Transcript
Speaker: Hello.
Speaker: Hello.
Speaker: Let's get right into it today.
Speaker: We're ready.
Speaker: We're fired up.
Speaker: We're fired up.
Speaker: I have my diet coke.
Speaker: I'm getting my diet coke buzz.
Speaker: Oh my gosh, you can't support the Coca-Cola company.
Speaker: I have a diet cola of non-preferential.
Speaker: Hosmer Mountain.
Speaker: I have a local diet soda that I'm drinking.
Speaker: Anyway, so today we're going to go right into an anecdote, Emily, that I remember you told me last year.
Speaker: I was in the last year.
Speaker: And that's the stress to you.
Speaker: And so let's start there.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Well, it's this time of year.
Speaker: This is March or I guess April now.
Speaker: But, you know, around this time.
Speaker: The birds start tweeting, the daffodils come up, and kids start taking standardized tests.
Speaker: And so I'm always kind of reminded of this season.
Speaker: I also teach in-service teachers.
Speaker: So I work at a local college teaching teachers that are in schools.
Speaker: And right now they're all bogged down with the season of standardized testing, right?
Speaker: And it just...
Speaker: I flashback to this experience I had a couple years ago, whenever this time kind of comes up of teaching through that real, it wasn't the first time, it wasn't the first March in 2020, but that 2020 to 2021 school year had so many just amazing
Speaker: I'm trying to think of a way not to say fucked up, but I'm just going to say fucked up things happening that were just so bananas.
Speaker: And this experience with our standardized testing in that year really, I think, tells so much.
Speaker: And so I really wanted to share that today.
Speaker: So I'm going to take us back at the time machine to that 20 to 21 school year.
Speaker: It was the first kind of...
Speaker: I know a lot of us are preferring to block that out in our memory.
Speaker: It was the fall.
Speaker: So it was the fall after kind of the first lockdowns, right?
Speaker: And so people were, a lot of districts were taking a different approach.
Speaker: Some schools remained locked down, like they didn't have kids in school.
Speaker: They were remote all year.
Speaker: Some were doing like a hybrid, having smaller groups to keep social distancing in school.
Speaker: And I was teaching in a school district.
Speaker: Rhode Island emerged thanks to our governor at the time, who was very big on keeping Rhode Island schools open.
Speaker: And so we had a straight up...
Speaker: The whole year we had kids in our building, which is not the case of a lot of schools.
Speaker: We had a hybrid situation where we had kids in like A to B days to keep the capacity at half.
Speaker: And you taught middle school, right?
Speaker: Sorry, yes, I taught middle school.
Speaker: So when you're a middle school teacher, if you're not familiar with that format in the US, you teach one subject or two and you have different sections.
Speaker: So it's not like you have one group of kids all day.
Speaker: So I had six sections of language arts and ESL.
Speaker: And so the way it broke down was the district did give an option.
Speaker: You could opt to have your kid come in for this hybrid model where they were home half the time and in school half the time, or they could do a fully remote option if they weren't feeling comfortable sending their kids to school.
Speaker: And so I happened to get assigned mostly sections that were remote.
Speaker: And so it was a very trippy experience.
Speaker: All the school district was gearing up.
Speaker: There were so many protocols put in place for the hybrid kids because they were in the building.
Speaker: But the remote kids were kind of forgotten about.
Speaker: It's the majority, I would say, but not like vast majority, like two-thirds probably were in school and two-thirds were doing fully remote.
Speaker: And I happened to have most of my day schedule except for one period a day was remote students.
Speaker: So I would say without much support from my district, I was going forth and I was also new to that district.
Speaker: So it was my first year teaching in that district.
Speaker: So it's like I was new, didn't know the systems, didn't know the people, and also was teaching in this format that wasn't really supported by my district because they were so hung up on how to deal with kids in school.
Speaker: which made sense because it was like a dangerous time too, like scary, kind of like uncharted territory, right?
Speaker: Of figuring out how to educate kids in school without vaccines, right?
Speaker: And still with COVID raging, right?
Speaker: And in a community that was also very, had been very vulnerable and affected by COVID, right?
Speaker: Many of my students had people that died.
Speaker: I was teaching in
Speaker: a majority Latinx district, a majority kind of low-income district as well.
Speaker: And so it was just, there was so much vulnerability already there.
Speaker: And I happened to just teach all remote students, which was nice because I didn't worry for my physical safety as much as some of my colleagues did every day.
Speaker: But I also didn't have any of the
Speaker: I just didn't know what I was doing.
Speaker: And it was really hard to teach, obviously, remote.
Speaker: I think we all know that remote schooling is not preferable to in-person for a lot of reasons.
Speaker: But I worked really hard to build community.
Speaker: I tried to do what I could.
Speaker: I reached out to families.
Speaker: And I spent my whole year really figuring things out on my own because there, again, was no institutional support, really, for remote learning.
Speaker: And so I...
Speaker: it didn't even cross my mind to think of preparing for standardized testing because I would think of any year out of all of the years of schooling where we've had standardized testing, the year of a global pandemic would be the year to not, you know, worry about the tests, but, Oh no.
Speaker: Oh no, no, no.
Speaker: The, that was not the case.
