Education reform policies missing the data that really matters

Dear Education Reformers, Policy Makers, and Legislators, where is the data that really matters on your high stakes testing policies? 
If you tried to approve a new medicine or intervention treatment in the medical world, you are required to gather data by talking with patients, care providers, and family. 
This data is not considered soft data, but crucial data.
No medicine can make it to market with this data. There is the data that matters, and the data that really matters!
When did you ever ask children, parents, and teachers about the testing, the reforms, the school closings, moving art, music, and play out of the curriculum for test prep in schools of color? Your education reform took aways the things that mattered, and replace them with a Darwinism education reform policy that demanded unfunded schools compete against each other for limited resources.

You claimed you were giving Black and Brown parents a choice. Your choice left most of their children in more segregated and underfunded schools. Schools with less play, art, music, nurses, counselors, and tutors. Your reforms made billions for Wall Street CEOs, billions that should have been used to fund the arts, music, and wrap-around services needed in communities of color. 
Someone has to say it, your reforms are as deeply rooted in Structural Racism as those that existed before Brown Vs The Board of Education. 

Jonathan Kozol, (2006), wrote in The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America: “There is something deeply hypocritical in a society that holds an inner-city child only eight years old "accountable" for her performance on a high-stakes standardized exam but does not hold the high officials of our government accountable for robbing her of what they gave their own kids six or seven years before.” 

I am calling this failure to collect the data that really matters. I say you did not collect it because you already knew that children, parents, and teachers would have told you. Their tears, their pain, and suffering would have shut you down.
I accuse you of education malpractice,
Dr. Jesse P. Turner
Professor of Literacy, Elementary, and Early Childhood Education 

If you like to listen to the song that inspired my morning walk today its Andra Day's Stand Up For Something" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GhY7qXGx-0

Assessment should not be something done to learners

This image may be old, but it still defines my work as a teacher today.
We are living in a time when assessment, learning, and teaching in our public schools is about measuring, quantifying, weighing, sorting, speeding things up, and labeling who is worthy, and who is to blame. Learners and teachers are living in a time of great damage. Where is the hope in this assessment game of blame?  I am not seeing it.
  

Something about assessment, teaching and learning that these number crunchers, education reformers, policymakers, and data chasers have not gotten. These data-driven people who say with certainty that our data defines what you are, and where you shall go. I have even heard some of these data chasers claiming to be able to see who is college-ready or not in grades one or two. It is in this kind of thinking that the race to nowhere begins. 

The Latin origins of the very term assessment are "to sit with". Think about it, it does not say 'to do to", it requires sitting with...it signifies sitting next to, and that to me indicates that assessment is a teaching and learning journey together. Both teachers and learners working together, growing together, each one part of something more powerful than some correct answer. No one knows how far a child may go, no test defines them, should limit them. Children are more than test scores.   

Assessment should be not your gate, but the path forward, and teacher and student should walk that path together, for we are in it together. Assessment should be about blame, but about hope. They have turned assessment into a game of numbers. A game of winners and losers, and if you accept their own data than surely you can see they are losing. 

I reject this shame and blame game. I see a path to hope not in their data, but on the faces of those I teach. The data that matters to me? Living and feeling learners who only request to their teachers is to guide them, walk a little with them and help them see more in themselves.
Children are more than test scores, teachers are more than data machines, and hope lives somewhere between the journeys taken together.   

Sincerely,
Dr. Jesse P. Turner 
CCSU Literacy Center Director 

If you want to listen to the tune that inspires my morning walk today...its Natalie Merchants 1995 song "Wonder" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zpYFAzhAZY

"Ooo, I believe, fate, fate smiled 

And destiny laughed as she came to my cradle 

Know this child will be able

Laughed as my body she lifted

Know this child will be gifted

With love, with patience, and with faith

She'll make her way, she'll make her way" ~ Wonder

Dear Senator Ron Paul your immigrant hate can't stop my love

I refuse to let these haters bring me down to their hater world...

Senator Ron Paul apparently thinks Congress Woman Ilhan Omar should go back to Somalia to appreciate the food stamps her family received when they first came to America as refugees.

Senator Paul, where should I go back to? As a child, my mother was given food stamps when we were homeless. Of course, you were born wealthy and would have no clue about needing that kind of help. All you have ever had to do is call Daddy.

Senator, let me share a little secret. My wife sealed a single one dollar food stamp behind the frame holding my Ph.D. It hangs in my office, and I have never told anyone it is there. Somehow, knowing it is there reminds me of the sacrifices my wife and I made to earn that degree. We moved 2800 miles to go to the University of Arizona to chase our American dream.
We had the promise of full-time jobs. We packed our bags as soon as those promises came in. But, as soon as we arrived those promised jobs turned to part-time ones. Like millions of other Americans whose promises fall through...we did what working people have always done...Without a Daddy Big bucks to call, we made do.

Only a fool thinks people who need food stamps are not appreciative. Only a fool thinks that needing that kind of help doesn't carry some extremely heavy shame. Shame that sinks deep in your bones. People who just call Daddy, have no idea about climbing up from that deep bone shame.

How would you ever understand, that even with my student loans, and 4 part-time jobs between us we needed food stamps to get by. Living in a right to work state where no one would give you a full-time job because then they would have to offer you health care.
You never had to take your sick daughter to the doctor with no way to pay, and hope the doctor would treat her...
Yeah, Rich Daddy Boys have no clue what it means to walk in the shoes of the working poor.

We regularly visited the food pantry. We don't talk about it, we have never told our friends, or family about it. We hold that pain deep in our hearts, and we never ever talk about it. But, you Sir need some teaching.

How would you a Daddy's Silver Spoon boy, understand...What everyday Americans go through? You know the ones that work for a living, daring still to reach for the stars. They make countless sacrifices, swallow their pride often, and unlike you, they never complain. They just get it done.

You, sir, have no clue about the difficult path America's poor and the working poor must walk. You have always been able to call Daddy Big Bucks.

I am not angry,
I don't hate you,
I wish you no harm, and
I pray that your family will never have to walk in the shoes of Congress Woman Omar.
I pray for your children and grandchildren never have to go into debt to pay for their higher education or need food stamps, or a food pantry.
Senator all I ask is you keep your hate to yourself.

Dear Congress Woman Omar, and to every American who may need food stamps to survive, this song is for you. For you are our star reachers, and you are loved. 
Love Wins,
Dr. Jesse P. Turner 

In case you like to listen to the song that inspired my blog tonight...its Play For Love Around The World Change
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=132&v=mxEd_8Bv7XQ&fbclid=IwAR2p-tBjLtDIhoW21wiT0JRwh7o3XavyWeykcFMWinmMNMPC_gaF0Izz6Qs