“Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” - Albert Einstein
There is something misguided in the way we classify students in our schools. We place them into categories based around their ability to meet measurement standards that a select privileged group of people create. Student performances will determine their capacity to achieve success in the dominant culture and if they do not measure up they are left to fall behind into a lower social strata. This creates a hierarchy in our schools that reinforces oppression by the ruling class of our society.
Student’s socioeconomic status (SES), a term which is essentially a euphemism for a discriminatory class or caste system, can have a dramatic effect on a students test scores. This has been well researched and standardized testing consistently shows that students who come from more affluent families get higher test scores (Sacks, 1997).
While working with the “Alternative Education” program at Colonel Gray, I was teaching a class of students who had been labeled as “at risk.” The students were no different then other kids of their age, except they were considered more disruptive then most “Academic” classes. They would sometimes speak out, and act defiant or rebellious. Those who did “act out” were often expelled or suspended from school – effectively pushing them further behind by limiting their opportunity to get an education that they will need to get work or to move on to a higher level of specialized education.
The students in my class all had one thing in common. They came from homes of low SES. Their parent’s income, education, and occupation put them at a disadvantage in school from the beginning by not giving them access to the same privileges people in a higher SES have. By the time they had reached grade ten, you could tell many of them had experienced repeated failure and had lost motivation for learning. It was only when we were working on projects that were set up in a low stress and non-graded way that these students really started to get involved with their work. When I returned after my first practicum I saw that they has fallen back into a routine of not caring and I believe it was solely because they went back to doing worksheets and tests for a specific text.
Tests measure such a specific area of content, yet they are used to determine a student’s capability as a person. It is such a limited snapshot of human potential, but it is something that is agreed upon as an acceptable measure of intelligence by the majority of our society. In some areas if teachers are not meeting certain performance levels, their job security can be in jeopardy. This forces teachers to “teach to the test” and can limit the scope of their educational canon – making the learning experience more rigid and restricted to alternative worldviews. The exclusive groups of people who are familiar with the content and who are equipped to succeed then go on to experience more accumulative success, and the opposite is true for those who experience failure. When people possess power and social capital, they can leverage this to get more power and capital, in sociology this is called the Matthew Effect, where “the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer” (Gladwell, 2007). In Education it could be called the Binet effect, where people who do well on standardized tests go on to be labeled as capable and those who fail go on to be considered incompetent. Although in all likelihood, the people who are failing the tests are doing so because they are not good at decoding or preparing for the tests, not because they are incompetent.
When I think about a school without assessment I am left feeling discomfort. One part of me knows that it would create a pressure free learning environment for students and it would make school less intimidating for those who do not experience traditional success, but another part of me imagines the criticisms I would face for even suggesting such a practice. It would certainly be an uphill battle. I imagine people asking; how do you know who is qualified to go onto university? How can we tell if students are grasping the content? How do we evaluate subjects with specific answers like math or physics? And how do we teach to different abilities? I know there are alternatives for assessment and pedagogy that I will not get into in this essay, but the fact is that most people are not willing to take them into consideration because it would require a paradigm shift in the existing school system. A school without explicit grading and ranking systems seems outrageous to people who possess power. They discredit students who fall behind as lazy or not trying hard enough, and buy into the myth of liberal individualism and the American dream. It is difficult for powerful White people (those high on the SES scale) to recognize their privilege and many go their entire lives without acknowledging it. The dynamics of dominance and politics of difference “allow Whites in Western nations to exist in the contradictory state of being blind to our own racial identity, on the one hand, while asserting the inherent superiority of Whiteness, on the other” (Howard, 1999: 85).
And why are we so resistant to change? Because the oppressors have developed a sophisticated system of oppression that is so invasive, we don’t even recognize it. The hegemonic values of our society, what some may call “common sense,” are a part of our social practices and it is difficult to challenge them, whereas it is extremely convenient and rewarding to be “easy in the harness” (Boler, Zembylas, 2003). Hegemony perpetuates the maintenance of the dominant class “not by the sheer exercise of force but primarily through consensual social practices, social forms, and social structures produced in specific sites such as the church, the state, the school, the mass media, the political system, and the family” (Boler, Zemblyas, 2003).
There are undeniable power relationships that exist in our classrooms. Teachers have power over students; curriculum and textbook writers have power over teachers, and so on. Yet when we go to acknowledge these power relationships, White people tend to downplay their significance, whereas people of color are more likely to point them out (Delpit, 2006). The same is true for White people of a lower SES, they are able to point out the advantages of their more affluent counterparts, but the opposite is not true when it comes to spotting disadvantages. I have heard many teachers discredit “at risk” kids as stupid, impossible to deal with, or unmanageable, without considering the circumstances those kids are coming from. Students who are living in poverty and still manage to get themselves to school, often without parental encouragement, are reprimanded when they do not meet the expectations of certain teachers. I can’t say that I would have done as well if I were placed in the same situation. Not recognizing power reminds me of Jane Elliot’s Blue Eyes Brown Eyes exercise where people with blue eyes are put in the subordinate class and made to feel discriminated. It is a major shock to the participants system as they start to realize what it means to have power and more importantly what it means to be without. You don’t recognize it as much when you do have power, but when it is taken away it is hard to miss.
As a male white educator I have to realize that my racial identity puts me at an advantage over others. I have to realize the power I have as a teacher and use it to make changes in the system or at the very least in my own classroom. I know the rules, dress, language, and formalities of the dominant culture, and I need to be able to transfer this knowledge to students so they can succeed even if I do not agree with the rules I am teaching. Otherwise students will be left behind at a later point in their life and could resent me for not teaching them these practices. I would like to someday see a school where there is no stratification of students. A place where people go to learn about everything and are guided to follow there own interest instead of being forced to follow a curriculum that is designed to give advantages to certain people. Until then, I will have to use the power that I do have to try and make changes in my own class by navigating the system so that I meet the requirements of my job while still getting to operate on the fringe and outside of the comfort zone.
Bibliography:
Boler, Megan and Michalinos Zembylas (2003). Chapter 5. In Trifonas, Peter P. Pedagogies of difference: rethinking education for social change (electronic resource -ebook), RoutledgeFalmer, pp. 110-136.
Delpit, Lisa (2006). Other people’s children. New York: The New Press, pp. 21-47, pp. 185-187, pp. 201-203.
Elliot, Jane (2005). Indecently Exposed.
Foucault, M. (1972). The archaeology of knowledge and the discourse on language. New York:
Gladwell, Malcolm (2008-11-18). Outliers: The Story of Success (1 ed.). Little, Brown and Company
Howard, Gary R. (1999). Chapter 5. In We can’t teach what we don’t know: White teachers, mutiracial schools. New York: Teachers College Press, pp. 83-96.
Sacks, P. (1997, March/April). Standardized testing: Meritocracy’s crooked yardstick. Change, pp. 25-28.