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.

Frozen and Maleficent: Disney's Recasting the Myth of True Love

Once upon a time, Walt Disney told variants of a single story from a patriarchal Germanic tradition in which passive, naïve and generally motherless girls whose only notable quality was superficial good looks ran afoul of dark, vindictive women powerful only in their capacity to hate, and from whom those passive, vacuous girls could only be saved by a gallant, upper-class male whom she might have seen once but who could deliver “true love’s kiss” to save the day and live happily ever after the end. 

That was the story, once upon a time.  It was a story that dominated the public mythos of much of the English-speaking world for decades, a story that whispered subtle moralizing guidance in the minds of generations of young girls and boys alike, encoding gender roles, and implanting subtle but powerful associations regarding the nature of True Love.

But these days, Disney seems to be telling a slightly different story, a mythos that is being newly alloyed and reforged in the crucible of social criticism and popular culture.

There is a curious relationship between what we loosely term “culture,” the complex and shifting pattern of language, beliefs, traditions and values that shapes a group of people, and the art forms, films and narratives produced by it.  On the one hand, a culture shapes its narratives, because those narratives are told by members of that culture who know the values and mores, the dramas and the styles that will entertain and inform other members.  On the other hand, the narratives that really move the hearts of large numbers of human beings, that inspire the imaginations of individuals—those narratives can shape and re-shape the larger culture.  It was the German-American anthropologist Franz Boas who first began to talk about culture as an organic, living thing, a matrix of symbols that both provides mythic narratives to its participants and receives them, and in the second decade of the 21^st Century, saturated by mass media, that dynamism has never been more apparent.

But what is it, in particular, about Disney narratives that seems to be undergoing a profound face-lift?  Consider for a moment the two most recent Disney feature productions; Frozen (2013) and Maleficent(2014).  One of the reasons Frozen immediately received such critical attention—as distinct from its popular appeal—is that it challenges traditional gender roles in which the passive princess could only be saved by the gallant prince and an act of “true love.”  In the case of Frozen, not only were there two princesses, and it was unclear for much of the film which one needed to be saved, but in the end one princess saves the other, her sister, and herself, in an act of self-sacrifice which turns out to be the curse-breaking true love—sisterly love.  In an added twist to the traditional tropes, she (the character of Ana in the movie) has to rescue her sister from the gallant prince, her own, handsome and barely-known fiancée, who turns out to be the villain of the story. 

In the more recent Disney feature, Maleficent, a re-telling of the 1959 animated  Sleeping Beauty from the perspective of the “evil queen,” we see the familiar narrative cast in a very different way.  In the new re-telling, not only is the audience allowed to see the reasons Maleficent’s character has grown from fun-loving though fierce and protective fairy to hateful and bitter sorceress (a brutal betrayal by the young man she’d thought to be her own true love), but in the end, when the young princess, Aurora, falls into her enchanted sleep, the expected “true love’s kiss,” the kiss of the handsome young prince whom she’s seen only once, fails.   Instead, it is Maleficent herself, who cursed the princess in the first place in revenge for her father’s betrayal, who grows fond of the princess by watching her grow, and whose hardened heart softens with regret at having cursed her, it is she who breaks the curse with what can only be called a motherly love.  What truer love is there?

What is profound about this change in the mythic narrative of true love’s kiss is not only the changing gender roles—which a century of feminist critique has helped effect, and still has much to do—but the re-evaluation of the nature of love.  In modern America, arguably the most over-mediated nation in the world (bring it Japan!), we have a steadily increasing epidemic of divorce, domestic violence, and disposable relationships.  For a modern young person, falling in love is essentially indistinguishable from having an intense biochemical attraction to someone else.  And when that weedy infatuation falls to the scythe of incompatible lifestyles or values, as it often does, our hearts are broken, love is lost, and we question love entirely.  In my own life, I have often blamed the Disney Myth of True Love for programming me with assumptions about how a relationship should proceed, in what order things should be done, even the very notions of monogamy and loyalty.

Obviously, the youthful tendency for love at first sight is not a new phenomenon.  Romeo and Juliet, and the earlier Greek version Pyramus and Thisbe, give us fine historical narratives of lusty infatuation mistaken for love.  But Disney, with its unremitting happily-ever-afters and subtly (or not) coded gender roles, has so impregnated our minds with the notion that such a love, properly defended and championed, will see us through any hardship, break any curse, bestow any super power, that now love is even harder to define that it naturally is—which is substantial. 

Now, in these recent recastings of “true love,” and particularly insofar as both Frozen and Maleficent juxtapose the negative consequences of too hastily handing out our hearts in the traditional fashion, we see mythic examples of “true love,” which are not sexualized, not based on superficial or barely-known qualities, but based on intimate knowledge and compassionate understanding.  And if Disney, perhaps the most influential myth-maker of modernity, can offer us such a vision of love, perhaps we can begin to nurture it in our own lives.

