Fwd: [care] article on shame, welfare reform and "high stakes" student testing

[Monty Neill <Mneillft@AOL.COM>]

Vicki Steinitz wrote this for Massachusetts, but it is highly applicable to
other states as well, so I am circulating it more widely. Monty Neill

--- Begin Message ---

• To: care@egroups.com
• Subject: [care] article on shame, welfare reform and "high stakes" student testing
• From: "Vicky Steinitz" <vicky.steinitz@umb.edu>
• Date: Wed, 08 Sep 1999 20:41:01 -0700
• Delivered-to: listsaver-egroups-care@egroups.com
• Mailing-list: contact care-owner@egroups.com
• Reply-to: care@egroups.com

I have a piece in the September issue of Sojourner which I hope will be
of some use in the fight against the MCAS tests. I'm attaching it
below.

Vicky Steinitz

?This piece first appeared in Sojourner: The Women's Forum, Vol. 25,
No.1, September 1999.


Shame, Welfare Reform, and ?High Stakes? Student Testing

I believed that dunce caps and the stockade were things of the past.
But public humiliation is
making a dramatic return. Touted as the best incentive on the path to
?success,? public policy
that seeks to shame women on welfare and embarrass struggling students
and teachers is really
about ensuring failure.

By Vicky Steinitz

On June 10, 1999, the Boston Globe published a front-page story on high
stakes tests in Texas, entitled "Embarrassed into success." It told the
tale of a poorly performing, low-income Ft. Worth elementary school
which
turned into one of the highest scoring schools in Texas after its name
was
flashed on the local news with a red ?F? next to it. I found the story's

thesis, that shame is an effective way of bringing about school
improvement, a shocker. A month later, the Globe reported an even more
unthinkable occurrence, the introduction of highly visible chain gangs
in
Bristol County, Massachusetts. While many public officials and citizens
responded with outrage at the sight of chain gangs in the state, the
Bristol County sheriff was unapologetic and asserted that public
humiliation was an appropriate way to treat prisoners.
In a way, perhaps, neither story should have come as a surprise to me.
After all, as an academic ally of the welfare rights movement, I have
long
understood that shame and blame are the powerful tools used by so-called

welfare reformers. And, for the past few years, I've been watching the
introduction of the MCAS (Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System)

tests into public schools with growing alarm, recognizing the
similarities
between the social control functions of these tests and the new welfare
regulations. Unfortunately, these similarities are not always easy to
see,
because the "official story" so effectively masks what's really at stake
in
both the welfare and education arenas.
But I was surprised at the Globe stories: they jolted me into
recognizing
that the conservative right has succeeded in broader terms than I had
imagined, transforming across the board what we are willing to consider
as
acceptable methods of changing behavior. While harsher punishments have
become commonplace as instruments of public policy in the î90s,
celebration
of the use of public humiliation as a motivational tool is a dramatic
acceleration of the move backwards.
I suppose I did believe that stocks and dunce caps were a thing of the
past, that as a society we had learned that humiliation does not act as
a
positive incentive, but rather breeds rage and despair. Degradation
ceremonies strip targets of their individuality, destroying self-regard,

and initiating a shame-rage spiral which either explodes in violence or
is
turned on the self by those too powerless to express their fury
directly.
Yet, flashing red ?F??s on television and parading shackled prisoners
through the streets are now being touted as innovative reforms.
It's critical to understand how we got here. I hope to contribute to
this
end by taking a close look at the "official stories" about welfare
reform
and "high-stakes" testing, that is, at how misleading definitions of the

problems have laid the groundwork for punitive solutions. While we keep
hearing about the great ?success? of new welfare policies and new
educational testing, these policies may really be about making sure that

some people fail and stay where they belongïat the bottom of the heap
where
they can be forced to do the lousy jobs that no one else wants to do.
The tradition of blaming individuals for their failures rather than
recognizing how the system sets them up to fail has a long history in
the
United States (see William Ryan's Blaming the Victim for a classic
expose
of these mechanisms at work). While victim blaming is nothing new, it
invariably escalates during times of conservative ascendancy, and that's

