Recently, my son revealed the difficulty in observing his ninth birthday. Usually joyous occasions, this past birthday was mired in nervousness over the perpetual, coordinated assaults on American ideals of democracy. Just as he was finishing online class, government representatives over 200 miles away openly opined on election malfeasance on the US Senate and House floors to the delight of former President Trump’s glee. A few minutes later, the news reports would show the waves of insurrectionists cruise into this usually impenetrable building like knives through unrefrigerated butter. His stubborn parents shook off the nonsense to center him, even as, in the back of our minds, we worried whether the insurrection at the Capitol was the first of a continuous set of actions between that moment and the inauguration of President Biden.
He’s sitting there, smile in tow, brimming at another year around the sun even as he observes the world we’ve brought him into. What, to this nine-year-old, is a learning loss?
He’s learned a lot this year. He learned how to create his own school schedule, how to advocate for himself and his learning, how to flip between several different computer programs, how to use Zoom and Google Meet depending on the Department of Education’s policies, and how to work independently while his parents navigated their own set of works. He learned how to put on his own mask, wash his hands for 20 seconds, and stay physically distant from strangers who he senses do otherwise. He’s got a larger vocabulary and can read our expressions well. He’s got a way with puns and jokes beyond what I had at his age. His musical tastes have expanded to early 90’s rap, older school R&B and soul, and a sprinkling of ballads from various genres (I’m not apologizing for that, either). There isn’t a Mario game I’ve handed him that he hasn’t tried to beat within two weeks.
Oh, and he’s inherited lessons on injustice, hope, and how much further we have to go towards any sense of equality, most of it from his own reflections.
Contrary to some people’s beliefs, my thoughts as a teacher of hundreds of students have aligned closely to what I want for my own son. The issues with standardized testing are manifold. It’s hard to advocate for standardized testing unless one ignores its abhorrent connections to the eugenics movement, massive disinvestment in the social safety net, distorted notions of accountability, and the mass closure and privatization of public schools. But even if we ventured to ignore decades of institutional malfeasance, we must reject notions that we somehow need these tests to accurately assess learning loss. Many of my students lost a lot more than learning with little to show for it. If anything, the last couple of decades have shown time and again how, generally, school districts don’t offer authentic support to those labeled “failing.”
On paper, districts and schools are supposed to provide “services,” but what, to a global pandemic, various hate crimes, perpetual economic stratification, and structural delegitimizing of full human beings, is a service?
Yes, it’s worth noting that Alejandro has two veteran and venerated educators, so he’s had a wealth of knowledge to inherit. So it stands to reason that, if my son’s been learning a lot this past year without standardized testing, other children ought to be asked what they actually learned, things beyond the standards surely. “Learning loss” assumes that a form of equality (it isn’t even equity right now) existed for children already stripped of both resources and agency. This coming school year, our school systems would do well to take better measures than whether a student aligned all their learning to what a publisher demanded.
So Alejandro’s parents are opting him out, not because he has the opportunity to fail this exam, but because we can reject the framing of learning loss and school reopening altogether in the service of rethinking what this looks like.
Society’s collective need to renormalize everything negates all the steps it took to get us here, including the consistent inhumanity this country has shown to its citizens descended from enslaved peoples, indigenous peoples, and immigrated peoples from marginalized countries and continents. It’s hard to recognize, too, that the people most likely to be seen through deficit lenses have an abundance so deeply underappreciated by our schooling norms. I openly acknowledge that many of the policymakers, administrators, and reporters ostensibly understand that inequity, but will proceed at deliberate speed because a small subset of mostly white wealthy framers said so.
OK. But my son doesn’t have to be subjected to the whims of a small obstinate few in a city that largely is supposed to serve students who share similar backgrounds to him. The results can never do justice to what our children have experienced, and what their parents have known so long about this country. To be clear, many a tragedy have occurred on many birthdays in the last year. This country owes a great debt to our children of color, even more so across multiple identity markers, especially disability, gender, and class.
Our students deserve more for their resilience than this country has offered them, especially because this country can offer that and then some. Perhaps now is a good time to assess our students less and assess itself more.
For more information on opting out in New York, please follow the work of NYC Opt Out.