by Rich Gibson
August 2011
For well over a decade, a few professors, teachers, parents,
community people, and maybe even more students, have made the now-tedious case
against high-takes exams as racist, unscientific, class-based tools of
segregation.
While often missing the point of the education agenda as an
empire's war and class war agenda, which should be abundantly evident, test
opponents have appealed with impeccable logic, passion, cleverness, and too few
simple "F-you"s.
The Big Test issue involves power, money (always), and people as well.
Test boycotts are a fine form of people-power. They don't reach the level of
the even-better actions of last school year (building seizures, bank occupations,
student strikes, the library occupations in Chicago, and so on), but they would
be a beginning, again. Sometimes the spiral of change arcs back on itself.
Rebels, though, need protective cover.
Test resistance happened in the past, from "be a hero take
a zero" student-initiated actions, to entire districts opting out, as in
Birmingham, Michigan, a wealthy Detroit suburb where one parent said,
"these tests will make our children stupid." The Birmingham
superintendent said to state test coordinators in a mass meeting of the
community, “If you think the people of Birmingham are going to subject our
children to your tests, you don't know how power works.” Not long ago,
Birmingham was opting out at levels of above 90%.
Another wealthy suburb, Lajolla, California, checked itself out of current
Obama Border Czar Alan Bersin's dictatorial San Diego "Blueprint,"
with remarkable ease. The latter two models demonstrate the power of money.
In each case that I know of, somebody had to go first--even in social network
organizing.
Those who have gone first, who did not have wealth behind them, frequently
faced retaliation-- and a few have not, or only been annoyed a bit.
For the most part, people who took the lead came under attack, much of it quite
serious--loss of jobs, denial of college recommendations, systematic isolation,
denial of tenure, faculty swarming, and more.
What I think is often missed by honest people who want the test frenzy, and its
causes as well, to come to an end is that this is a very real fight. School
workers and their likely allies are, well, too nice.
Sure, we must reason with people and explain our case--and
for my part that case will always connect the parts, tests, to the whole: class
war. It's a redundancy (schooling and its social context) for me, mainly
because so few people are willing to make it. In the US, where people,
quasi-citizens, know so little history they cannot link cause and effect, the
contextual relationship is vital to organizing which can be maintained and grown.
Reason is important, part of the crux of why we teach.
But it is unreasonable to think that making a good case is enough. This is a
battle, one that will lead to others--I hope—one building on the next.
Since it is a fight already engaged in mass ways by a corporate state, the
government, it can appear to be a fight that is de-personalized, coming from a
system. That is a one-sided outlook.
Bad people initiate and propel the mis-education of children
for a variety of reasons: profit (McGraw Hill), social control (Obama/Bush plus
McGraw Hill), fear and opportunism (many teachers, principals,
superintendents), racism (pro-test researchers), and sheer stupidity (Surprise!
Merit pay attaches perfectly to the tests!).
Some of these bad people who really have no stake, material interest, in
perpetuating what is actually the construction of their own oppression, like
many students and teachers, can change their views when challenged by mere
reason. Perhaps they should be called ruined people who can become better than
they are at the moment.
The US education system is the central organizing point of N. American
life. Schools are missions for US
capitalism and its empire. The
bosses at McGraw Hill or Obama, are never going to be reasoned out of a structure
that protects and nourishes them.
Others have to be shown by rebel example.
From the time that the first slave launched a retaliatory slap against a
master, it has been clear that action changes minds as well. Indeed, it is
indispensable.
Those who initiate that action, as someone must go first, need to be protected
by people who grasp the nature of a real fight and are prepared to take harsh
measures against bad people who personify a rotten system. Those defenders
probably cannot be public about what they plan or do, but harsh measures are
not hard to imagine, take, and mask. People need not study Giap, Al Quada, Sun
Tzu, or B.H. Liddel Hart. “The War of the Flea,” to come up with a grasp of
specific conditions and ways for the dispossessed to hurt offenders.
The overseers who serve as puppets for very real masters are
more vulnerable than they appear to be. Among the most vulnerable: upper
echelons of the unions.
What seems to me to be ahead is a relentless assault, far
more severe and rapid than what we have experienced to date, on daily life
(income, jobs, benefits, hours, tuition hikes, the social safety net—now
largely evaporated--more lost wars), and on reason too: class war escalated.
We know the No Child Left Behind waivers are a bait and
switch maneuver, as Stephen Krashen aptly put it, designed to make the
regulation of what is known, and how people come to know it, even more
surveilled and restricted. It is the Race to the Top on adrenaline.
The current liquidity crisis (overproduction of goods and
capital, collapsed income and hence demand, frozen markets, etc) and six
failing wars invariably means capital, and the people who believe they run it,
will hit at us unrelentingly, shaving people off with razor like precision, the
poorest hit first and worst, usually a color coded method.
For America's power slingers, the casinos are closing. There
are few places left to gamble in the world and the winnings are slim. It
follows that they will turn on their “own” public, savagely. The more they win,
succeed in driving down wages, the more their economy stalls. Capital must
move, but it cannot move—proof of Marx's dictum that the limit to capital
is capital itself.
