Ben Carson for President of USA, Inc.

I listened to Ben Carson's speech yesterday, as he announced his bid for the Presidency in 2016.  I happened to find myself facing Fox News on a television in the locker room of the Y-- the only place I frequent where I am likely to catch both Fox News and various strains of  foot fungus. 

Because I am highly critical of Rupert Murdoch's agenda, and of the manipulative and heavy-handed rhetoric that characterizes Fox News, I was immediately suspect of Ben Carson, knowing nothing about him prior to that moment.  But I am always willing to hear people out, even if they are endorsed by Fox News, so listen I did.

I heard him speak of the need to make our own way, of the disempowering effects of becoming reliant on the government to meet our basic needs, and so on and so on.  It's the typical Republican Bootstrap line I've heard many times before, usually from white men, and occasionally white women, coming from a place of privilege and unquestionable opportunity.  It's a common argument, that America provides all of the opportunities to succeed equally to everyone, and if you're not succeeding, it's your own damn fault.  It assumes, of course, that everyone really does receive the same opportunities, an assumption that is beleaguered by overwhelming and well-documented evidence of inequity in school funding, police profiling, prison demographics, to name but a few.  I have to say, I do find the line a little more convincing (just a little) coming from a man of color, raised in Detroit by a single mom working a couple jobs to make ends meet, which is probably why Republicans are falling over themselves to support Carson as a candidate. And, to a certain extent, I too believe in the ethic of teaching a person to fish rather than giving him or her a fish; I'm a teacher, and I've many times seen  the empowerment that comes when under privileged kids learn tools to help them make their way in the world.   But we simply can't pretend that the inequities don't exist.  They do, and therefore, it's not a this or that, Welfare State or System of Inequity, kind of equation, and pretending that the same opportunities exist for all hard workers equally doesn't make it so.

Setting this first stirring of dissent aside, I kept listening to Ben Carson.  He cited the current $18 Trillion debt and then he said, essentially, "If God allows me to get to the White House, we're going to change this government to work more like a well-managed business."  (I'm only paraphrasing a bit.)

And if for no other reason than that, he lost me right there. 

My Republican friends, or some of my Libertarian friends, might say "well what's wrong with that?"  Efficiency, a balanced budget, sensible spending and investment decisions.  These are things woefully lacking in our government.  True, all true.  But here's the most important question:  What is the central purpose of a government?  To make profit for its shareholders, or to administer the resources of a society in order to provide for the security and well-being of that society? 

Some of the biggest problems with old-school capitalist notions of business, as I see them, is that core concepts like "profit" and "cost" have been far too narrowly defined.  Cost is hardly ever measured with respect to the environment as a result of contaminated water, or air, or radioactive dump sites, for example.  Profit is only ever measured from the perspective of the share-holders and the owners, and not with the overall well-being of all the workers and environments that created it, and it is only ever measured in small units of time, annually, or even quarterly.  If earning a lot of revenue this year means that your great-grandchildren will be facing droughts, or floods, or cancer from unimaginable toxins, can you truly say you profited? 

Sure, more and more businesses are looking toward sustainability models, and some forward-thinking capitalist theorists are writing about these costs, with measuring tools like the Triple Bottom Line.  That gives me some hope. But still, all of the business models around today are predicated on that unimpeachable goal: Growth.  Continuous, predictable, profitable growth.  No matter how we frame it, nothing in this world can continue to grow indefinitely without choking itself out.  Equilibrium, homoestasis, is one of the defining qualities of life.  And the dominant business model, every word about the inviolate Economy, is based on indefinite growth.

Back to Carson:  as soon as I see a homeostatic business model that values the health and well-being of its employees equally at every level, a business that gives back to the earth everything it takes, that leaves a job site as clean as it was before, a business that works to find ways to collaborate with other businesses for the greater good of the global community, rather than aiming to destroy its competition, a business that recognizes and acts upon the premise that what we do now impacts many generations after us, THEN I will say "OK Ben, you make this government run like that business."