Speaker: And in fact, most districts went forth with, um,
Speaker: the steadfast commitment to keeping things normal and having data.
Speaker: I don't know of any districts that opted out of standardized testing.
Speaker: I mostly heard people that continue to do it.
Speaker: And our district was one of those that really got into it.
Speaker: There's a little context for this.
Speaker: Our district was in state takeover because there'd been a really damaging report about the quality of schools in our district.
Speaker: And so
Speaker: The state took it over to because it was in such a state of emergency.
Speaker: The quality of education was so poor.
Speaker: They said that the only solution is to have the state have control over this district.
Speaker: So there was a lot of eyes on Providence in the district I was teaching.
Speaker: There was a lot of focus.
Speaker: And so there was even more pressure.
Speaker: It was like the second year of the takeover, maybe.
Speaker: I can't remember if it was the first or the second year, but it was like very early in the takeover.
Speaker: And so there needed to be data, right?
Speaker: Even though nobody thought about or seemed to, maybe people thought about it, but it wasn't talked about.
Speaker: Like, is this data going to be good?
Speaker: Are we going to get anything relevant out of this?
Speaker: Because it's such a freakish year.
Speaker: It's like already standardized tests are
Speaker: not giving us really awesome data because you're testing kids on one day, you know, out of their whole lives on their knowledge they have.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: But it's also added in that like, it's a disrupted school year.
Speaker: Kids are, the way we administer the test is going to have to be really different, right.
Speaker: Because of the COVID restrictions, kids have been, even if they've been coming to school, they've been coming half the days and like learning quote unquote at home the other days.
Speaker: So there was just so many reasons.
Speaker: It didn't cross my mind leading up until March that we would try and do standardized testing.
Speaker: And lo and behold, come January, they started doing access testing, which is the testing that ESL students get.
Speaker: If you speak another language, you have to get this standardized test and access test to measure your English language proficiency.
Speaker: So that started.
Speaker: And then we moved into the state test for everyone in language arts and math.
Speaker: And all of a sudden, we shifted from how do we make schools safe during COVID?
Speaker: How do we teach in a hybrid setting?
Speaker: In January, a switch flipped and we became hyper-focused on testing.
Speaker: And that extended not just to the kids in school, it extended to the kids at home who had been learning remotely, had not stepped foot inside of a school building,
Speaker: since March of 2020.
Speaker: Can you tell us a little bit about how long were kids sitting the test?
Speaker: How did that look and feel like to give us a sense of environment?
Speaker: And I'm going to give some lead up to it because it wasn't just about the day of the test.
Speaker: It was truly starting January 1st.
Speaker: It's like, we're going to come in and all of our energy as teachers, administrators, all of the energy was put into how do we get kids to come in to take this test?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And already our district struggled with things like absenteeism, like having kids come consistently to school.
Speaker: Like that wasn't necessarily new, like doing a family outreach to get kids to come to school.
Speaker: That had been a problem or the district had identified that as a problem, you know, before COVID even started really.
Speaker: So there was already this hyper focus on getting kids in to come in to school, but it just shifted to getting kids to come in for, you know,
Speaker: So it started with access testing for ESL students.
Speaker: And that was, I can't remember how many hours it was, but it was basically a half school day for each part of the test.
Speaker: And there were two kind of big chunks they broke it into.
Speaker: So we had to get our kids to come in to spend several hours to take a test.
Speaker: And we put all of our energy...
Speaker: into doing so.
Speaker: And I should, I say that all of our energy, I didn't.
Speaker: I decided to take the, the, what do you call it?
Speaker: Like silent quitting.
Speaker: I was just like silent.
Speaker: I got notes from my administrators that were like, make sure all remote teachers, people who work with remote classes, we need to do
Speaker: outreach to families and make sure that they bring the kids in for these tests that they need to be in.
Speaker: If you have ESL students, they need to come in on these days.
Speaker: And we literally, what they ended up doing was shutting the school down.
Speaker: So kids that had been coming in, stayed home.
Speaker: They were like, we're going to make families who have been remote all year feel as safe as possible.
Speaker: So we're going to stop school for a day and have the kids who are remote come in and do these tests they need to do.
Speaker: And that's what they did.
Speaker: And that was their solution.
Speaker: They put in all of their creative efforts to figure out
Speaker: Everything they could do to bring kids in from remote school to take these motherfucking tests.
Speaker: And that was what literally January, February, March into April, that was the energy of the – that was the thrust.
Speaker: That was the project that we were focusing on was getting kids in to get tested.
Speaker: Didn't matter.
Speaker: Like when it came time for projects or like, you know, actually measuring what they learned in seventh grade, because I was a seventh grade teacher, there was no effort.
Speaker: I would say like very little concerted effort to make sure remote students got that attention.
Speaker: It was literally, they got focused on only when it came time to test them.
Speaker: If you're not familiar with the way standardized tests work, I know we've broken it down into other in other sessions.
Speaker: But when a kid takes a standardized test, like a math test, let's say, like you have to take math tests in our district.
Speaker: You had to take them every year in middle school, sixth, seventh and eighth grade.
Speaker: You had to take a standardized math and a standardized ELA test in March.
Speaker: Those tests don't affect a student's grade in school.
