via Rachel Levy, one teacher’s frustration with the standardized testing students are tortured with every year. The tests are high-stakes, expensive, and costly in ways we don’t even know yet.

I used to tell Ms. Dancer that they were testing the school, not her. This is because she has always suffered from horrible test anxiety and I knew the only way to alleviate her stress was to tell her who really had skin in the game. It wasn’t her. It was the teachers, the school, the school board, and the state. But really, this is beyond the pale:

As testing was underway I became more and more irritated with not only the rules, but the fact that teachers’ discretion was being undermined by outsiders claiming to be experts on data, but not on children. Who are these people moving chairs from place to place around my room to see my test administration from multiple angles? Why are these strangers writing pages of notes on the condition of my classroom and my position in the room? The thought crossed my mind of just throwing the pile of test booklets in the air and screaming of its insanity, but what good would that do? I wouldn’t be allowed to finish the year with my students who had to put their science projects on the back burner for the two-week testing period. I would never get to see how they turned out if I was punished for breaching test security. I had already been scolded for allowing children to read books after they finished the test, as well as for allowing them to go to the bathroom. I decided to not push any further.

After being stalked throughout the building for two weeks in order to ensure that I would not change any test answers and spied on from just beyond my classroom door, my anxiety and disgust became overwhelming. After being witness to little children crying with anxiety and acting out in resistance and being forced to sit for hours completing endless assessments that they would most likely never see the results of, my faith in public education was diminishing. Why are teachers subject to this level of disrespect and distrust? Why are students subject to this much of a loss of real learning time?

There is a certain irony to me that I’m writing this as my last child is within two weeks of waving goodbye to the public school system. I am a total believer in public schools, don’t get me wrong, but I’m angrier and angrier at how teachers are treated, how data-driven education has become, and how much money we are WASTING on these high-stakes tests that teach children how to parrot answers but not how to think!

Here’s what I’m talking about, via the Washington Monthly special series on testing. A young, creative motivated teacher, crushed into a pigeonhole:

“The value of the way I am teaching this week,” said Voskuil, “is that kids are falling in love with books. They’re making important connections between ideas and having this emotional connection with the narrators. They also get the satisfaction of starting and finishing an entire book, which is something many of them have never done.”

And yet whenever Voskuil spends time teaching a novel—or grammar and syntax, for that matter—she says she feels a vague twinge. “I have the sense that this is not a meaningful use of my time,” she says. “I have that sense because it’s not going to be on the test.”

The test in question—a standardized exam called the DC Comprehensive Assessment System (DC CAS), made up almost entirely of multiple-choice questions—was coming up in early April. And so the week after she taught Seedfolks, Voskuil’s teaching style underwent a dramatic change. She began by physically rearranging the classroom: the students who had scored just below the “proficient” level on earlier tests were brought front and center; the students who had scored “below basic” were clustered in a small group near the window; and the few students who were already on record as proficient lined the perimeter, their desks facing the wall so they could work quietly on their own. Like a politician who spends all of her time in swing states, Voskuil wanted to concentrate on the students who were on the cusp.

Working within a tight agenda, with five-minute intervals marked by a stopwatch, Voskuil began drilling the group. Together, the students read aloud an eleven-paragraph text called “Penguins Are Funny Birds.” Then they answered multiple-choice questions such as “According to the article, how do penguins ‘fly through the water’? A .) They use their flippers to swim. B.) They dive from cliffs into the sea. C.) They are moved by ocean currents. D.) They glide across the ice on their bellies.”And why, Voskuil asked, is it important to read the italicized introduction that always accompanies such text passages? Because it’s a summary, the group responded.

This is sheer insanity. It’s costing far too much in money, creativity, and it’s certainly hurting public schools. Some Texas parents have started an “Opt Out” program for standardized tests. I hope it spreads across the nation.

I received this question in my email this week:

Where are you? Your president who claims to be a Christian has come out in favor of gay marriage and your silence is deafening. Can you reconcile, using scripture, Christianity with same sex marriage? This is not an issue on which a Christian can ride the fence because God calls unnatural affections an abomination. What do you say?

I say, what took him so long? I say that my obligations as a Christian are to behave in accordance with what Jesus says I should be doing. Interestingly, Jesus doesn’t really give me a mandate to go out and tell other people what they should be doing. But he does teach us about attitudes, judgments, and servants’ hearts in Matthew 25:31-46. And he does command us to “love one another.” Judging one another isn’t in there anywhere. Really, it’s not.

And if that isn’t enough, then maybe this will explain it better:

To my questioner, I offer this. Marriage is a legal contract which is the product of an act of the state, not an act of the church. Some people solemnify it by making vows in front of a church and a minister; others do not. Marriage confers certain legal rights upon those who enter into such contracts. It is, at its most fundamental base, a contractual arrangement between two adults. It has not been defined throughout the ages as one man and one woman. It has, at times, involved one man and many women. At other times it has involved one man and one child. These are both definitions of marriage that our current society rejects, but which were at one time completely sanctioned within certain religious and societal sects, including the mainstream churches.