Until then, Dr. Carson, not only will you not get my vote, you'll get my arguments as to why no one else should vote for you either.

So what do I know, anyway?  Not much, but I suspect a lot, and one thing I suspect is that a government should operate more like a family than a business.  In a family, we have to find a place for everyone, and we don't just kick out those who are struggling.  In a family, we acknowledge each other in their fullness, warts and all, rather than limiting our value to what each member can do in the moment.  Of course, in families, some pull more weight than others, some take advantage of others, and there are some we'd frankly love never to see again.  But in a family, we work through all of that lower-selfish humanness, because we know, in some deep place of knowing, that we are related, and our fates are bound together inextricably.

I also suspect this: if we don't find a way to get past this dominant, adolescent ethic of short-term profit at everyone else's expense, our human family is in big trouble.

Not smarter, not balanced

I wish to be clear: I'm not one to panic and shoot down changing educational policies just because they're new.  I do find it highly problematic that every 4-8 years, a new Executive desire to look effective in addressing "Education" brings more and more requirements into the schedules of already overtaxed teachers, but I'm not opposed to fine-tuning or even overhauling assessment practices when it's warranted.

But the overhaul that has come in the wake of Common Core State Standards and its Smarter Balanced Assessment is not warranted.

Let's leave aside, for a moment, the clear and overwhelming evidence that private interests like the Pearson Group and Houghton-Mifflin have long been influencing educational policy to create more opportunities for curriculum- and test-producing corporations to profit from public funds.  This "Education-Industrial Complex," not unlike the Military-Industrial Complex, is a slow-growing cancer that allows privateers to gain contracts through board-room handshakes and then generate the very conditions that produce magnificent profits for themselves.  But, monumental as that issue is in its own right, let's leave it aside for now.

Instead, let's look at the ideology of the high-stakes standardized testing phenomenon.

I sat in a meeting last night at my daughter's high school in which district representatives, including two School Board members and several school administrators, made a fine effort at justifying the institution of this new test, the Smarter Balanced Assessment.  This test is better than the old test.  This test only increases the time spent out of meaningful class time to 3 1/2 hours from the two hours of the old test.  This test  includes a sensitivity to cultural bias that the old test lacked, and will provide better accommodations for English-language Learners and students with Special Needs.  This test will be the first to actually measure critical thinking, and will demand more rigor, and over time, will improve our children's over all college-readiness.  I have many reasons to doubt all of these claims, and I'll speak to a few of them in a moment.

The key moment for me, though, came when we, as parents, were urged to help the schools achieve the necessary participation rate of 94.5% without which the school, regardless of the actual test scores, will get docked a full point out of its 5-point score.   This, of course, is a result of George W.'s 2002 No Child Left Behind Act, which specifically tied schools' overall test performance and graduation rates, measured in an annual report card score called AYP (Adequate Yearly Progress).  Here in Oregon, the State measures this on a 1-5 scale where one is "not meeting standards" and 5 is "exceeding standards."  In other States they measure this on an A-F scale.

What this means, effectively, is that if a school does not show sufficient progress, as measured largely by test scores, the State can fire the school's entire staff, or shut the school down entirely.  So, for a school to lose a full point because less than 94.5% of its students did not take the standardized test at all is a big deal.  Presumably, this stipulation is motivated by the desire to get an accurate measure of all of our students' performance, across ethnic and economic lines.  In fact, that's exactly what our district administrator argued at last night's meeting.  I believe that he believes that.  He's a good guy, and a friend of mine.  And like other administrators across the country, I trust that they genuinely have the best interests of our kids as their first priority.

But I have to ask the question: What other assessment instrument-- anywhere-- requires a 95% participation rate to claim it has an accurate sample?  It seems to me far more likely that this outrageous requirement is really designed to punish schools for not aggressively enough towing the party line, and by extension, to cause schools to pressure parents not to opt-out.