Speaker: In fact, you don't even get the results on how they did on those tests until the summer.
Speaker: And so once they've graduated from their grade.
Speaker: So it doesn't affect their... Kids are always like, that's always their question.
Speaker: Like, what's this going to do to my grade?
Speaker: It does nothing to your grade.
Speaker: You won't even get the feedback in a timely enough manner to affect your learning trajectory.
Speaker: The reason we have standardized tests is to measure how a school district is teaching their children.
Speaker: It's to see, are all kids in the state on the same test getting the same score?
Speaker: And if not, what are the discrepancies?
Speaker: And it's supposed to be used as a tool to measure equity, right?
Speaker: Are kids across districts getting the same access?
Speaker: Are they performing the same?
Speaker: That's like the generous framework for a standardized test.
Speaker: That's how it's theoretically supposed to be used.
Speaker: It's not supposed to be used to identify deficits.
Speaker: It's supposed to be in students.
Speaker: It's supposed to be used to identify deficits in a district, right?
Speaker: But of course, that isn't how it works.
Speaker: It's like it gets mapped onto the students.
Speaker: And students are facing the brunt of this, the negative feelings, right?
Speaker: Of feeling like they're failing, right?
Speaker: When we tell students, you know, we did so poorly on our tests last year, we need to get our scores up, you know,
Speaker: Even if we don't mention it, it's like those scores get published.
Speaker: They see them.
Speaker: They know their districts are, quote unquote, failing in relation to other districts around them.
Speaker: And it's because of how they do on their tests.
Speaker: And we don't unpack like, well, why does this wealthy white suburb, majority white suburb, do better on these tests than kids in our district?
Speaker: That's majority black and brown.
Speaker: Or opt out.
Speaker: A lot of them opted out during the pandemic.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: And it's like, why?
Speaker: And nobody... What disturbed me so much about that push in the 20 to 21 school year of getting my remote kids in, and I'm sorry, I'm just so pissed off still about it.
Speaker: It pisses me off.
Speaker: And I wish I had been braver and had done more to fucking orchestrate a walkout because it was...
Speaker: I was like trying to organize with teachers and I was sharing, you know, in Seattle, there was like a big uprising of teachers against like the standardized testing regime.
Speaker: And I was like, you can tell kids like they do not have to take this test.
Speaker: Like tell your students they don't have to take this.
Speaker: But we got so much pushback from administrators.
Speaker: We were made to think that like we, our jobs would be in jeopardy if we didn't, if we shared that information.
Speaker: Like I did have colleagues get called in and like called out for like
Speaker: saying that they didn't need to take this test, right?
Speaker: It's like, I can't think of specific incidences, but I know it happened.
Speaker: Like the energy in the school, the message in the school was that this was mandatory.
Speaker: It wasn't something you could opt out of.
Speaker: And we as teachers couldn't tell them.
Speaker: And they made it an equity issue.
Speaker: They said, like, if you don't, sorry, I keep tapping my mic.
Speaker: I'm so articulating so wildly.
Speaker: And they made it feel like if you don't tell kids to come in, it affects our
Speaker: our district right if we don't get enough kids to show up to take this test we won't get the funding we need that was how it was framed it had to happen and we had to have the data and they were like oh it was always like well even if the data even if they do poorly it shows us like learning loss happened over covid and i'm like i don't think we need a fucking test to tell us that it's like if i bake a cake and i forget the flour i'm gonna have a shitty cake
Speaker: I don't need to eat it to know, oh, fuck, I forgot the flour instead of sugar.
Speaker: It's like the recipe isn't there.
Speaker: Can I interrupt you a moment?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Because I think it's very, what strikes me a lot is how upset you are about it still.
Speaker: And it's been two years maybe.
Speaker: And so that was, that just says a lot about how intense it was.
Speaker: And so.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: What about it?
Speaker: What about it you think under that?
Speaker: What about it you think distressed you about?
Speaker: There's two things.
Speaker: It's like, I knew this baby.
Speaker: It was, it was effectually their first day of school.
Speaker: Like the first day they're coming into school and they're coming into school to take a test that is,
Speaker: under the best of circumstances, very anxiety producing, really it's nerve wracking, right?
Speaker: And they're coming in, imagine yourself in middle school, right?
Speaker: Like you and I went to middle school.
Speaker: I can imagine you in middle school.
Speaker: I can imagine me in middle school.
Speaker: It's like what matters to you in middle school?
Speaker: It's in any human at any stage of life is their connection to other humans.
Speaker: They're coming in for the first time seeing other humans and having to sit silently in a room, not talk to each other,
Speaker: And just like sit in their little squares for public health reasons and for fidelity to this test reasons.
Speaker: They just like go in.
Speaker: They had like 10 or 15 minutes maybe to chat and actually like
Speaker: make eye contact with people they'd only seen, like heard because none of them had their cameras on, heard over video calls for six months.
Speaker: You know, it's like they'd come in and sit and be silent and take this high stakes test.
Speaker: And that was the only interface I had with them face to face all year was this time where they were sitting silently.
Speaker: I had to fucking
Speaker: monitor them.
Speaker: I felt like a fucking warden, you know, in like a prison.
Speaker: And it was just like, I had to, I didn't, I tried not to, I tried not to do that.