I’m glad and proud to support a man who chose to be empathetic rather than judgmental and legalistic. Since my views on this have been quite plain for a number of years, I didn’t feel the need to expand on it initially, but given my emailer’s (and maybe only reader’s) confusion over my position, it seemed like a good time to reiterate it.

Here’s one final biblical admonition that I try but don’t always succeed at heeding:

If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone. – Romans 12:18

In the context of marriage equality, it is simple enough for me to heed it and live by it. Same sex marriage does not threaten me or undermine my marriage. It does not elevate anyone above anyone else. Condemning same sex marriage and becoming an advocate for stripping people of happiness and stigmatizing them does not comport with “living at peace with everyone else.”

Like I said, I don’t always succeed. But I do try.

I hope that in 2017, after leaving the White House at the end of his second term, he writes that book to his mother. And his grandmother. You cannot hear his words of tribute to his mother, spoken by him, without believing their sincerity and regret.

I was especially moved by his acknowledgment that he focused on the absent parent instead of the one always present, even when she was apart from her child. Sadly, it’s all too often the case. I’ve done it too.

Happy Mother’s Day to all Moms out there!

Thanks to my good friend Cyn at K-12 News Network and her Facebook posts, I’ve been following what I consider to be a fairly amazing series of events involving a blogger, a post, racism, and her ongoing effort to defend the indefensible. If this were just an ordinary blog like this one where one is as likely to post something thoughtful as a picture of a pug rolling around on the grass, it wouldn’t be a big deal. But it is a big deal, and it’s one that I see all the time whenever conservatives write about race or race and higher education. They’re not particularly huge fans of either one, at least when higher education might illuminate others about racial issues.

Blogger vs. Black Studies

The blog in question is published on Chronicle.com — the Chronicle of Higher Education — and is widely read by academics and others on a regular basis. The bloggers aren’t just no-name bloggers, but highly respected academic types with positions at major universities around the country and until this week, one of them was a writer by the name of Naomi Schaeffer Riley. Ms. Riley claims to be a journalist writing about higher education for the past 15 years, has been published in many major newspapers, and wrote a post last week declaring that Black Studies at universities should be eliminated on the basis of the titles of a few of them.

Hey, she’s entitled to her opinion, but that’s beside the point. Her thesis is objectionable on its face, but her delivery was awful. For example, this:

You’ll have to forgive the lateness but I just got around to reading The Chronicle’s recent piece on the young guns of black studies. If ever there were a case for eliminating the discipline, the sidebar explaining some of the dissertations being offered by the best and the brightest of black-studies graduate students has made it. What a collection of left-wing victimization claptrap. The best that can be said of these topics is that they’re so irrelevant no one will ever look at them.

That’s what I would say about Ruth Hayes’ dissertation, “‘So I Could Be Easeful’: Black Women’s Authoritative Knowledge on Childbirth.” It began because she “noticed that nonwhite women’s experiences were largely absent from natural-birth literature, which led me to look into historical black midwifery.” How could we overlook the nonwhite experience in “natural birth literature,” whatever the heck that is? It’s scandalous and clearly a sign that racism is alive and well in America, not to mention academia.

Riley’s remarks really show her own cluelessness in this area. While I don’t want to refute her snark point by point, I do want to illustrate the danger of making a judgement about someone’s research based upon a title. As it turns out, the role of black midwives is a pretty pivotal one. I found this article from 2007 on Mothering.com discussing the history of black midwives and their legacy. Here’s some pretty key information:

Part of Monroe’s mission is to teach African Americans their history. She wants midwives of all cultures to remember the important position they once held in community health care—a place she feels they should hold again. It was midwives who kept communities together, serving every aspect of health and every member of a family. For Monroe, being a midwife—particularly for the African-American community—means playing a key role in educating black women about their health, reducing infant mortality, and showing women how to raise healthy children with tenderness and attention. These are goals to which Monroe—she won’t give her age, but seems to have more dynamism and energy than most teenagers—has dedicated her life. She hopes that, through ICTC, other African-American midwives will carry on the tradition after she’s gone.

I don’t have to hold a master’s degree or PhD to understand from a simple Google search that black midwifery is steeped in tradition and community, something we all could use a little more of these days. It seems to me like it’s a worthwhile area of study on that basis alone, but just in case there’s still doubt on anyone’s part, this statistic ought to pull people up short:

ICTC is one of the few organizations in the country dedicated to educating and training black midwives. Any doubt about the need for such training is quickly dissipated by a glance at the statistics: Overall, the US has one of the highest rates of infant mortality in the developed world, and the rate for African Americans is almost twice that: 13.6 deaths per 1,000 live births, according to a National Vital Statistics Report.² The reasons for this are intrinsic to the system we live in, says Monroe, who adds that training and supporting midwives is part of the answer.

