Testing won’t fix aging schools

By Sabrina Joy Stevens

Tribune News Service

Imagine working in a place where rats skitter across the floor. Where mold climbs the walls like ivy, and floors buckle, soaked and rotted from frequent exposure to rain and snow.

If you’re like most adults, such things are probably difficult to imagine. Yet schools in poor areas often must deal with problems like these.

Proponents of high-stakes testing have increasingly leaned on one particular argument to shut down opposition. They say testing is needed to achieve equality between whiter, wealthier students and nonwhite, poorer ones.

But we don’t need standardized tests to know that kids in school shouldn’t be sitting next to rats.

In privileged communities, students attend beautiful schools with diverse curricular offerings, up-to-date materials and technology, nurses, counselors, librarians and support staff to bolster the work of classroom teachers. In low-income communities and many communities of color, few of these amenities exist. This has long been the case.

That’s why, well before high-stakes testing became an issue, parents and students in segregated, neglected schools began sounding the alarm over these deplorable conditions. For decades, they’ve organized, walked out, sat in and sued over untenable teaching and learning conditions.

Yet pro-privatization advocates ignore these savage inequalities and focus on test scores. We need a full conversation on how glaring inequalities in school conditions violate students’ rights, regardless of whether those conditions are reflected in their test scores. We need to re-engage our leaders in a serious conversation about fixing this problem.

Some leaders are taking up the cause. I recently heard from two leaders of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Reps. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., and Mark Pocan, D-Wis., who have addressed systemic inequity in a caucus document called the People’s Budget.

Past efforts to address these problems, Ellison noted, have been stymied by Republicans.

Pocan added that the People’s Budget calls for investing in universally available, quality education from preschool through college, from which students could graduate without debt.

These and other proposals, they said, could be paid for by levying a financial transactions tax, cracking down on corporate leaders gaming the system and hiding money overseas, and adding new tax brackets for the very wealthy to ensure they pay their fair share.

As elected officials vie for our votes this year, we should keep such proposals in mind. While the People’s Budget probably won’t be passed intact, progressive legislators plan to introduce individual parts of it throughout the session. Let’s push them to prioritize education and infrastructure spending.

Sabrina Joy Stevens is a founding member of EduColor, a collective that works to elevate the voices of people of color in the education policy dialogue. She wrote this for Progressive Media Project, a source of liberal commentary on domestic and international issues; it is affiliated with The Progressive magazine. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.