what we're seeing now. The myth of individual responsibility is being
used
to justify the grossest inequities in U.S. history. After all, so the
myth
tells us, welfare moms, school drop-outs, and the unemployed must have
only
themselves to blame if they can't find a way to make it in this age of
spectacular economic growth.
The "crises" in welfare and education have been manufactured to convince
us
that drastic action is needed, action that many people once might have
found too harsh. For example, the conservative attack on the successes
of
the 1960s welfare rights movement began in the î70s with a relentless
stream of stories about lazy, fraudulent, immoral, welfare queens,
having
baby after baby in order to stay on the dole. Invariably, Black women
were
featured in the "visuals" accompanying the text, thereby creating the
image
that all welfare recipients were women of color. These racist tales set
the
stage for the recent successful campaign to end welfare as an
entitlement.
In a similar way, the right began in these same years to feed the media
a
steady flow of stories about our failing educational system,
highlighting
the evils of social promotion, falling test scores, violence in the
schools, students who won't learn, and teachers who can't teach. These
accounts laid the ground for today's demands for accountability as well
as
the preemptive strikes against affirmative action, bi-lingual education,

special education, and a host of other programs that were designed to
increase educational access and equity.
Just as welfare recipients were (and are) blamed for their poverty and
shamed off the rolls, teachers were (and are) blamed for their students'

test scores and shamed by highly publicized charges of incompetence.
Undeserving welfare moms, unmotivated students, incompetent teachers:
clearly, if these are the real problems, something is seriously amiss,
and
stringent remedies are called for.
But, in reality, welfare recipients do not spend their lives raking in
benefits, cheating the government or having more children in order to
increase their benefits. Indeed, the majority of recipients have
received
assistance for less than two years, have the same number of children as
other women, and have worked both before and after receiving benefits.
Troubles in the schools have also been vastly exaggerated. The great
majority of parents are satisfied with their children's schools. Test
scores have not plummeted. Massachusetts school children are
particularly
successful, scoring well above national norms on standardized tests. For

instance, Massachusetts ranked among the top three states on the 1998
Grade
4 National Assessment of Educational Progress reading tests. The
minuscule
drop in SAT scores actually can be seen as a sign of progress, as it
reflects the fact that a much broader range of students now aspire to
college and take the test than did in the past. Moreover, low income
students, particularly students of color, had been going on to higher
education at record rates, at least until recent moves to end
affirmative
action programs and raise the standards for college admission.
But, the "official story" has held sway. Despite extensive evidence that

these characterizations aren't true, they have taken hold among
politicians
and the public, providing the rationale for harsh, punitive policies. In

the 1990s, conservatives moved into decision-making positions in
Massachusetts and elsewhere and the call for tougher policies grew
louder.
With passage of national welfare reform in 1996, welfare recipients
across
the nation now confront heavy work requirements, severe restrictions on
opportunities for education and training, and a lifetime maximum of five

years of benefits. In Massachusetts, recipients also face a family cap
denying benefits to children born to mothers on welfare and the coup de
grace, a "drop-dead" two-year time limit. With denials of requests for
extensions running at 90 percent, this means you're off after two years,

virtually no matter what.
For school children and their teachers, the Massachusetts 1993 Education

Reform Act brought state-wide curriculum frameworks and high stakes
testing. While the original plan had called for parent and teacher
participation and consideration of a variety of educational outcomes,
this
May, the State Board of Education decreed that the MCAS tests (which
require fifteen hours of testing for all fourth, eighth, and tenth
graders)
will be the sole measure of student progress. Publication of test scores

for schools and communities insures that those who do well will be
lauded
(and coincidentally find their property values rising), while those who
do
poorly will be the objects of statewide public scorn.
My argument is that the current versions of education and welfare reform

are dangerous, not only because they are grounded in false,
victim-blaming
analyses of the "problem," but also because they are based on flawed,
simplistic conceptions about how to change behavior:
Çset arbitrary standards
Çmake them uniform
Çdemand that everyone meet them, no matter what
Çpublicize the results
Çpenalize those who fail.

Sound familiar? This formula resonates with the traditional "pull
yourself
up by your bootstraps" ethic where success in the face of heavy odds is
applauded and cited as proof, in the words of Jimmy Cliff, that "you can

make it if you really want, but you must try, try and try, try and try."

Failure in turn is seen as the result of personal deficiencies and must
be
treated harshly. Being thrown off the rolls, not getting a high school
degreeïthese are judged legitimate punishments that will create the
conditions where people must swim on their own (or sink, which is of
course
unfortunate but perhaps necessary). Yet we know this doesn?t work.
It is crucial to understand what's really going on here. First of all,
the
one-size fits all solution is bogus. Work is not the answer for everyone
on
welfare and is certainly not in the best interests of every family.
Using
one standardized test score as the measure of success (particularly one
which has not been validated in any way), is profoundly disrespectful of

students' individuality, not to mention being an outrageous violation of

teacher autonomy and professional best practice. The misogyny here is
only
thinly veiled. Relentless degradation of "undeserving" welfare moms and
"incompetent" teachers (the great majority of whom, needless to say, are

