By Shira Cohen
This week, I went to the second meeting of Mapping Corporate
Education Reform, and two things continue to strike me. The first is
the way that the authors tackle the networks that seem only to exist
above us. They are constantly creating a reform movement driven by
money and stakeholders whose decision making power is entrenched in the
systems that allow nations to operate in a corporatized socio-political
landscape. The second is the way that we have the opportunity to use
this text as a lesson - which while written for an academic audience -
is a necessary tool to understanding what we are facing as organizers
and activists in our current landscape of teaching and power.
The
SICME, a system of national testing in Chile, has moved me the most in
this book. The authors argue that the SIMCE "has worked as a pillar of
the neoliberal reforms in education, thus supporting the construction of
a common sense that transforms cultural capital into merit and makes
the poor responsible for their own failure." This particular testing
system impacts funding, curriculum, security, and evaluation at all
levels of the Chilean educational system. As a pillar, it also
functions as a tool of control within local classrooms and tools,
existing in spaces where teaching and learning are happening daily. For
many years, Chilean social movements have focused on education, and
this last month, led another series of protests and responses to the current president's reforms.
As
I write this, I'm considering the ways that education
policy in the United States uses standardized testing as a tool at the
national level - beyond the districts and states where we are doing our
own local work in creating authentic learning experiences together and
in driving the opt-out movement. The Common Core is a national movement
to standardize testing, and the most recent cut scores in the State of
Pennsylvania have revealed that a jump in rigor - constructed by corporately funded test makers - have resulted in lower scores across the state.
Two
of our essential questions for the summer groups are, how do the authors take up
intersectionality in their text, and what are the lessons of the
movement? We are never finished in our answers to these questions, but
in this particular case, I'm thinking about how we can read the
intersection of race, class, and neoliberalism in the US, and how we can
continue to focus as organizers and activists on the ways that
standardized testing exists as both a pillar and a tool for top-down
education reform. These issues are present currently as our school
years will be beginning again in six weeks (how can we both opt out of
standardized testing and work to dismantle the ways it impacts our
classrooms, students, and lives?) and as a presidential election year
arrives in less than a few months. How will the leaders in the upper
crusts of our own system respond to an anti-standardized testing
movement? And how will education policy makers hold responsibility for
the construction of failure?
I'm left with this
quote - read in Teaching to Transgress (come to that book group too!).
bell hooks cites the Pedagogy of Liberation by Antonio Faundez (with
Paulo Freire), who wrote in 1989, "one of the things we learned in
Chile...was that abstract political...statements did not take concrete
shape in acts by individuals. We were revolutionaries in the
abstract....it seems to me essential that in our individual lives, we
should day to day live out what we affirm." I'm wondering how we can
continue to ground our work as teachers and students in living out
learning that roots itself beyond standardized testing and neoliberal
tools of oppressive change - and how we can continue to ask decision
makers in the highest echelons of US government - to live out their
statements for change in direct policy rather than in the abstract.
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