Speaker: But like your job when you're administering a standardized test is to keep conditions that,
Speaker: controlled.
Speaker: And that means no talking.
Speaker: They cannot have any electronics.
Speaker: They can't have paper material that isn't from the test administrator.
Speaker: They have to have like sanctioned pencils.
Speaker: Like everything has to be controlled.
Speaker: And it's from a place of wanting to have good data, right?
Speaker: It's from a place of wanting to have good information about how kids are doing in school so that we can have this
Speaker: Vision of equity, right?
Speaker: But we know if you've ever fucking administered a standardized test, especially, and it was just heightened because all of the kids were coming in with so much feeling, fear, you know, anxiety, excitement.
Speaker: They were so excited to see each other.
Speaker: It was so cute.
Speaker: I bought a bunch of food.
Speaker: I don't tell my nurse.
Speaker: I wasn't supposed to bring in snacks, but I brought in like, you know,
Speaker: all the chips they liked, like the gushers.
Speaker: I went nuts at Target and just brought in like tons of snacks to make it at least kind of fun.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And I bought a bunch of crafts that they could do after.
Speaker: And there was some moments of joy that we had.
Speaker: Like they had like so much, there was so much gossip.
Speaker: And at the end I had to be like, can we not gossip this way?
Speaker: I was like, can we not have like the second time you see each other?
Speaker: Because by the second time we had, I saw them twice, once for math, once for ELA, I think is how it worked.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And the second time they were like, they came in, they had established like their relationships in the time after the test.
Speaker: Cause there was some time that we had while we waited for everyone to finish.
Speaker: We did have some time to have social interaction, but they moved right to gossip.
Speaker: And I was like, we're not like talk shit about each other.
Speaker: Like I was like, I was like, you guys are really like, let's not do this anyway.
Speaker: But, um,
Speaker: that was built in around like that, that, that happened because like I, I tried, you make the best out of, you know, in, in these systems, you try to find these moments of joy and you can, but it, it was just like so disturbing to me that we had put all of our efforts in to, to,
Speaker: It's just such a, like, the worst part of school.
Speaker: It's, like, literally what makes school so shitty is, like, this approach to learning, to thinking that you could measure.
Speaker: It just, like, made no sense to me.
Speaker: And none of the teachers wanted to give it.
Speaker: We all – it was this, like, this whole thing of, like, none of us wanted to do this.
Speaker: We all hate standardized tests.
Speaker: But we're doing it because –
Speaker: it felt like we needed to get through to fucking like keep our jobs to make it through.
Speaker: And then the administrators felt like we were in state takeover.
Speaker: They're going to shut our district down and turn us into a charter network.
Speaker: If we don't do well on these tests or at least have data to, um,
Speaker: We don't follow the rules.
Speaker: We had to follow the rules of giving everyone a step.
Speaker: It sounds like from listening to you and from describing how everyone is responding to a higher power.
Speaker: I know my administration was under it.
Speaker: They felt pressured and make sure we didn't shut down as a school.
Speaker: We have to do this.
Speaker: Something else that strikes me is that you mentioned how you find your moments of joy.
Speaker: That brings me into...
Speaker: you know, why we're sharing this anecdote, it brings up this question of harm reduction versus more upstream at the root type of work.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And maybe we talk a bit about what we mean by harm reduction.
Speaker: So it's kind of like this idea of things we do to get to the next week, the next year, just to survive.
Speaker: And I guess the question for me in all of this is how do we hold that tension between, because we need to do that.
Speaker: We can't not do that.
Speaker: And I wonder if there's a certain level of harm reduction just gets in the way of upstream foundational work.
Speaker: Another example of harm reduction that people might be more familiar with is representation in colleges, right?
Speaker: And so you get people of color, Black people,
Speaker: into higher education but there's a lot of data showing that um many struggle to finish right so the harm reduction part is the increase in representation and then the the upstream work of allowing them to thrive is not really happening or not having to the extent it needs to right and also like we don't think about what it's like
Speaker: we're not making the pie big enough.
Speaker: We don't have enough universities to send everyone to school at affordable prices.
Speaker: You know, we don't have enough public universities.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: You know, so it's like, we might have, we might be striving for more representation in the limited like schools we have, but we don't, we haven't thought of like how to make the pie bigger or like how to reallocate resources to give everyone access to something instead of just like a diverse, like slice of you.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And it's, um,
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I think that like, I'm also like reminded, I heard Angela Davis speak a couple of weeks ago and it was really powerful.
Speaker: And she talked about her journey of activism and how she's like very hopeful for the future, even in this moment of what feels like a lot of like kind of blows to progressive causes, like the overturn of Roe v. Wade, what seems like imminent overthrow of affirmative action.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And she's like,
Speaker: we knew those things were going to be challenged.
Speaker: And we also knew that like, this wasn't like, we did attain what we were fighting for in certain ways, but we didn't realize we were not attending to other things that we needed to be attending to.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: She's like, I,
Speaker: She marked some things as successes that had happened.
Speaker: She's like, things have gotten better since I was a child, but there are other things that have not.
Speaker: And some things have gotten worse.
Speaker: And we need to think about, we achieved what we were fighting for, for certain goals, but we didn't realize there were other goals we should have had at the same time.
