Appointment of Yecke as Commissioner of Education must be denied
Standardized Minds
By Niles Xi-An Lichtenstein, Youth SpeaksHow can we walk straight
When our backs are bent into boxes
How can we stand
When standards overshadow the individuals
How can we create
locked down behind wooden desks
As future fates rest on the restricted breath of a number two pencil tip
So the clock ticks with the hands of Master America
Stitching together a society
Hemming in divisions and weaving in stratification
Searching for liberation
But stuck within the abbreviations like SATs GREs
GPAs and LSATs We, the nameless ones
Print our identification
With a consistent darkness
To shade the light of our being
Comprehension based
On two dimensional reflections
Of our circumstances
Knowledge is pressed into tight packages with breakable seals
That conceal unbreakable barrier
Deciphering between classes
This royalty has us backwards
As Prince-ton reviews our King’s English
And mathematics only makes sense in the land of abstraction
This land of reality was based on fact
Not fractions
As factions are created between those deemed intelligent
And those who are not
Ivory gates of Ivy league creep open
As cells in Attica lock down
Equations only lead to x’s
While life’s questions only lead to why’s
It’s ironic the one’s who can’t figure the numbers on tests are the ones
Who end up as statistics
I sit dumbfounded trying to figure out the meaning of fulminate
And wonder if Shakespeare could analyze himself
For a 5 on the AP English exam
But I know he could poetry slam
And so they wonder why we’re hesitant
To take tests where the subject matter seems irrelevant
We only use a level of standard
Because we’re too scared to ask ourselves whether we’re good educators
The national average is around 50%
Yet 50% will get you an F on my test
So when do the graders get graded
Who is held accountable for our failure
As students count the bull passed through schools every day
Cyclical reactions to the same problems
And so the bell curve tolls and we are left singing
Oh say can you see
Jose can you see
Nah, Jose is getting an F
Because no habla ingles
So after the test he is left with no options
Maybe back home he was a doctor
But now he is on the corner of 4th street looking for work
Hastening humans have no time to listen or flip past the first page
In their frenetic frenzy
Unless your life’s story is on IMAX
Locked into percentiles
In need of melding together the tiles of a person’s experience
And uncovering the mosaic they call life
Trapped in our personal bubbles
As we bubble in our answers
To none of our problemsOur hands must release from the mechanical flow and we must scribble outside the lines
We must paint our infinite responses to multiple choice questions
And scribe poetry in the blanks
Tell me this not everything
Tell me you believe there is more to me than this test
This test will never recount all the pain
This test will never tell you about my daily struggles
Or the passion breathing in these veins
You cannot confine the travelers of soul
There are too many 1600’s who have never learned to survive
There are too many trying to survive who have no time to produce a 1600
Don’t ever tell a child they’re stupid
Don’t ever cage the stars meant to shine
One can never measure the hidden magic locked behind the mind
There is only one test on planet earth
It ends with death and begins with birthThree hours later
The pencil drops like the weight of a fallen angel
I’m questioning my worth as a human being
Sitting, waiting for you to implant the next string in my back.
— Niles Xi-An Lichtenstein was the 2000 Bay Area Youth Poetry Champion, and a member of Youth Speaks, a poetry project in San Francisco. The organization brings young people together through spoken and written word.
Thursday afternoon, I attended the Senate Education Committee hearing on the confirmation of Education Commissioner Yecke and was on the schedule to testify and request that the Committee deny her appointment. I did submit my written testimony, but a previous commitment to meet with constituents in Forest Township kept me from making an appearance before the committee. It was frustrating, because I was next on the list, but those testifying against her confirmation were eloquent and covered many of my points. The following morning, I read Rep. Cox’s comments on the hearing, which he described as ‘a circus.’ I’m not sure we were at the same hearing, at least I did not see him during the hours I was there. Now, I have to admit, it’s been awhile since I’ve been to a circus, but aside from the shape of the hearing room, set up in a ring, I did not see any resemblance. I was impressed with chairman Kelly’s evenhanded leadership and respect for all participants. He allowed speakers to finish statements even when they went far beyond the allotted time unless their testimony seemed to ramble. He allowed ample questions from all perspectives.
