Apartheid America

So it is basically a capitalist system where kids are seen as investments -- and it comes down to who is worth the money and who isn't?

Exactly. What's happened in many of these inner-city schools is that kids are no longer perceived as children but rather as economic units -- like pint-size deficits or assets for the American economy. No one asks whether they are good or they are happy. The only question is will they be useful to our corporations in a global marketplace. It is not like this in the suburbs. There, children are still valued because they are children and childhood is still regarded not merely as a prelude to utilitarian adulthood but as a perishable piece of life itself. In the inner-city schools, even though most of the teachers I know would like to do the same, there is tremendous pressure on the principals to view these children as products, with "value-added" skills that they pump into them. And if you view children as products, it makes sense to have a lot of product testing.

I used to teach in the suburbs, and I heard many complaints about the testing system. It's not really fair to ignore the effects there either, is it?

Principals and teachers in suburban schools don't like the testing regimen -- they find it to be a tremendous annoyance and distraction. But it doesn't create a sense of siege, because they're likely going to do well anyway. And besides, if the federal government penalizes them by withholding funds, they've got plenty. It's the inner-city schools where the principal is subjected to the threat of public humiliation -- because the lowest-scoring schools are named in the newspaper -- and the more specific threat of being penalized by loss of federal funds, that makes principals and teachers feel compelled to turn the school into an efficiency factory. And because a lot of these schools are so poor, they are deluded into creating partnerships with businesses. Corporations love to claim they have become school partners with inner-city schools -- so the very same banks that have redlined these kids into segregated lives then pose as allies to the children.

The direct result of this is that even the best principals and teachers -- and I write this book with tremendous empathy for them -- in poor inner-city schools, as compared to the suburbs, feel totally compelled to teach to the tests. They feel compelled to exclude from the curriculum anything that will not be tested, which means the children must be trained to give predictable answers and the teacher cannot indulge an unexpected answer. If one little boy, in the middle of a lesson on consonant blends, insists on telling the teacher about a visit to the zoo with his uncle, the teacher has to cut him off. She can't let him get to the end of his story. The child who wants to ask the teacher about something he finds funny or something that brings him close to tears, she has to cut him off. In many of these schools teachers have to hold timers in their hands -- especially schools using the Success for All classes -- every minute has to be directed toward something that will be on state exams.

In the suburbs, a teacher can listen as a child piles on "ands" and "buts." In good schools in the suburbs where the teachers aren't running scared and may only have 16 kids in a class, teachers can listen. And at the end of all those "ands" and "buts" there may be a hidden treasure that can unlock a child's motivation. In the test-driven school, the teacher will never find that key to motivation. Instead the school is based upon externally created motivations and in the worst of these SFA schools, the motivation is almost exclusively anxiety and fear. It is a stimulus-response curriculum based upon the rat control experiments of B.F. Skinner and the teacher is told they cannot deviate.

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