Speaker: You brought up Angela Davis.
Speaker: It just reminds me of this quote.
Speaker: I might be paraphrasing a bit, but she says something that radical simply means grasping at the root.
Speaker: And that just reminds me of what she's saying.
Speaker: I wonder how much she would think about that now.
Speaker: It sounds like the things that have yet to be grasped at the root.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah, and I think of that so much of just like, you know, it's not that like activists, it's like we need to be fighting for things like for greater representation of people of color, black people, and wide socioeconomic, you know, representation for sure in our institutions.
Speaker: But we also need to be thinking, okay, well, how do we not have this inequality in the first place?
Speaker: How do we not have the need like,
Speaker: The more fundamental at the root work.
Speaker: Disgusting inequality, right, in the first place, right?
Speaker: It's like, it's not enough just to see representation in the institutions we have existing.
Speaker: It's like, what are we doing to make it so this inequality doesn't exist, period, right?
Speaker: Because it's not going to be solved just by fitting people into the systems that made the inequity in the first place, right?
Speaker: I mean, it reminds me, this idea of harm reduction versus more upstream work reminds me of this anecdote I heard on Krista Tippett's podcast on Being with Ruth Wilson Gilmore, who, as people in the audience may know, is one of the OG abolitionists people and theorizes.
Speaker: She's a geographer, which I just love how she frames her work like that.
Speaker: And
Speaker: She shared about this group of East LA Mexican-American moms in the 80s, I believe, who noticed that the city was building a new prison for the first time in years or decades even.
Speaker: And they would assign to build it in their neighborhood and they didn't quite understand
Speaker: And if I'm remembering correctly, like they found that it was because that's related to the education level and the likelihood of people in the neighborhood going sent to prison, right?
Speaker: They wanted to counteract that.
Speaker: And honestly, I forget if you remember from listening, but if they were successful or not, were they successful in staving off the prison?
Speaker: Yeah, I think they did stave off the prison.
Speaker: I think they did.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But then they shifted their focus to why then are their children not doing well in school?
Speaker: And then they found there was a high level of absenteeism.
Speaker: And then they asked, why is there a high level of absenteeism?
Speaker: Oh, there's a lot of absenteeism in relation to asthma.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: which had to do with the quality of air in the area.
Speaker: So Ruth Wilson Gilmore points out how they became like in a way climate justice activists and really focus on public health more than anything.
Speaker: And I thought that was such a beautiful, powerful way of people coming together and thinking about at the root, more at the root of things.
Speaker: And I just, I just contrasted so much in education, how things happen where, um,
Speaker: we stop at, oh, like Teach for America, at least when I joined, would say a lot, it shouldn't matter the zip code that children are born in.
Speaker: So the antidote is helping them get the get higher test scores.
Speaker: But there was never really the question asked or addressed really of, okay, so why, why does the zip code matter in the first place?
Speaker: And how are we going to address that?
Speaker: And it's not that the type of work and helping kids to read, write, or read, I didn't mean write, but like read, um,
Speaker: According to a standardized definition.
Speaker: Well, I was going to say right, and so I was like, you get what I mean.
Speaker: But anyway, it's in and of itself problematic.
Speaker: But for me, it was all the resources that was put toward that.
Speaker: And going back to the question I made earlier, it's like, when is harm reduction getting in the way of radical, at the root work, or another way to think about it, of going upstream to the source of issues in the system?
Speaker: So...
Speaker: that just really spoke to me of how we can learn from abolitionists in the sense of people who are world builders, right?
Speaker: That's another thing that Ruth Walsing Gilmore really makes clear.
Speaker: That's about re-imagining a new world much more than erasing another.
Speaker: Even though we wanted to replace another, right?
Speaker: But it's more how do we set the conditions in such a way that we can be in that world.
Speaker: So you're a story around me of that story.
Speaker: And so I wanted to ask you a little bit more about...
Speaker: where is the harm reduction and where is the opportunity perhaps for more upstream work or radical change in the example of standardized testing that you shared that was distressing?
Speaker: Yeah, I think like if we think of harm reduction as like just doing things to survive, right, to get through from day to day and to make the way things are people the most safe, right, in the systems as they are.
Speaker: I think that the idea was we need to get these test scores, right,
Speaker: So that we are checking a box because we have this agreement under state takeover and also as a public school in general that we need to have a certain percentage of our kids participate in standardized testing, right, to provide information.
Speaker: accountability on our teaching.
Speaker: And it's part of this movement, right, to hold schools, quote unquote, accountable, right, and teachers and districts.
Speaker: And the harm reduction, I guess, was to do what they needed to do to get those test scores in so that we didn't get further sanctioned as a district and then have our district broken up into charters.
Speaker: So I think that was definitely the reasoning behind a lot of this push.
Speaker: And it felt like
Speaker: we need to do this just right now.
Speaker: We need to do this so that we can get through state takeover.
Speaker: We need to do this so that we don't get shut down and we need to do this so that we, yeah, I just, instead of prompting, instead of like what, I think what disturbed me the most about it was also like, if we think of that framework of like abolition is about building something new, not just taking away.
Speaker: I think they were trying to avoid that, right?