The only part of the proceeding I found at all circus like in behavior may have been the gallery, where Yecke supporters roamed back and forth sporting ‘Yes, Yecke’ stickers, one proudly wearing a blue ‘Team Pawlenty’ sweatshirt. A few opponents had ‘no to Yecke’ stickers on. There were a number of Republican Party operatives taking notes and watching everyone very carefully and making comments to each other. I was sitting behind two of them who highlighted my handout and whispered, not quietly enough, “Make sure the commissioner sees this.” Shortly after that, Senator Tom Neuville approached me and asked what I was doing there. I said, “I am here to testify.” To which he replied, “If you do, you are in big trouble” as he walked away. I do not know what he meant by this, but it does seem unusual to me that legislators, both a novice Representative and a seasoned Senator, would demean a democratic process in such a way. One calls a legitimate and legitimately contentious hearing a ‘circus,’ and another implies a participant should have reason to fear for offering testimony.
The issues for me on the Yecke appointment are as follows:
1. Her appointment was highly politicized by the White House involvement in Minnesota politics. I believe her appointment was engineered by the Bush administration. Which brings into question, “Who does she serve?”
2. She was touted as a reformer, but through the President’s plan, promotes very traditional, perhaps outmoded methods of instruction, ‘a one-size fits all’ system of assessment that ignores the strengths of Minnesota schools and will arbitrarily punishe them.
3. She on numerous occasions gives misleading or dishonest information. As an example, I heard her on the radio the morning after say that most of her critics at the hearing complained about the social studies standards. This was not true. Very few of the critics at the hearing even mentioned the social studies standards, yet I remember her defenders mentioning them several times as if there was anticipation that this would be the primary objection (and this is not to say that the social studies standards are not something worthy of complaint, but there were more important issues to raise at this hearing, issues she’d perhaps rather not discuss on the radio.).
4. She discounts and dismisses those offering their education expertise and rejects differing points of view. We need open and thoughtful debate about education, not a stifling of viewpoints.
Rep. Cox, in his blog, went on to complain about having to listen to people complain about NCLB, the President’s Elementary Secondary Education Act called ‘No Child Left Behind’. He made several statements I did not quite follow. First, he claimed that No Child Left Behind started in the Johnson administration. This is the first I have heard of this, and I have done quite a bit of study on the matter.
Presidents since Eisenhower have all had an Elementary Secondary Education Act, but ‘No Child Left Behind’ started with Bush. Many of its elements can be traced back to the Clinton administration, which was influenced by Al Shanker, former President of the American Federation of Teachers, who called for testing and standards as ways of improving education outcomes. Much of the negative feelings about public education began with the ‘Nation at Risk’ study in the 80s, which in large part was discredited. The original idea to challenge schools to improve their efforts for all learners is laudable and it achieved bi-partisan support, especially for efforts to shrink the achievement gap. The problems and disagreements arise when you try to figure out how to do close the gap.
The Bush administration has chosen a highly punitive and regulated method that will withhold funds to states that do not institute curricular regimens that can gain the blessing of Federal Education Commissioner Rod Paige. The Federal Government must approve all plans for testing, teacher licensure, etc. Technically, Ray is correct, ‘there is no Federal curriculm,’ but with a commissioner who takes her marching orders from the Feds and uses standards hurriedly developed, it is hard to see how we will “get the academic standards to fit what Minnesotans want in our standards.”
Ray claims that “President Bush has focused on the child.” I don’t see any evidence of this other than use of ‘child’ in the name. Before NCLB, there used to be talk about individualized instruction and the need for attention to learning style different modes of instruction — much of this was incorporated into the ‘Profile of Learning’. We are now focused on standardization and treating all students the same, which calls into question how this act can be about the needs of the individual child. In NCLB, all the attention is on making schools and teachers conform to a standardization plan.