The American boast and promise of the past, what they said
all the world should ascribe to, “The Rule of Law,” is shattered. Contract law
between the working class and the employing class, collective bargaining
agreements, are routinely shredded—always in favor of employers.
International law is regularly abrogated. The US bombing of Libya with no
congressional approval, and little complaint, is only the most recent instance
of the contempt the ruling classes have for constitutional composition.
It is a fast closing vice: necessity of profits and the good
life on one jaw, no restraint on the other jaw, the stick replaces the carrot.
We are the turnip to be bled to soothe the greed fever.
The terrors of rough sacrifice have yet to really come home
to the US. With a little more than one percent of the population in the US
military, and probably an equal number of mercenaries, posing as contractors;
dead in body bags and amputees have not shocked too many people. If they have,
until recently shopping and spectacles offered surcease.
The US may be the world's chief arms-maker but technology replaced the Rosie
the Riveter legions who helped end the last depression with factory jobs when
war made work. War profiteering is not being shared out much.
Worse, the President will not make the early moves that
Franklin Roosevelt undertook: the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Works
Projects Administration and other money dumping maneuvers that provided a shred
of hope, some jobs, and historical value: libraries, parks, sidewalks, and
more.
Potent people fear inflation more than the social movement
that might come after them—as it doesn't yet exist.
Thus, we see this counterfeit tight-rope act, balancing
inflation and deflation which means, for the vast majority, steadily
multiplying forms of misery. Those with abundant savings can dodge and evade.
Those who live from check to check: trapped in a form of financial
conscription, draftees in the class war.
Americans who are, now, probably the most deluded and
potentially dangerous people in the history of the world, are more than well prepared
to lurch to the right, making fascism a mass, multifaceted, popular
movement—each section making no special sense but summing up to be a
ruthless protection of capital and its government. This development is in place
now.
Examples: the Tpartyites, union leaders who deny the
contradictory interests of workers and bosses and their minions, Nazis and
skins of the right, racists like the Klan and the intellectuals who back them,
evangelicals, Catholic cultists (Opus Dei), committed Zionists, Republicans and
Democrats alike, of the two-headed snake that is the electoral system,
anti-immigration fanatics, xenophobes, and so on. Many of these people believe
they are self-actualized, yet participate in the construction of their own
oppression, typical of residents of pacified areas.
Weaponized themselves, or in the form of the police,
military, intelligence agencies, or mercenaries, these people are assuredly dangerous, as are their thoughts.
But they have no answer to the crises at hand; the reason good ideas are so
important and threatening. Correct ideas, linked to action, can turn around the
guns of armies.
The demagogue, Obama, is not going to retreat unless his
forced to do so. Neither will the assemblage of Republican nutcases and prudes:
not Mitt, nor Michelle, nor Perry. They will slug it out among themselves as
they have real philosophical and practical differences but, at sunset, they
will unite and batter us, using their government as a weapon: debt ceiling
nonsense; the bank vs auto bailouts, bi-partisan support for endless wars, etc.
In schools, this will mean more regimentation of the
curricula (Common Core Standards), more high
stakes exams, more militarism—as well as layoffs,
merit pay, wage cuts, and to some degree, privatization, although privatization
is a third tier project; in fact, is conducted by the corporate state: the
united government tops, union bosses, and business personnel. Fighting privatization alone only means
propping up that state and its schools.
Schools will portray false hope as hope. We should know that
swindle by now. Kids, however, in recognizing the hustle only superficially,
often choose to learn not to learn as what they are taught are lies. It's a
success story of capitalist schooling.
Over time, only mass class conscious resistance can meet
that challenge: a growing social movement for equality (against capitalism) and
justice (against imperialism, racism, and sexism) using direct action tactics
and harsh measures to Quislings. Reason would be part of that, even the
fighting part: strategy and tactics. Absent such a movement, barbarism rises.
It may be that the moment for test resistance is gone by.
Food on the table, the dignity of work, tuition driving students out, the
economic military draft, all make the Big Tests seem to pale.
It may be that, rather than fight, typically nice teachers
will persist in the pacification, and deception of kids. The empire's bribe,
fairly good pay, may work. The recent NEA Representative Assembly's decision
to back Obama, by an overwhelming vote of local leaders, is a discouraging
sign.
Or not.
That paycheck, the job security, decent benefits, some
control of work life—all evaporates. It's commonsensical to suggest that
people will dissent. In the balance: will people uncover why they must build a
real opposing force, or missing the point, class war, lose?
The Big Tests are still a crucial instrument of social
control combined with profits. They may be a weak link worth another probe.
We can fight to rescue education from the ruling classes.
Everything negative is in place for a revolutionary
transformation of society (distrust of leaders, collapse of moral suasion from
the top down, financial crises, lost wars, massive unemployment, booming
inequality, imprisonment of only the poor, growing reliance on force to rule,
eradication of civil liberties, corruption and gridlock of government at every
level, etc.) What is missing is the passion, generalization, organization, and
guiding ethic to make that change.
Nevertheless, resistance must begin with someone, or a few
someones. We know now those people need back-up. And the backup will need
counter-plans too. The other side has surely considered what to do with the
first sign of rebelliousness. In a lifelong fight, it is good to have many
layered strategy.