Speaker: They were trying to avoid,
Speaker: blowing up the system totally and having something they knew wouldn't be better, which is a charter system.
Speaker: It truly would not be better.
Speaker: I would not want our public school district to be made into a charterized, basically like they were like people in Providence who are deep in this school reform quote unquote movement, look to New Orleans and say, we want Providence to be like New Orleans, which is a total charter district instead of a central public district.
Speaker: There's like a network of charters.
Speaker: People say that?
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: So they want something that emerged from utter disaster and the ultimate form of just surviving to be their standard?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: There are people, not that I know, but there are people who have loud voices in Rhode Island who would love...
Speaker: for Providence to become a charter district because they think that- Just to get hit by a hurricane, you know, and be destroyed completely, you know?
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker: And I'm like, we're going to look to like, and also it's like, I don't think it's working.
Speaker: I don't think that they're having good results from this charter, total charter takeover.
Speaker: But I, so I get like the impulse of these administrators in our district to like say, we need to like do what we need to.
Speaker: Instead of saying like, what if we mobilized our power right now
Speaker: And rose up – this was also in a district where they assigned for our district-wide reading.
Speaker: We read Bettina Love's book, We Want to Do More Than Survive.
Speaker: And a central tenet of her thesis is that standardized system is racist.
Speaker: And standardized testing, sorry, is like a racist regime, right?
Speaker: It was part of like –
Speaker: Can I just interject?
Speaker: It just reminds me, Bettina Love also recently wrote an article about, related to harm reduction versus, again, he said the RU is, before you try hiring more Black teachers, work on being sure you keep the ones you have.
Speaker: It's just that disconnect.
Speaker: Why do you think...
Speaker: I'm sure people saw the disconnect or do you think people did not see the disconnect between reading Bettina Love's book and what was happening in the district?
Speaker: Or what do you think that's about?
Speaker: That's just, that really, that really confuses me or strikes me too.
Speaker: I know, I know.
Speaker: Well, it was such a, it was such a particular time where, um,
Speaker: I mean, there was a lot of interesting, cool things happening in our district where like I, when I got hired, I was trained in how to support trans students and like explicitly told, I don't need to, you don't need to disclose a student if a student is, you know, socially transitioning at school, but not at home because they don't feel safe or comfortable telling their families.
Speaker: It's like, that's not your responsibility as a teacher to like call home and say, oh, so-and-so changed their pronouns or their name.
Speaker: Did you know that?
Speaker: Like, that's not part of like what you had to do.
Speaker: So at the same time, and then we were also like encouraged, like we had a Black Lives Matter week of action in our school, like organized by school staff members, you know, in February.
Speaker: And this was all also definitely tied in around the racial uprisings of the summer of 2020 around the murder of George Floyd.
Speaker: And I think that there was like a really...
Speaker: I don't know if it's the same, but a lot of doors were open and there was this awareness.
Speaker: There was this influx of interest in talking about anti-racism.
Speaker: And I think some people just took a lot of things in and disseminated things without really thinking, without processing through, what is this person saying?
Speaker: What does this mean about how I have to change?
Speaker: It was like, there's a lot of both ends happening.
Speaker: It's like we were reading
Speaker: And like doing some pretty radical things while also like still keeping within the system.
Speaker: It's like people were really jazzed up and excited about things that she was saying, but also like not translate.
Speaker: Like we didn't have the space to actually say, well, what does that mean?
Speaker: Not – it was translated into how do I –
Speaker: how do what are my interpersonal relationships with my kids every day which we need to talk about of course because there were some racist explicitly racist teachers in our district that needed to fucking be checked and removed and that needed to happen but there were also like things like systemic racism we talked about but i don't think we understood how this like even though we didn't have racist like you know we didn't
Speaker: consider ourselves to like be explicitly racist.
Speaker: It's like we were participating in a system that was racist.
Speaker: And that was the whole point of her book.
Speaker: It's like, she talked about, she had, she did talk about like explicit racism, but also like systemic racism.
Speaker: I mean, I'm not using the right term, but like, I know it's not explicit, but it's like when people, it's like, she was talking about how it's like baked into the school system.
Speaker: Like, and part of it is standardized testing.
Speaker: And, um,
Speaker: that connection wasn't happening.
Speaker: It was almost like too much.
Speaker: And I don't think we had enough time to actually talk about that.
Speaker: You know, it's, and it wasn't, it wasn't like every teacher is mandated to read it.
Speaker: It was given out as like a book club book.
Speaker: No, it wasn't like everybody read it and we talked about it.
Speaker: It was like, this is what we're reading and discussing if you want to opt in.
Speaker: But still it was like disseminated pretty widely, you know, or like, it was paid for by the district.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: You could get like a copy.
Speaker: It wasn't, I don't know if it was like a certain number.
Speaker: I think it was like a certain number of people could get it, but they had like district-wide reads of it, you know, like where we had like Zoom meetings where you could talk about it.
Speaker: And I was adjuncting.
Speaker: And so I was like crazy.
Speaker: So I was adjuncting at night at the same time I was teaching in the day all day, which is crazy.
Speaker: So I didn't have any bandwidth to do that.
Speaker: But yeah.
Speaker: I know people who did participate in those book clubs and it was just kind of like, and we read sections of it.