The late Senator Wellstone was outspoken on the ‘No Child Left Behind Act’, and as a former educator, he was one of the few in Congress who understood this issue. He correctly advocated for substantial investment in early childhood programs to help those catch up who start out several steps behind. ‘Head Start‘ was a program that was part of the Johnson administration that addressed this issue, but NCLB has no resemblance to it, so that can’t be what Ray is referencing. In fact, the heavy emphasis on high stakes testing and exit exams at the end of the process will not help solve any of the problems facing us. Creating a system which financially rewards good test scores sets up a system that is at risk for promoting cheating and dishonesty, and that is the last thing we need if we truly want to improve education. A look at the problems with the testing and reporting in Houston shows this is a valid concern.
There is nothing wrong with testing per se, the problem is in how the tests are used and whether or not they become the only way of informing teachers and schools how they are doing. Tests can help teachers set goals and shape what we as a society believe is important for us to teach, and tests can tell us to a degree how well we are doing with that instruction. For example, I have been favorably impressed with how the Northfield school district has used testing information to improve instruction set goals and focus its resources. I believe the Minnesota Basic Skills tests have been positive overall, however we still need to work on methods to help those who fail to pass find alternatives. Overall the President’s plan oversimplifies the problem by not encouraging multiple measures and a variety of paths to reach the goal of leaving no child behind.
Education should be about improving and creating opportunity for young people by helping them to develop the skills to be successful in life, which includes the tools and character to make good choices. What is wrong with NCLB is its approach. A recent study done by the Harvard Civil Rights Project, Inspiring Vision, Disappointing Results: Four Studies on Implementing the No Child Left Behind Act found that: 
President Bush conceded that he had not read it before signing it and it is highly unlikely that anyone could have read and fully understood all the intricate provisions before Congress hurriedly ratified a bargain between the White House and Republican and Democratic leaders in Congress that produced a bill more than a thousand pages long. The new law tells all the states how often they have to test children and what subjects must be emphasized, forcing the great majority to change the assessment processes they had decided were best and to give absolute priority to gains in scores on reading and math tests from grades 3 to 8. The law specifies how much progress schools must make every year for every subgroup of students, and mandates goals that have never been achieved on any scale in high poverty school districts. It requires that students with limited English proficiency and special education children perform at these same high levels and that all schools employ ‘highly qualified’ teachers. . . It imposes huge new duties on the states without providing state resources to cover many costs. It requires the states to assume a role with the local schools and districts that goes beyond what any state has ever done on a large scale. While there is very broad support for the goals, there is bitter controversy over not only the substance of the requirements but also the feasibility and desirability of the dramatically altered role of federal and state administrators in forcing local change.
Gary Orfield, the Project Co-director, says, explaining that the Act’s sanctions falls most harshly on low performing schools, “It’s as if you were to take the temperature of everybody in a hospital waiting room, and then take away the medicine from those with the highest temperatures and threaten to hit them. That’s supposed to be the cure: They will curve themselves if you punish them . . . We’re dismantling desegregation, sending kids back to highly impoverished schools, and then we slap a big F on them. All of sudden, instead of the problems being blamed on discrimination and inequality, they’re blamed on whoever happens to be in that school — both the staff and kids.”
Blame doesn’t solve anything, and NCLB is not working toward solutions. It is a set up to exacerbate the problems that are already there and which need our attention.
Ray and other supporters of NCLB talk about the money it brings to the states and how it is not an unfunded mandate, however, according to the National Education Association, President Bush has requested $9.4 billion less in funding than the Act requires to cover just the costs of the mandates. In order to cover the costs, the states must make up the difference. That is an under-funded mandate. Who will make up that $9.4 billion difference?
We continue to be told by the Commissioner and advocates of NCLB, how wonderful it is and how much it will improve education, while they dismiss criticism and ignore its consequences. Those of us working in education are not blind to such blatant problems, and we must speak out to protect education.
Cheri Pierson Yecke is not the person to be setting Minnesota’s education policy. Her appointment should be denied.