Read that statistic while hearing Riley’s voice ask how we could possibly overlook the nonwhite experience in natural birth literature and ask yourself whether or not she bothered to consider how it would be received by people concerned with poverty and health issues in this country, and whether or not it is, on its face, a racist remark.

Later in her post, Riley went after a young scholar by the name of TaSha B. Levy, who is writing a dissertation on African-American Republicans and how conservatives have assaulted the same civil rights legacy they benefited from. Riley’s response?

The assault on civil rights? Because they don’t favor affirmative action they are assaulting civil rights? Because they believe there are some fundamental problems in black culture that cannot be blamed on white people they are assaulting civil rights?

Another scholar is studying the impact of the 2007-2008 housing crisis on African-Americans, who lost the most in the meltdown. One doesn’t have to look far to discover that the gap in wealth between whites and blacks doubled, with the median wealth of white households being 20 times that of black households. Further, a popular right-wing talking point is the claim that all those loans to minorities by Fannie and Freddie crashed the housing market, when in fact, that is simply not the case. Minorities were exploited badly by unscrupulous lenders who told them they could reach that goal of home ownership even if they couldn’t really afford it. Ms. Levy’s thesis includes a study of the “profitability of racism in the housing market.” Indeed, they were profitable, giving up nearly half their accumulated wealth to the crash and putting a greater number of blacks into poverty than whites. Riley’s response? “Those millions of white people who went into foreclosure were just collateral damage, I guess.”

Any way you cut it, this post was oozing with racism and intended to be inflammatory. She belittled the writers, the issues they’re studying, and called for a complete end to any scholarly work with regard to African-American, or Black Studies. It offends me, and I’m white. It’s particularly offensive when it’s published for a well-respected publication staffed by academics.

The Chronicle’s editor had a look at what she wrote and the reaction it received and fired her. Good move on their part, and I speak as someone who has written my share of stupid blog posts and tweets that others found offensive. At least I managed to apologize to those I offended, but Riley chose a different route, telling readers that not only was she unapologetic, she had some advice for them:

A word to the wise: If you’re trying to convince the wider world that black people in America are oppressed, I’d skip using the experience of black graduate students as an example.

If at first you don’t succeed…write for the WSJ

Well, thank you for that. With that bit of advice, Riley rode into the sunset at The Chronicle, but only long enough for the sun to rise on her over at Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal, where she ripped into higher education overall for, in her words, giving African-Americans a venue in which there are “a series of axes that faculty members would like to grind.”

As evidence for her contention that black studies as an academic endeavor is a dead end, she cites John McWhorter, Manhattan Institute scholar and Fox Business commentator, Hoover Institution Friedman Senior Fellow on Public Policy Thomas Sowell, Harvard economics professor Roland Fryer and Marxist historian Eugene D. Genovese. All academics, three are black, and all are men. Economists, historians and linguists. Why are they worthy of respect and the targets of Riley’s wrath not? Easy. They weren’t focused in “black studies” departments. In Riley’s view, Economics, History, Linguistics are “real” areas of study. Black studies? Not so much, even though the areas being studied incorporate sociology, economics, history, linguistics, anthropology and other studies necessary to actually look at ways an entire culture situated in an entire country with different demographics has changed and been changed.

If you needed evidence that racism exists and permeates, even in places it shouldn’t, here it is. Riley chose three scholars studying three different areas specific to the African-American experience and tradition — health care, housing and equality — and belittled those studies as irrelevant, self-indulgent and a waste of time.

Taking an even longer view of Riley’s three rants, it would appear that she disapproves of most higher education on general principles, but especially for African-Americans who might dare to focus their research and study on — gasp — African Americans.

Just for fun

I decided to look around at other departments at other universities and see what sorts of studies they were doing on African-Americans. And just for fun, I decided to only read the titles, just like Riley did. Here are some. Tell me if you think they carry more weight because they are sponsored by more, ahem, traditional departments. I offer no commentary whatsoever on whether they are worthy to study. I haven’t read them. All I offer is the department or university where the student is or has researched the topic, and the topic itself. Tell me whether you think they are worthy of study in that context. If they are, why aren’t they worthy of study in the context of black studies?

Liberty University (Conservative Christian):

• A Revitalization and Growth Strategy for the African Methodist Episcopal Churches in the Virginia Conference,
• The Role of Appreciation in Higher Education: The Experience of Online Faculty Members with Instituional Administration
• Church Choirs: An Examination of Relevancy in 21st Century American Churches,

Columbia University (American Studies):

• Charity Fox, “Manifest Mercenaries: Mercenary Narratives in American Popular Culture, 1850-1990”
• Sandra Heard, “The ‘Bad’ Black Consumer: A Study of African-American Consumer Culture in Washington, D.C., 1910s-1930s”
• Cameron Logan, “The Constituent Landscape: History, Race and Real Estate in Washington, D.C., 1950-1990″ (Richard Longstreth, Director)