Speaker: We had like an equity committee in our school that met, you know, sometimes during school professional development hours that I would participate in.
Speaker: And we read excerpts from it.
Speaker: And it was just like, I would bring up, I was like,
Speaker: fired up about standardized testing.
Speaker: And there was talk about like, you know, and some of us talked about how could we tell families that they don't need to do this, you know?
Speaker: And I think some did and they felt, we felt brave to a certain extent because of all of that reading and like the support.
Speaker: And then immediately we're extinguished by certain administrators who didn't want us to be sending that message, you know,
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, I think any critical eye to any anti-oppressive work does need to grapple with the history of standardized testing rapists.
Speaker: We're saying it's racist, and so I just wanna explain in brief the brief version.
Speaker: And I mean, standardized tests are really rooted in eugenics, right?
Speaker: In terms of who's fit and not fit.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And who's who.
Speaker: They're historically very much centered around white supremacist ideas of what people should know, right?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Someone chooses the type of questions that get asked and the content that is covered.
Speaker: And also just a source of control.
Speaker: If you believe in objectivity to the extent that you can't really challenge it, if it says this, it says this, right?
Speaker: And so standardized tests enable all of those things and come from that history.
Speaker: So that's, I just wanted to say in brief, that's another podcast episode, I guess, but in brief why standardized tests is so rooted, is so intertwined with racism in this country.
Speaker: Yeah, and white supremacy, you're right, with this idea of even just the anecdote of control that I shared from what it was like to administer these tests.
Speaker: The panopticon, focal.
Speaker: Yeah, and it's one thing.
Speaker: I mean, I think people think of standardized testing as one thing in a year, and you kind of have to suck it up and lock down, and everyone just kind of knows that that's how it is.
Speaker: Like going to the dentist for me?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But going to the dentist actually does extend your years of life.
Speaker: does it taking a standard well if you have your teeth cleaned yet it's true correlation when your gums and standardized tests yeah just to say like i feel like i feel like people kind of just accept it as like it's good for you but you need to do it and it's like no it's actually not i know all of these reasons totally and it's actually doesn't yeah it doesn't and like
Speaker: I remember in our well-resourced suburban district we grew up in, you and I grew up in, it's like the testing...
Speaker: We did some prep because we were coming of age, like no child left behind became a thing when we were in middle school.
Speaker: I didn't feel it that hard.
Speaker: No, because our teachers, I remember our teachers talking about it because they were really upset at the push.
Speaker: Like there was a major increase in the testing, but there was a lot of talk with us about like how this doesn't measure our intelligence.
Speaker: It's like, it's not about.
Speaker: See, that's like, and you weren't, it didn't seem like there was space for you and all of you to have that conversation with your students.
Speaker: And I tried.
Speaker: I tried.
Speaker: I don't know if people can really – it's not every kid is going to be deeply affected by it.
Speaker: Some of them will just goof off and be okay with being like, I'm not doing my – I don't care about this, whatever.
Speaker: But there are a good number of kids that are really anxious about it and that feeling of the affective experience.
Speaker: Ooh, affective.
Speaker: Like the emotional.
Speaker: experience yeah like the new body i don't know if i'm using that that's a new word for me yeah it's in your word it's a magic means that like you're it's what you feel and making sense of what you yeah oh my god i'm like going uh it could be the diet coke or sorry the diet beverage or it could be like going back to that place but it's like very nerve-wracking and it's like in the instruction it's like hard to describe how
Speaker: stressful it's stressful how stressful it is to feel like form of exhaustion i see it with my partner too who he has told me how he didn't fully understand the exhaustion i felt at the end of the day until he taught and he taught in like a college level right uh and he also it was just a unique level of exhaustion
Speaker: And also this like idea that we measure our intelligence solely by what we can produce in a lock, like a vacuum sealed amount of time.
Speaker: It's like, and it's like kids have you as a human kids, especially have a natural instinct to turn to a friend and be like, you know, and like, just say something that crosses their mind or like, you know,
Speaker: ask for help on something they don't know because we ask for help all the time.
Speaker: Whenever in our lives do we have to complete a task without asking for help?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That narrative of separation from each other is very much persistent in standard assisting in our schools.
Speaker: And so if we think of it like that, and if we had had space as teachers to just air our grievances about why do we not want to send our kids to school to take this test?
Speaker: And it's not because we're shirking our duty.
Speaker: And it always turned into this guilt trip of you're not in favor of equity.
Speaker: You don't want- It's a gaslighting on it.
Speaker: It feels like a gaslighting to me.
Speaker: No, no, no.
Speaker: My primary goal, the fucking reason I'm here is to struggle against inequity.
Speaker: That's like... This is the F-bomb episode.
Speaker: I'm sorry.
Speaker: My mom's going to listen to this and say it's unprofessional.
Speaker: But I just can't.
Speaker: But it's interesting.
Speaker: I do want to touch on this point because...
Speaker: Even the idea of professionalism, right?
Speaker: And like, I think for people listening, it's like, what is it about being angry that's uncomfortable?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And what can be generated from?
Speaker: Like, it's a real core emotion.
Speaker: We have it for a reason, right?
Speaker: And we're openly airing it more than lots of people would be comfortable with, I guess.
