Finishing The Race

Every race needs a finish line. Every journey a destination. Every story an ending.

Even if you are wont to believe that it’s the journey not the destination that matters most, it’s still important that the journey takes you where you want to go – somewhere where you’ve never been before.

We are currently in the midst of journey on race.  It’s not the first time that we, as a nation and as an education community, have embarked on this journey, but it feels a little different this time around – we’re most definitely visiting places we’ve never been before.

In his recent book, Systemic Racism and Educational Measurement, Mike Russell meticulously compiles and articulately presents the evidence and arguments supporting the two central tenets fueling the current journey:

1. First, race is an invented social, or political, convention for grouping or classifying people. It is not a biological construct. There is “no scientific foundation for a biological definition of race.”
2. Second, much of what we see today in education, and elsewhere in society, is the result of systemic racism, which “connects individual, institutional, and structural racism to sustain, and at times, increase power for the dominant elite and to provide unjust economic, political, and social advantage to people membered into the dominant racialized group.”

It’s critical that we recognize that neither of those tenets is a solution. What they do is to replace an outdated explanation for group differences in student achievement (i.e., race) with a more valid explanation (i.e., systemic racism).

In essence, they answer the question of whether group differences are primarily the result of nature or nurture, the vexing question that Thomas Jefferson left for science to answer 200 years ago.

You can file this under better defining the problem, which is a necessary step in reaching the final destination, but inevitably causes immediate and short-term problems which as I wrote in a recent post are the daily concern of teachers and students.

Some may argue that the focus on systemic racism shifts the blame and responsibility for gaps in achievement from the individual student or teacher to the system – where it rightfully belongs.

True.  But it also runs the risk, at least in the short term, of making the problem seem more intractable to those individual students and teachers.

I have a sense of how to convince a skeptical teacher that all students can learn and how to create an environment in which students believe that they can learn.

I am not sure how to counteract the message to students and teacher that the system is stacked against them (or in favor of them) being hammered home relentlessly day after day after day.

I am not sure how students whom I am led to believe were rendered incapable of performing by a passage from the The Underground Railroad appearing on a state test are likely to react to slavery and its lasting effects being front and center, integrated throughout the curriculum.

I am not sure how to reconcile the idea that a system that apparently can be brought to its knees merely by uttering the phrase learning loss is a system that can handle being told that it is the product of 400+ years of systemic racism.

Best case scenario, as I see it, is that this is a classic case of the need to break something down before building it back up again – an approach I have adopted on more than one occasion.

What happens, however, if we break it down before we know how to build it back up again or if we don’t get around to building it back up again?

All the King’s Horses…

When I was young, I excelled at taking things apart. Not simply breaking them per se, but painstakingly disassembling them piece by piece. Unfortunately, I never developed the same level of passion for or skill at putting those pieces back together again.

My fear is that we are in a similar place in our reckoning with race in education and educational assessment. Pieces strewn across the floor with no real idea of how to put them back together again (to build back better), and worse lacking the passion, will, and/or skill to do so.

Given the extent to which this current awakening has been fueled by academics and academic theory, that fear may be well-founded. Those of us in education reform, of course, have fared no better. Two decades into the NCLB era, we have administered millions and millions of tests only to end up with 20 years of essentially flat NAEP scores in Reading and Mathematics at grades 4 and 8 (and that was prior to the pandemic). We have disaggregated and reaggregated, revised, reauthorized, and reset only to finally figure out that we were teaching reading the wrong way, and to realize that we still don’t really understand what mathematics is.

Science? See climate change, vaccines, and social issues too volatile to mention (even in a post about race).

History? Ha! Good luck.

It’s not a pretty picture.

Equity and anti-racism are laudable goals, as were 100% Proficiency by 2014 and college-and-career-readiness. Equity, at least, may be better defined than proficiency and college-and-career-readiness ever were. But goals alone are never enough in the absence of real solutions to underlying problems. And when stakes are attached to those goals, the likely result is attempts to deny, distort, and dissemble rather than a systemic effort to achieve them.

Systemic problems, more importantly, cannot be solved by piecemeal solutions. And if the past is a predictor of the future, then piecemeal solutions are what we will adopt even in the face of a problem that has systemic in its name. In fact, we are already seeing this play out.

Looking for Solutions (and Love) In all the Wrong Places

As assessment specialists, it is natural and appropriate that we will focus our attention on improving the design, development, and use of tests and educational assessment. That’s our job. That’s why we’re here, and there is certainly plenty of room for improvement in educational assessment, so many things that can be done better, particularly with regard to policy.

It’s a problem on two fronts, however, if we go too far in overstating the amount that assessment and testing contribute to the problem, and consequently, overestimate the amount that improving them can contribute to the solution.

The first front is the familiar one that we have experienced for the past two decades, the failed approach in which testing is used as the primary lever of change.

The second front, much more pernicious than the first, is the one where tests are the scapegoat. The one where people are led to believe that “better” tests and testing policy can somehow eliminate existing achievement gaps. If we only assess the right things in the right way at the right time everything will be fine.

It baffles me when the same people who decry the disparities that systemic racism causes in health, wealth, living conditions, sense of safety and well-being – along with a host of other factors directly related to student achievement – then blame tests and testing for gaps in student achievement.

Better tests and testing policy are part of the solution. They’ll move the needle a little.

But not as much as better instruction.

Which won’t do as much as better schools.

Which won’t be as effective without better living conditions.

Which won’t occur without major structural changes.

We’ve known this forever.

We need the outcome to be different this time.

Systemic Racism and Chill

When most of us sit down to watch a show or read a book, we hope for a happy, satisfying ending. Most of all, however, we want an ending. Nothing is more unsatisfying than when Netflix suddenly cancels a series after two seasons – after we have become invested in it and after setting up all sorts of conflict and turmoil, they walk away leaving everything unresolved.

The same holds true, of course, in education. How have we felt each time we bought into a promising new intervention and initiative which was introduced with excitement and fanfare, endured the tremendous disruption it caused, only to see it fade away when the new superintendent, governor, or initiative comes along? Or when it just became too hard.

It has to be different this time.

We may not reach the finish line or the ultimate destination on our current journey, whatever that destination may be, but we cannot walk away with pieces of the psyche of students, teachers, and school communities strewn across the floor.

It is imperative that we commit to a third, fourth, or fifth season, whatever is needed to advance the story, because we are in a very precarious spot right now.

Image by Paul Brennan from Pixabay