year or whether we can do it maybe every several years; and let's make sure that that's not the only way we're judging whether a school is doing well.

"Because there are other criteria: What's the attendance rate? How are young people performing in terms of basic competency on projects? There are other ways of us measuring whether students are doing well or not."

Then he blasted the results of everything US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has done in his 'educational career'...

"So what I want to do is—one thing I never want to see happen is schools that are just teaching to the test. Because then you're not learning about the world; you're not learning about different cultures, you're not learning about science, you're not learning about math. All you're learning about is how to fill out a little bubble on an exam and the little tricks that you need to do in order to take a test. And that's not going to make education interesting to you. And young people do well in stuff that they're interested in. They're not going to do as well if it's boring."

Cody asked the US Department of Education to explain. These days we get to do that, and Twitter's @EDPressSec, who is really a guy named Justin Hamilton, was forced into dialogue.

And things began to go badly from there. First, it took the young Mr. Hamilton almost 36 hours to come up with why the President agreed with his Secretary of Education. Then, the answers, well, they were worthy of the Nixon White House.

"Switching to measuring student growth--as opposed to using tests just to measure absolute levels of proficiency--may result in an increase in the frequency of tests. But that does not mean that students will face more high-stakes standardized tests."

No, of course not, no one will think that federally-mandated tests, on which school administrator and teachers jobs and income depend, will be considered high stakes Justin.

As Cody asks, in a question Mr. Hamilton has not yet been able to answer, "Many of the core elements of Race to the Top and the Blueprint are related to test scores. Department of Ed policy calls for the linking of teacher evaluations and pay to student test scores. The Blueprint calls for tracking of student test scores of teachers according to the place they were prepared. We still have the threat of reconstitution hanging over the bottom tier of schools, attended exclusively by children in poverty. All based on test scores. The President described the tests that Sasha and Malia took as "low stakes." All these changes RAISE the stakes on the tests, for teachers and schools. How does this move us towards the "less pressure-packed environment" the President is advocating"

The perils of choosing your cabinet from your basketball buddies

But really, this reveals a lot more about Duncan and Obama than just the fact that they've never actually discussed education policy. As in the legendary US Army quote about Vietnam, "We had to destroy the village to save it," the Obama/Duncan argument regarding "low-stakes tests which determine teachers' lives" suggests a fundamental disregard for the humanness of American teachers and students.

The US thought of Vietnam as a place to stop communism, not a place where real people lived. Thus bombings and the burnings of villages were OK. Obama (by default, because he has outsourced education policy to his buddy) and Duncan (by design) think of education as a place to score political points with Republicans and rich hedge fund donors, not as a place where real people live and work. Thus tests and humiliations and firings and ruining children's lives are all OK.

The strategies are equally flawed. US policy in Vietnam actually strengthened the appeal of communism throughout Asia, Africa, South America - even Europe and North America - in the 1960s and 1970s. And we know exactly what Republicans and the Democrats for Education Reform did for Obama in the 2010 elections. Perhaps if he had gotten the NEA and AFT thinking positively about his administration and had gotten them out to vote... Ah well, the White House has often been a place where intelligence goes to die. The isolation created by American paranoia really eliminates the possibility of good governance.

Allow me to try to explain testing to our President, to our Secretary of Education, even to Mr. Hamilton. Perhaps, if their educations had been a bit more robust, been a bit more connected to 'most people,' they'd understand why they sound ridiculous.

I am not against assessment. We assess ourselves, and those around us, constantly. I think of my days coaching football (soccer). I watched every player, I knew what worked for them, I knew what didn't. I knew what natural gifts they possessed, I knew what learned skills they had, and because I knew my athletes, I knew where each wanted to go. Still, no player ever got a grade from me. Every player played in every game unless hurt or sitting out for game discipline reasons. What my assessment did was help the player and I develop a map of where the player was is various facets of the game, and of where they wanted to be. Then my job as coach was to help them find paths between those starting and finishing points.

That's assessment. Teachers, those much maligned, overpaid, underworked teachers of your speeches, do that every day. But let us remember, that is not comparative assessment. It does not tell you that player (a) is "better" than player (b), and it can not help you compare team (a) to team (b) or coach (a) to coach (b). It is simply a way of helping people reach their potential.

Something happens though when you introduce the fiction of "standards" into this assessment process.

"When you assess something, you are forced to assume that a linear scale of values can be applied to it. Otherwise no assessment is possible. Every person who says of something that it is good or bad or a bit better than yesterday is declaring that a points system exists; that you can, in a reasonably clear and obvious fashion, set some sort of a number against an achievement.