Peace Amidst a Sea of Troubles

I don’t know that much about the Troubles in Northern Ireland. 

I know that one of my best friends, Paul, grew up in Belfast and that he, a Catholic, was jumped by a half-dozen Protestant boys when he was 16 and beaten badly, just because he was Catholic.  That was 1990.

I know that Betty Williams, the product of a Catholic-Protestant intermarriage, witnessed a car crash in 1976.  The car was driven by an IRA member who’d been shot by British police, and when he lost control, he struck and killed three children.  I also know that Betty Williams had two cousins; one was killed by Catholics, and one was killed by Protestants.  The aunt of the three children who were killed, Mairead Corrigan Maguire, contacted Betty and within days, the two of them organized a Peace march with over 35,000 people.  I met Betty.  She gives good hugs.

I know that there’s a long history of peace and war, intermarriage, love and hate between Catholics and Protestants, that it goes back all the way to the British occupation and the Protestant conversion of the English King Henry VIII, and more recently to the Irish War of Independence, when a thin Protestant majority in Northern Ireland decided to remain part of the UK.  I only know in the abstract, academic brand of ‘knowing’ that there were decades of bombs and bullets, atrocities and concessions on both sides that most people call “The Troubles.”

I believe that there has been some modicum of peace there for the last fifteen years or so, and that makes me happy, because Ireland sings in my blood, Northern or Republic of, though I’ve never set foot on the island. 

And now I hear that Gerry Adams has been arrested and is under investigation for a terrible murder that happened forty years ago, because of an interview for Boston College’s Belfast oral history project. I guess the interview links Gerry Adams and the Sinn Fein to Mrs. Jean McConville, who was accused of being an informant and was disappeared by the IRA, snatched from in front of her children, and that her family has been seeking justice ever since.  It was a terrible act of violence amidst a sea of Troubles.  I understand the McConville family’s desire for closure, and their deep need for justice, so often misunderstood for vengeance.

But here’s something else I know.  Peace is fragile.  Especially when it’s young, like a seedling, it is tender and needs nourishment.  It is easily damaged by things like vengeance and hate, which burn like a coal in the heart for years.  So when I see something of vast historical and academic importance, like the Boston College Belfast project, something that was launched in the spirit of peace and reconciliation, according to its director, seized upon to reopen old wounds (or keep open wounds that have never healed), I have to mourn. 

There will always be a need for vengeance.  It will always seem easier to continue to pursue retribution, even for forty years, because there’s a certain defining certainty to it, than it will be to embrace the uncertainty of trusting those who have been enemies. 

And so my wish for Northern Ireland is as it has always been: peace.  If Gerry Adams has to go to jail for something that happened forty years ago, that's not for me to say, though I'm sure he's a very different person now than he was then.  Truth is an important part of reconciliation, as the great Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela showed in South Africa.  But I also hold the wish that the oral histories of the IRA and UVF members recorded by Boston College be treasured, be honored, and if any new light is shed on the Troubles, that it be used to nurture the fragile seed of peace.

Hope and Expectation

Of the two identities that pulse together and intertwine at the core of who I am, writer and teacher, it is that latter that I reflect upon most often.  I realized I was a teacher at heart when it occurred to me that I unconsciously strive always to find the best in every person I meet.  It is a trait I inherited from my father, also a teacher.  There is some fundamental assumption I hold that each person really is doing the best he or she can do in life, that each person has the potential to reach fullness, self-actualization, and I feel inherently and unconsciously driven to address that part of her or him. 

Whether this is an admirable quality or a naïve one—or both—I leave for others to judge, but a curious consequence of it is that it tends to lend itself to expectation, which is itself a potentially dangerous habit to fall into.

Apprehending the future seems to be a natural and compulsive activity of the human being.  We reach out with eager fingers toward some more secure image of the landscape of tomorrow.  That grasping takes on a very different grip depending upon the feelings we apply to it: fearful, hopeful or expectant.  When we extend our mental fingers toward the future with fear, for example, we trap ourselves in fascinated dread, summoning up the very doom that we most wish to avoid, like the deer in the onrushing headlights.  (This, I think, is why such a rich and lovely word as “apprehend,” from the Latin “to reach toward or to seize,” takes on the negative and fearful connotation when we force it to become an adjective: “apprehensive”).

When we reach toward the future with hope, on the other hand, it is like planting a seed in the soil, trusting in the subtle and (for most of us) incomprehensible forces of nature to nurture that seed into life so that it may provide food for us later.  There is an extending toward the future, but, when Hope is done properly, it is a reach that already contains gratitude within its attitude.  It is an image of the future that still has gracious space for other possible outcomes.

