Open Season On Our Schools© Regina Sewell
Mar 30, 2001
How often have you heard a politician charge that our schools are failing our children and call for standardized tests as a solution to the problem? This seems to be one of the Bush administration’s favorite stump speeches. I wonder if G.W. ever laments that he sounds like a moron every time he speaks in public and anguishes over the possibility that standardized tests would have solved his communication problems. I doubt it. He doesn’t seem to be concerned that private schools, unfettered by state regulations, may or may not offer an adequate education. Note that he has never lamented his own obviously inadequate education. He is too busy focusing on dismantling our public schools to be concerned about the private ones.
The Bush administration’s education proposals to give school vouchers and to cut funding for public schools that don’t make the standardized test grade are little more than an extension of the white flight that has resegregated the schools into the haves that live in the wealthy suburbs and the have nots who live everyplace else. Moreover, the whole idea is based on a naive understanding of what our schools, and more specifically, what our teachers (who are the unnamed targets of these anti-school lambasts), are really charged with doing. This focus on standardized tests as a panacea for all our nation’s educational woes assumes that students come into the classroom as obedient, blank hard drives that need only to have information typed in and the save key hit for the acquisition of knowledge to be accomplished. This is a nice fantasy but it has no bearing on reality. The reality is that students are living, breathing beings whose lives are often cluttered with the messy reality of life. Many students who line the halls of our schools come from damaged families and damaged communities. Some come from violent homes where they watch their mother’s husband or boyfriend beat her. A tragic number of our nation’s youth have been abused themselves, burned with cigarettes, burned with irons, beaten with anything available, and/or sexually molested or raped. It is not uncommon for children who witness or experience abuse at home to either express their pain at school by acting out to the point that no one can learn anything, or to dissociate and/or disconnect from everything so that they spend their days lost in a complete fog. In addition, poverty scars the lives of many students in our public school systems. Some students don’t even have a home to go to at the end of the day, and many don’t get enough to eat.
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