"But never at any time has a code of practice been laid down for the awarding of points. No offense intended to anyone. Never at any time in the history of the world has anyone-for anything ever so slightly more complicated than the straightforward play of a ball or a 400-meter race-been able to come up with a code of practice that could be learned and followed by several different people, in such a way that they would all arrive at the same mark. Never at any time have they been able to agree on a method for determining when one drawing, one meal, one sentence, one insult, the picking of one lock, one blow, one patriotic song, one Danish essay, one playground, one frog, or one interview is good or bad or better or worse than another." - Peter Høeg Borderliners

 That "something" is the linear scale of "standards." Standards:

1. A level of quality or attainment.
2. Something used as a measure for comparative evaluations.
3. An object supported in an upright position.
4. A musical work of established popularity.
5. The flag or ensign carried by a cavalry unit.
6. A rule or set of rules or requirements which are widely agreed upon or imposed by government.
7. A bottle of wine containing 0.750 liters of fluid.
8. One of the upright members that supports the horizontal axis of a transit or theodolite.
9. A manual transmission vehicle.

"Standards" - as applied in educational evaluations - are all of numbers 1, 3, and 6. They are a subjective measure of quality. Their purpose is comparative. They are usually "agreed upon" by those dominating a culture and/or imposed by a ruling elite (is that different?).

I often meet with young people from 'non-Anglo" cultures who are in transition from secondary education to universities. Almost all of them are nailed on the language testing for freshman. They are told that their way of explaining things, of telling stories, is "circular," is not "straightforward." They are told that the organization of their writing is "wrong." And they are, laughingly, told this by college English departments which place Irish fiction in "Brit Lit" courses - meaning - that the people evaluating these students completely ignore culture's role in literature.

"Standards" can not possibly be anything but political. You don't have to worship at the shrine of great colonialists as E.D. Hirsch Jr. and Robert Pondiscio do to still - by applying standards - be imposing your belief system, your culture, and your religion on those being measured.

I'll go back to Borderliners, because in this passage, in which Høeg's character is describing a question on an IQ test, best illustrates this...

"A letter came from her. It was not in her own words, it was a quote straight out of Binet-Simon. She must have learned it by heart, just by reading it. "There was once a grasshopper, who had sung merrily all summer long. Now it was winter and he was starving. So he went to see some ants who lived nearby and asked them to lend him some of the stores they had laid up for the winter. `What have you been doing all summer?' they asked. `I have sung day and night,' replied the grasshopper. 'Ah, so you have sung,' said the ants. `Well, now you can dance.'

"Beneath this she had written: "What is the moral?"

"It was so deep. It showed how she had figured out that this was a problem from the "fourteen years" level and that I must have had it. She had, therefore, used what I had written to her and discovered the system behind Binet-Simon.

"At the time when I had been given this story, I had come close to answering that the moral was ants were not helpful. But this would not have fitted in very well with the other problems. Instead I had sensed Hessen, and then I had said the moral was that one must seize the moment."

Of course, if one were raised as a Catholic, or a socialist, the answer is indeed, "ants were not helpful." In cultures non-Anglo, non-capitalist, you have a human moral responsibility to help. So this IQ test question is not at all about "intelligence" but about conformity to Calvinist Capitalistthought.

Prison Ship Martyrs' Monument in
Fort Greene Park, Brooklyn -
Over 11,000 murdered, and forgotten

But it isn't just that, everything which gets standardized, from what you know about the American Revolution to how you form a sentence is a both a cultural construct and a method of limiting future change. There is a reason why US schools teach Hemingway but not Dos Passos. Dos Passos not only questions why the US was in World War I, he questions everything from sentence structure to spelling, and neither E.D. Hirsch nor Arne Duncan wants him in your schools. There is a reason why US schools teach about Ticonderoga but not the 11,000+ prisoners of war murdered by the British in Wallabout Bay, Brooklyn (a murder four times the size of 9/11). Learning about the latter might endanger US love of the British. (Evacuation Day was celebrated with the burning of British flags in New York every year through 1916, before being squelched by the Wilson government.)

There is a reason American children are taught that reading is an individual thing (see how Protestants worship), that arithmetic is taught before math concepts (the goal was to fail most children), why it is considered important to be on time for class (your children are being prepped for shift work in factories). There is a reason spelling is considered important when it was not previously (Theodore Roosevelt asserted that enforcing traditional spelling was certain to deprive most children of literacy). There is a reason the five-paragraph essay is taught in schools (it enforces a specific form of thinking).

And so, when we test any of this - any of our curriculum - we are making a political statement, enforcing a political code. Every application of comparative assessment compares a wide range of children to, maybe Barack Obama's daughters, or maybe E.D. Hirsch's grandchildren, with all the cultural baggage included. The less your child's life has been like either of those gold-plated cohorts, the higher the likelihood that you will fail and be consigned to capitalism's required underclass.

Obama, the privileged child of doctoral students doesn't understand this because he focused on other issues in his life. Arne Duncan, who I think does understand this, works for his friends and benefactors, whose children "win" when most others fail. Justin Hamilton, well, he's just doing public relations. He works for his boss.

But their ignorance or evil intent (whichever) does not hide the fact. Education is, by nature, political. Standardized education is overtly political. Comparative assessment is cruelly political. Testing is a form of cultural and psychological child abuse.

That's the truth.

- Ira Socol