Expectation, on yet another hand—why not have three hands, if we’re reaching?— expectation is a demand.  It is a vivid, well-defined, and therefore closed vision of what must come.  It is an outfit we must wear cautiously in our relationships with other people, since, stitched to the inside of those clothes, unseen but waiting for expression the moment we take them off, is disappointment.  As teachers, we are taught to cultivate this clothing, to wear it clearly for our students.  The famous quip, cited by Clinton Administration Education Secretary Richard Riley “the tyranny of low expectations” is often brandished toward educators as an admonition.  The meaning is clear: the more we hold our students to high standards, the more they will stretch to meet them and therefore the more service we provide them.  Having high expectations of someone (read: “someone over whom you have authority and influence”) offers that person an opportunity to tap potentials in herself that she was unaware previously unaware of.  High expectations are useful, important, and a necessary tool for those of us engaged in the co-cultivation of consciousness. 

There is, however, that darker side to the equation, which we might call "the crippling of high expectations," or perhaps more accurately, of unreasonable expectations.  So often, when we see an individual’s potential, and as teachers, we are predisposed to focusing on just that, we press him toward that potential.  With a student, a young spirit with an intricate life outside of the classroom, an ineffably complex mandala of prides and insecurities, pressures and doubts, it is a delicate dance between pushing enough to be encouraging, but not so much as to discourage, or even damage with the scars of failure.  Many of the kids I’ve worked with in the classroom have carried just these scars from their experiences in public schools.

As with so many vocations, however, it is dangerous to apply what is appropriate on the job to what is personal.  One of my biggest challenges in my personal life has been that I carry this natural predisposition—to see the enormous potential in people, to see where they have room to grow, and to press them toward that growth—into my intimate relationships.  Some of my most heart-breaking disappointments have come because I could see the bright, glorious spirit of my partner in her fullness, and held that against her insecure, habitual and tentative reality.  And it is exactly here, in this place of vivid, well-defined (and therefore closed) vision of the future, where we can most cruelly and unintentionally oppress our loved ones, over whom we always have some modicum of authority and influence.  And it is because of my heart-breaking forays and failures with this kind of apprehension of the future, applying to my loved ones the crippling of unreasonable expectations, I have learned to give up on expectation and place my hope in Hope.  (By the way, I’m still not sure it is unreasonable to expect a person to strive to become their best selves.) 

It is, I find, far more commendable, far more apprehensible, to see the best and highest in another, to hope her gently toward that, and then to comprehend that person exactly as she is, right now, in her fullest, most perfectly flawed present.  In the end, I still like to believe that everyone really is doing the best he can with what he has—I can say with not-quite-total certainty that I am.  Whether that is true or not, if we pretend that it is, it allows us to see others with patience and grace, and perhaps—perhaps, it allows them to look at themselves in that patient and graceful mirror, and to check in for themselves as to whether or not it is true.  I make a practice of that self-checking in, with the graceful mirror I see in each new person. After all, whose hopes and expectations are more important for us to measure up to than our own?

Heartsong

Take heart!

Even in the twisted times, when reason’s ring has wrung all meaning

From the lashings of our living’s lessons

When our lips like purse-strings draw the lines of lovers lost and keening—

Even when our deepest heart connections (so often indistinguishable

from our heart’s attachments) snap from the strain

Of holding circumstance in a static place it cannot linger—

Even then you can hear it

If you listen.

Yes, you can. 

There is a need for hate and hurt and pain,

There is a reason our deepest love can feel like hate when it snaps back

broken, there’s a reason you dig out the depths of your

Purpose with the jaded spade of despair (in those twisted times)

If only to make the well deeper—that well you’ll draw your passion from when

The twisted muscles have relaxed, when the fears of still more pain have receded

And the muse begins to whisper in your ear.

You are not alone. 

No never. 

Nor ever are you given more than you

Can hold, but just enough to stretch the muscles of your spirit,

And muscles lubed with patience, faith, and courage stretch with wider motion

Than devotion to some rigid rote can train them.

You are needed in the after hours—those hours after love has fled (the lily love

That keeps its fragrance while the springsun beams, but no longer).

You are needed in the desperate times, when love is menaced (the polaris love that,

Stringless and implacable, saunters narrowly around true north but never leaves it).

You are needed stretched and tested, for your heart can love and hate and clutch and snap

But always, always will it find more of itself to give. 

So take it.

Take Heart. 

You are needed.

You are loved.

