Context is everything
In doing some prepatory reading for Teach For America, I came across a chapter from the 2002 book Educating Culturally Responsive Teachers: A Content Approach by Ana Maria Villegas and Tamara Lucas. Villegas and Lucas note an underlying truth that I think is often ignored:
Indeed, the cut-and-dry assumption that student learning -- an incredibly complex milieu which includes personality, mood, experiences, cultural exposure, awareness of surroundings and factors associated with home and community life -- can be diluted into a percentile or scale score is perhaps why the reliance on testing grates on me so heavily. We are not dealing with automotons; these are children, individuals, human beings. It is folly to remove them from their necessarily human context and try instead to essentialize them through the lens of a system which is hardly focused in universal fashion. It leads to inequities, it leads to students being pushed out, and, worst of all, it leads to a loss of purpose.
Schools are the great equalizers, but in order for them to fulfill that superbly important role, we must understand that no two students are coming into the system equally.
From childhood, we have been socialized to believe that schools are the great equalizers in American society. We are told that chools "level the playing field," providing opportunity for all, regardless of social background, by serving as the impartial grounds on which individuals freely prove their merit. One function of schools, then, is to sort students according to merit -- which is equated with "talent" and "effort." Those deemed meritorious are promised access to the higher-status positions, while those found lacking in merit are told they must be content with the lower-status positions since that is all they have earned.
Two key assumptions undergird this function of schools: first, that individual merit can be identified and measured on the basis of objective criteria, and, second, that schools are fair in their practices [...] [h]owever, schools ... are far from being the impartial settings they are professed to be.
Indeed, the cut-and-dry assumption that student learning -- an incredibly complex milieu which includes personality, mood, experiences, cultural exposure, awareness of surroundings and factors associated with home and community life -- can be diluted into a percentile or scale score is perhaps why the reliance on testing grates on me so heavily. We are not dealing with automotons; these are children, individuals, human beings. It is folly to remove them from their necessarily human context and try instead to essentialize them through the lens of a system which is hardly focused in universal fashion. It leads to inequities, it leads to students being pushed out, and, worst of all, it leads to a loss of purpose.
Schools are the great equalizers, but in order for them to fulfill that superbly important role, we must understand that no two students are coming into the system equally.
This entry was posted
on Sunday, March 19, 2006 at 11:33 AM.
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