VOLUME VI, CHAPTER 2, SECTION 8

VOLUME VI, CHAPTER 2, SECTION 8

The Yardstick of the Standardized Test: It Helps the Rich and Harms the Poor

At the end of the last section, we came to that yardstick set up in 1998, the statewide standardized test. It sorted schools into ranks, and stirred up that whole great commotion. This section is about that yardstick alone, and lays it bare for you from end to end. I have to tell you something that may take you by surprise. This yardstick of the standardized test flies the banner of one word, fairness, yet the thing it actually does is help the rich and harm the poor. How it helps the rich and harms the poor, this section peels back for you, layer by layer.

First, see how fair this yardstick looks on the outside. Every child in the state, the same test paper, the same way of testing, measured by the same yardstick. The test done, the scores lined up, who is high and who is low, plain as day. At first glance, is that not fair? No dividing by rich and poor, no asking about birth, everyone tests on their own merit, and the score is the score. Is there anything in the world fairer than that? That is the very thing that makes this yardstick so convincing. It wears the word fairness right on its face. Say it is unfair, and the first thing anyone shoots back is: the same test paper for everyone, how is that not fair?

Today, let me peel that skin of fairness off for you. Think, calmly, about one thing. With the same test paper set in front of them, what actually decides whether a child scores well or badly? On the surface, it is whether the child is clever, whether he works hard. But look one layer deeper, and what is truly straining behind the scenes is the kind of family standing behind each child.

Behind a rich family's child, what stands? He gets out of school and the best private tutor is there to give him one-on-one lessons. His weekends are spent in the most expensive cram schools. He finishes his homework, and his parents have all the time and all the learning in the world to sit with him, teach him, walk him through it. He does not have to spare a thought for how the household will get by. All his time, all his energy, is aimed straight at that test paper. And he lives in a good school district too. Why can they afford to live there? Because they have money, and can buy the house in that district. Behind a poor family's child, what stands? The cram school, he cannot afford. The good one-on-one tutor, he cannot hire. And his parents, most likely, are out working themselves half to death for the wages their labor earns, coming home too tired to want to say a word, with no time and no learning to sit with him over his lessons. He gets out of school and may have to help with work at home, mind his little brothers and sisters. He wants to work hard, but he does not have the conditions that rich family's child has.

Now sit these two children down in front of the same test paper. Tell me, that fair test paper, what does it measure? Does it measure which of these two children is cleverer, which works harder? No. What it measures is which of the two families behind them has more money. The rich family's child, carried by a full set of resources, scores near the top. The poor family's child, however clever, however hard-working, goes bare-handed against the other one's full suit of armor, and his score falls behind. Measured by the same paper, the result is: the ones with money come out on top, the ones without come out at the bottom. This yardstick is not measuring the children at all. It is measuring money.

And yet it wears that skin of fairness. It takes the advantage the rich already had, and with one test paper that is the same for everyone, stamps a seal on it and says: look, he scored high, he earned it on his merit; you scored low, that is because you are not good enough. It takes the plain unfairness that already stood between rich and poor, and washes it into everyone equal before the score. The poor family's child not only loses on the score, he gets, openly and above board, a seal stamped on him that says you are not good enough. Back where the chapters on law lay out their reasoning, there is a line worth setting here: an institution is very often a tool the strong use to hold down the weak, and the more it wears the skin of fairness, the more you have to watch it. This yardstick of the standardized test is a living example. It does not bully you unfairly out in the open. It uses a method that looks fairest of all to make the strong one's advantage lawful, and to turn the weak one's loss into something the weak one has only himself to blame for.

Once this yardstick has sorted high from low, it draws out a larger commotion still. The scores go up on the board, the schools are sorted into ranks, and right behind them, the houses get sorted into ranks too.

The reasoning is simple. Whichever school scores high, that district becomes the one everyone wants into, and the houses in that good district turn precious at once. The parents keep a clear ledger in their heads: if I can just move my family into this good district, my child can walk in the front door of this good school, above board. A house buys not only bricks and tiles; it buys a ticket into a good school. And so a great migration begins. The rich move. They sell the house they had, throw money into a house in the good district, move the family in, and put the child into that school ranked at the top. One family after another, the ones with means pour into the good districts. And this pouring in drives the housing prices in the good districts sky-high. A price that was once within reach gets driven, by the scramble to get in, higher and higher, until it is a figure ordinary families dare not even dream of.

And the poor? The poor want in too. What mother or father does not want their child in a good school? The poor stare longingly at the good district and want to squeeze in too. But they cannot. The housing in the good district has already been driven sky-high by the rich. The poor cannot buy it, and cannot even rent it. That ticket hangs there with its price marked plain, and the price marked is a figure the poor could not reach in a whole lifetime. He stands outside the door of the good district, and he can see inside, but he cannot get in.

Look at this one going in and the other shut out, and how it cuts. The rich, who had money to begin with, now, on the strength of that money, have moved into the good district and taken the good school, and their good has been piled higher with more good. The poor, who had no money to begin with, now have even the door of the good school shut fast against them by the price of the houses, and their hardship has been piled higher with more hardship. This yardstick, by this point, has dug the ditch between poor and rich a great deal deeper. First it used a fair test paper to sort the schools high and low. Then, on the strength of that high and low, it sorted the house prices high and low. And at the last, it used the sluice-gate of house prices to shut the poor, good and firm, outside the door of the good school. And those good schools in those good districts, more and more, became what kind of place? More and more they became schools for the children of the rich. In one school, the children seated are, to a one, from families who could afford the sky-high district houses. The poor family's child is sifted out by that sluice-gate of house prices.