Speaker: But part of the work here is like,
Speaker: Like, okay, maybe some people would be less likely to hear us if we sound angry.
Speaker: But I wish that people realized more consciously that in not sounding angry, there's either a lot of processing or a lot of suppression.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And just the effect.
Speaker: And how that expectation in and of itself structurally leads to oppression.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So like, I have to admit, like when you were like really going, I was like, woo, this is, this is spicy.
Speaker: I feel a little uncomfortable in my body, but, but like, I'm very used to being with that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And my body was telling me like, it was like my old conditioning, if you will.
Speaker: And so in the day, I'm really happy you went the route you went.
Speaker: Like, I don't think people hear this level of deep, like you clearly care.
Speaker: Like, like you were saying, people think you're shirking your response.
Speaker: Like, no, like you wouldn't talk like this or feel like this two years after the fact.
Speaker: It's a trauma.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: It's a small T trauma perhaps, but it's a trauma.
Speaker: Like it's, and so, yeah, yes.
Speaker: It's not surprising that you feel it, but that's why I asked you earlier a little bit about like, tell me more what's under that because it's,
Speaker: I want people to really sit with that and with themselves and their own reaction to that, right?
Speaker: And how that affects change in their context and outside of their context.
Speaker: So if you're ready to do that work, you can email us.
Speaker: get to that later yeah yeah anyway i just wanted to i just wanted to make that more explicit the experience explicit i also really want to be i'm so grateful that you put that lens on my anger and like also that like i didn't realize i mean i think i got a reputation among my colleagues about being like kind of angry i was worried i was like too angry and
Speaker: Because you do have to put your head down and do what you need to do to get paid because we're paid so little.
Speaker: So we're living paycheck to paycheck.
Speaker: We have to keep our jobs.
Speaker: And we also have to come into work every day and not be crazy because sustaining this level of anger is...
Speaker: exhausting exhausting exhausting and it's also like it isn't productive always in the way that you want it to be if it's not being received and then like done something with um and that's ultimately why i left it just like for many reasons other than it's like beyond beyond this conversation like it only got worse from there and
Speaker: But I'm really grateful.
Speaker: Thank you for hearing my anger and taking it and helping me and validating it because it feels like, yeah, it's like we're supposed to be okay.
Speaker: And it's like with, I don't know.
Speaker: I don't know how you don't, I also don't know how you don't get angry about this.
Speaker: It's just like so clearly illogical.
Speaker: It's just like- So for me, what gets me angry is that going back to that question of harm reduction being relied on to-
Speaker: I think in many ways systematically on purpose to stop wider changes.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's an example of violence.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And the sense of like, it allows a continual opening of vulnerability to a whole group of people, to all types of,
Speaker: ways to premature death to continue trauma, right?
Speaker: And I know there's lots of criticism of the word of violence with things that are not physical at times, but it is like, if we look at what it opens up people to from a vulnerability perspective, which we won't get into too deep now, but
Speaker: And Ruth Wilson-Gilmore in that podcast I mentioned earlier talks about this group vulnerability and how most of the time the vulnerability is not the fault of the individual, it's the fault of the system.
Speaker: And she goes into this idea of organized abandonment of how the banking system, for example, and companies and other aspects of society just abandon groups of people and let them be in...
Speaker: in situations or in environments that just lend themselves to more of unsafety, violence, and trauma.
Speaker: So I bring that up to say that there's a lot there that we can keep exploring.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker: Well, thank you so much.
Speaker: I'm excited for our next conversation.
Speaker: I know you're just as fired up, although you dropped some F-bombs, not as much as me.
Speaker: Do I drop F-bombs?
Speaker: I just don't realize that, I guess.
Speaker: But when you do, it's rare, but it's like, oh, it lands.
Speaker: It's not as angry as mine, I feel like.
Speaker: And that's, that's cool.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I'm actually going, I'm actually with, I'll just say in my therapy, I'm learning to be more with my anger and have it come out more.
Speaker: I'm into it.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So anyway, so there's a lot, there's a lot there.
Speaker: So I think for now, I am comfortable stopping here.
Speaker: I really want to continue to explore this idea of harm reduction versus upstream work.
Speaker: And maybe not versus, it can be in tandem, right?
Speaker: But I do think there's a lot to dig deep into.
Speaker: Why is it so hard to get into the upstream work?
Speaker: Because it's a source of problems, right?
Speaker: It's just such important work to be done.
Speaker: So if you're interested or have any more thoughts, you can email us at pedagogyofthedistressed at gmail.com.
Speaker: That is also in the description.
Speaker: Anything else you'd want to add, Emily, before we sign off?
Speaker: No, just thank you so much, Rafa, for hearing me and encouraging me to share my thoughts.
Speaker: And sorry, mom, for all the swears.
Speaker: I'm sure she still loves you.
Speaker: I'm a mom now, so I guess I'm okay.
Speaker: I'm giving the mom seal of approval on that.
Speaker: I love you all.
Speaker: I love you lots.
Speaker: I love you, and I love you all.
Speaker: I love you too.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Let's make it clear.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Hasta la próxima.
Speaker: Ciao.
Speaker: Bye.
Speaker: Bye-bye.