And here's another question: how many people who can accurately call themselves experts in education truly believe that high-stakes standardized tests are an accurate measure of student learning?  I haven't been able to find too many who do.  In fact Portland Public School District's school board voted unanimously to place a two-year moratorium on the new test, until the test itself has been tested for efficacy.  One thing that is clear is the evidence that high-stakes standardized tests increases student stress and decreases their love of learning.

Here are some of things standardized tests, including the new and improved Smarter Balanced Assessment, do NOT do:

1. They don't measure engagement.  One of the greatest experiences in a teacher's career is to catch student's interest, to see her eyes light up with new ideas and passions in a new issue or subject, to see a formerly listless student start to pay attention, start to ask questions, start to show up.
2. They don't measure growth.  I worked for ten years at an alternative school attended mainly by students who arrived substantially behind in credits, who in fact would never have been able to graduate had they remained in a mainstream school.  Because of our alternative curriculum and stricter attendance policies, we saw students build skills, attend classes more often and with more awareness, and finish their high school diplomas.
3. They don't encourage a wide enough sample of curriculum.  During these last 20 years of standardized test-madness, we've seen a clear decrease in the arts, music, and foreign language.  Higher stakes for students and schools mean more time out of class to prepare for tests and a narrowing of valuable curricula that engages the whole child.

Finally, perhaps my deepest concern about this perpetuation of high-stakes testing has to do with the fundamental ideology of education that it presumes.  The key assumption underlying the emphasis on standardized tests is that a good education requires students to acquire constellation of facts and information or even, at best, the ability to perform certain skills under pressure.  To me, education is about far more than the ability to perform certain tasks or regurgitate facts.  It is about awakening to a larger world; it is about learning how to participate as global citizens in a creative and critical and compassionate way; it is about questioning and discovering inspiration and how to follow that inspiration into action; it is about learning how to keep learning for themselves so that the world itself becomes your classroom.  Some of these qualities are possible to measure on a test, but some of them aren't.  

All of them require teachers who know their students, who have a relationship with them and watch them grow.  

And while I am encouraged to see the Common Core place a much greater emphasis on critical thinking skills than any test before it, and while I acknowledge the need to establish measures to insure schools are doing their very best to support kids, I continue to be deeply concerned about the prevailing climate that quantifies learning and punishes those who question it.  I am outraged by the distrust of teachers that predicates the so-called "Education Reform" movement which I believe is motivated by corporate interests' desire to privatize education.  

High-stakes standardized tests--even new and improved ones-- are neither smart, nor balanced.

Culturally Tranmitted Diseases

In some mnemonic slide show still imprinted on

the seventh grade lobe of my expanding

universe float images of herpes, syphilis and HIV and

all of the coccuses that might infect my future

choices, the STDs that lurk in microscopic condemnation
          (of lust, or love, or lack) and menace my Caucasian
will.  But in my current static, plastic world, wherein thoughts
bend and shift to dopplered colors, Blue and Red and Black and White,

at last I see a pattern in the splattered blood of races.  At

last I see how cultures, myths and misbegotten memes lead us

toward the hasty unconsidered views and hate-infected hues away from

Unity.

So easy are the hard beliefs of Them and

Those, and Us and These.  So simple then to nurse disease, to suckle

armored, spiked, misapprehended motives, blaming, outward-aiming

thoughts that sit, like fear, to

rust through heartfelt knowing of the wells of our shared fountain.

In these ironclad and necrophilic notions
          (of foes, or friends, or Fates) our emotions breach the angry clouds and

rainfall fills the tracks where tears have spilled, and blood;

under the imperatives of generations, transmitting thought-viruses through

Time in waves and wars
and when will we learn to wash the members of our

naked minds and desegregate our over-taxonomic
hearts?  When we remember our relatedselves, then, at last, we 

Heal.