-Darren Reiley

Proud to be an American

I am American, and proud to be an American. My name is Darren Reiley, which I usually point out to people is very Irish, and I often call myself Irish, even though I’ve never been to Ireland, because my ancestors came from there, and for some reason I think of that as my racial identity more than my English great grandparents or Cherokee great great grandmother (though I mention them sometimes too; white folks do that a lot here.)

I like to think about being American sometimes.  We’re great thinkers here in America.  Just this morning, I was thinking about the New Year, which we celebrate here generally by getting really drunk and setting off explosives.  The year we recognize starts with January which was named for a pagan Roman god.  The rest of the months, too, were named for either a Roman god, emperor or number.  As far as I know, no Romans ever lived in America; if they did, the other immigrants here probably called them Italians, or something worse.  Oh, by the way, I call myself American because of an Italian explorer named Amerigo Vespucci, who never set foot in what is now my country.  (As Americans, we often forget there is a South America, and they’re Americans too.  This is a technicality.)

As Americans, we begin our week with Sunday (or Monday).  We have catchy little songs about the days of the week to teach our children to remember them.  They must be hard to remember at first since those days are named for Viking gods like Tiu, Woden and Thor.  Somehow, Saturn snuck in there too.  Those Romans again.

When we teach our kids math in school, here in America, we take some time first to make sure they know how to write their numbers clearly, and put them in the proper order, with the smallest numbers on the right.  We do this because we get our numbers from Arabic, not just the order and system, but the shape of the numbers themselves.  We now require all of our kids to know al-gebra (an Arabic word), because it’s a REALLY good way to do math.  We do this because back when white folks in Europe were hanging out in the Dark Ages, forgetting how to read if they ever knew, dying from plagues or local feudal lords or corrupt priests, the Arabs and Persians were doing really well, making art and developing math and astronomy and writing poetry.  We don’t teach that part in schools.  We mostly prefer to think of the numbers we use as “American.”  Then we can be proud of them.

Christianity is the official state religion here in America.  People say it isn’t, and that we have a separation of Church and State, but we’ve never had a non-Christian President—can’t even imagine having a non-Christian president—so I know that’s wrong.  A lot of Christians here like to say God Bless America, because they’re proud to be Americans too, and that means God must be on our side, whatever we’re doing.  We usually show pictures of Jesus as a white guy, even though he was Jewish and probably looked more like a Palestinian.  We talk about Jesus a lot here in America, with a hard “J” even though that name came from the Latin Iesu, which came from the Greek Iesu which came from the Hebrew Yeshua, which was his real name.  We don’t teach that in school or in church either because, well, He likes America enough to bless it all the time, so He must understand, especially with Christmas coming up.  What's more American than Christmas, when a fat Turkish saint with a Dutch name rides a sleigh with eight reindeer, most likely inspired by the same Viking god who gave us Thursday, and delivers presents made by children in China?  

Because I'm American, I speak good English, which is a strangely accented and often poorly spelled descendent of Anglo-Saxon, heavily seasoned with French, Latin and Greek.  I speak this language because the land where I live was colonized by people from the island of England, who took the land, most often by force, from the Native American people who lived here first.  The English found out about this land because it was apparently “discovered” by another Italian explorer, sailing for the Spanish, who was looking for India, and who also never actually set foot on American soil, but we name a lot of our cities, rivers and schools after him anyway.  If we know about it at all, we don’t worry too much about the fact that he was personally responsible for killing at least 100,000 Arawak Indians.  I was taught in school that genocide is bad, but that Columbus was brave and adventurous and clever.  So was Andrew Jackson.

I was also taught that slavery is bad, but money is good.  Sometimes these things are hard to think about at the same time, since much of America's wealth came from 150 years or so of white folks forcing black folks to work for free.  It’s easier to think about how this country also got really wealthy because all those Chinese folks built all those useful railroads.  They got paid $7 per week.  It sure was nice of them to work so hard for so little.  I bet they were proud to be American too, even if the white folks at the time didn’t call them American and wouldn’t let them be citizens.

Then again, America might also be really wealthy because of all of those helpful migrant workers who still harvest all of our fruits and nuts and vegetables.  They must be proud to be American too, since they’re willing to work so hard for six bucks an hour, when minimum wage is nine.  As a documented American citizen, I sure wouldn’t do that.  I know my rights.

Finally, I’m proud to be an American because I’m free.  Free to buy plastic stuff I probably don’t need that was made in China; free to wear nice, stylish clothes made by small children in Bengladesh; free to drive my Japanese car using oil from Iraq.  I won’t forget the men (black, white, or Arab) or the women or children (Cambodian, Indonesian or Guatemalan) who died, who gave those rights to me.   And I know I'm free, and I have these rights, because the Constitution, the greatest American invention, which was largely based on the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, says so.

I’m American, by God.  I know who I am.  Do you?