women), set the stage for the imposition of standards and sanctions.
With
belief undermined in these women's ability to determine how best to
educate
and care for their charges, authorities could step in, ignore the full
and
varied range of children's needs and interests, set uniform standards,
and
police the results.
Second, the bar has been arbitrarily set too high. Two years (and
sometimes
five years) may not be enough time for those welfare recipients most in
needïpeople who can't read and write, who have learning disabilities who

don't speak English, who have never been employedïto prepare themselves
for
jobs, not to mention jobs which will pay enough to support their
families.
Similarly, MCAS passing scores have been intentionally set very high,
allegedly so as to insure that schools reach beyond the commonplace.
When
parents and other voters hear about the high failure rates, they assume
something must be dreadfully wrong with the schools, but the failure
rate
is completely arbitrary, determined by policy makers who set whatever
passing grade they wish.
Third, it is reprehensible to punish the most vulnerable for their
inability to meet standards that we know to be so clearly out of their
reach. We have scapegoated women on welfare so mercilessly they have
lost
hope and are too ashamed to ask for help or even identify themselves. We

know almost nothing about the fate of the 30 percent of welfare
recipients
in Massachusetts who have hit the time limit, are not working, and not
responding to the welfare department?s follow-up questionnaires. They
and
their children have "disappeared."
Similarly, all students are mandated to take the MCAS tests, even those
with special needs or minimal English competence who can't possibly pass

them. My daughter, a third/fourth grade Cambridge public school teacher,

told me how painful it was for her to sit by as a child in her class
with
serious learning difficulties struggled with a test way beyond her
ability,
leaving page after page blank. This little girl, who had had so many
proud
moments in the previous two years as she came to see herself as someone
who
could learn, was so ashamed, she stayed home from school for four days
after the testing ended. How could taking this test possibly be viewed
as a
good experience for children with histories of school failure? And, what

will be its impacts on efforts to create cooperative classroom climates
where individual differences are respected? Two years from now, tenth
graders who fail the MCAS test will be denied high school diplomas. What

will happen to these teens? How will they be treated by their teachers
and
their peers? Will schools seek to raise their average scores by
encouraging, however subtly, the low scorers to drop out, creating
another
class of disappeared?
Fourth, what's claimed as success really isn't. For the proponents of
welfare reform, success is defined as leaving the rolls and finding a
job.
The slogan "Any job is a good job" holds sway regardless of whether the
job
pays enough for a family to survive. But if a woman whose benefits have
been terminated cannot find a job that pays enough, and returns to a
batterer in order to feed her children, does this count as success? For
the
education reformers, success is a passing score on a test which
primarily
measures students' ability to remember vast amounts of unrelated
information. But, what do high test scores have to do with the larger
purposes of schoolingïto educate creative problem-solvers who can find
meaningful work and become caring, responsible citizens? And, why are we

forcing ethical teachers to administer tests that violate their own
professional judgment as to what is in their students' best interests?
Why is the standard set so high and why the punitive consequences? I
contend that the powers that be are actually more interested in failure
than success. Students who fail the tenth grade test and do not receive
high school diplomas can not go on to higher education. Failure rates
are
highest among low-income students attending urban schools. Whose
interests
does this serve? Perhaps, the same legislators and employers who have
decreed that welfare recipients can no longer attend four-year colleges
and
who have made it extremely difficult for them to obtain any meaningful
education and training. The MCAS tests and welfare reform are really
both
about "regulating the poor,? making sure that a pool of low wage
laborers
will continue to be available who must accept the dictum that any job is
a
good job because they have no other choice. Indeed, our current economic

boom rests on the backs of these workers.
We must allïwelfare rights advocates, educators, feminists, parents,
concerned citizensïsay, loud and clear, that we recognize what's really
going on here and will not accept these barbaric policies. We know what
makes schools work: respect for teachers' professional judgment,
innovative
curricula, cooperative classrooms, individualized support, affirmation,
and
encouragement. We also know what low-income women and their children
need
to make their way out of poverty: public assistance during emergencies,
access to educational opportunities, jobs that pay a living wage,
individualized support, affirmation, and encouragement. It is imperative

that we put an end to shaming and that we demand programs that support
all
women and their children in their efforts to move towards truly
fulfilling
lives.

Vicky Steinitz created the Massachusetts Welfare and Human Rights
Monitoring Project. She teaches at the College of Public and Community
Service, University of Massachusetts/Boston.




------------------------------------------------------------------------

eGroups.com home: http://www.egroups.com/group/care
http://www.egroups.com - Simplifying group communications






--- End Message ---