By rights, a school should be the place that takes in the children of one area, rich and poor alike, and settles them all, this being the thing the last several sections kept setting up, that a school's number one job is to settle people, to catch them. But the great migration this yardstick drew out does the very opposite. It sorts the children, by rich and poor, into different schools. The rich children go into the good schools. The poor children stay in the schools no one wants to go to. A courtyard that should have taken in every child of the area regardless of rich or poor is split, alive, into two halves, one half for the rich, one half for the poor. And those poor families shut out, are they simply to accept it? To stand and watch their own children barred outside the good school? There are some who will not accept it. They love their children, and gritting their teeth, they mean to find a way to get their child into that good school. But they have no money in their hands, and cannot buy that ticket. The way they can come up with is another road, a road that pays with the child's character.

That way is to borrow an address. The poor family cannot buy the house in the good district, cannot get through that door. But what does the good school recognize? It recognizes an address. You live in this district, you can enroll. And so someone hits on the idea: I cannot move in, so I will borrow one. Borrow an address inside the good district, write it onto the enrollment form, and let the school believe this child lives in the district. The address is borrowed, is false. And the moment it is filed, this family has begun to lie.

But it is not only the grown-ups who lie. This child, from now on, carries a lie on his back. He has to remember that he lives in a place he has never lived. If the school should ask, if a teacher should check, if a classmate should ask where his home is, he has to keep the lie whole, he has to carry it on, together with the grown-ups. Picture it. A child of six, of seven, just about to step through the door of the school. The school, which should be the place that teaches him to be a person, the place from the last several sections that raises character and hands down that medicine of tormenting no one. And the very first thing he does stepping through that door, the first lesson he learns, is not how to be an honest person. It is how to tell a lie, and how to keep that lie from being found out. The first lesson of his life is to cheat.

And this cheating is not done once and finished. He has to cheat for years. From the day he enrolls, year after year, he has to guard this lie, keep this lie whole. Cheating becomes the ground color of his whole schooling. Cheating turns from a thing done wrong now and then into a thing he does every day, has to do, a thing as ordinary as a meal. Back a few sections ago we set up a virtue called good faith. Good faith is that your word counts, it is the bridge between people. And it was also said that once good faith is destroyed in a child from young, what is destroyed is more than this one child. Now look at what this yardstick of the standardized test, together with this great migration, does in the end. It is exactly this. It drives a poor family's child, from the age of six, onto the road of cheating. It destroys, with its own hands, this child's good faith, at the very root.

This is the cruelest, most people-wrecking thing this yardstick does. The harm it does the poor, from the two layers before, was in the dividing up, cannot afford the good school, cannot squeeze into the good district. Those harms are cruel enough. But those, after all, are things outside a person. The schooling missed, the money not earned, those can still be made up somewhere down the road. But the thing it does in this layer harms the inside of the child, the very root of his being a person. It drives this child, from the age when he should most be learning honesty, to learn to cheat. It drives him to cheat one year after another, until cheating is his nature, cheating is in his bones. A child driven to cheat from the age of six, cheating for a dozen years, grows up, very likely, into a genuine cheat. This is far crueler than robbing a person of a job. A job lost can be found again. But a person's character, handed down wrong from young, is very often wrong for life.

And worse still is yet to come. Back in the third section it was set up that handing down is people soaking into people, one generation soaking its lived life into the next. Good character is handed down this way, and so is bad character. This child, driven to cheat from young until it is his nature, will one day have children of his own. How will he raise them? What kind of person does he live out for his children to see? A person for whom cheating has become as ordinary as a meal soaks cheating into the next generation. And so cheating gets handed down, one generation to the next. The forever-cheat is not one person. It is a string of them, handed down along the chain, one generation into the next, a long string of them.

Turn it over and see how frightening it is. This yardstick, that holds up the banner of fairness and wants to raise up education, does, in solid fact, this: it hands down, at the root, the character of one generation of poor family's children after another, wrong, and hands out a string of forever-cheats, one after another. What it destroys is precisely the thing this whole chapter has been fighting to set up, character. It pulls, from the poor family's child, the one medicine that cures the hundred sicknesses of this world, clean out. And whose account is this to be charged to? Not to the poor families who borrowed the addresses. They were driven to it. They love their children too, they too want their children to grow up honest people, but this system drove them into a corner, drove them until the only road left was to pay with the child's character. They are the ones harmed. This account is to be charged to that yardstick, to the ones who set that yardstick up, and who watched it drive people to this, and who to this day will not take it down. It is they who took a thing that harms the poor, wrecks children, and hands down bad character, and called it fairness, called it a record of achievement, and propped it up there, year after year.

So at the close of this section, a heavy word: this yardstick of the standardized test should be taken down. What should a school use to take a child in? It should use that number one job from the last several sections, settling people close to home. Wherever a child lives, he goes to the school at his own front door, rich and poor alike taken in, all settled well, all raised into people of character who do not torment. No yardstick for measuring rich and poor. No sluice-gate built out of house prices. No driving of any child, from the age of six, to learn to cheat. Take this yardstick down, and return the school to what it was, a courtyard that takes in rich and poor alike, settles them close to home, and puts its whole heart into raising character, and a poor family's child will no longer be driven to pay with the very root of his being a person. The next section moves the eye from the school to the stage, the radio, and the television, and sets up a rule that guards the people at the very bottom.

Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.