Make Trump break the law.

"Why bother? He'll just ignore the courts." 

I'd say that's dumb, but that used to be me. Okay, it is dumb. And besides, I've changed my mind.

Challenging the Trump regime in court is meaningful even if, when he loses, he goes on to defy the ruling of that court. When courts rule against him, and he does it anyway, he is a criminal breaking the law. If he wants to do crazy shit, the least we can do is make it illegal.

It has been profoundly frustrating to watch as Donald Trump has evaded accountability. From the grifting and self-enrichment of the first Trump administration, to the two impeachment results, to the piles of stolen boxes piled in the loo at Mar-a-Lago, it has felt like he's laughing at the United States and at all of us. Suckers and Losers, I guess.

Now, with the immunity invented by the Supreme Court in Trump v. United States not even a year ago, it sometimes feels as if we've been transported to a different country in a different time, a place it is becoming hard to recognize.

The Supreme Court's decision, which Mark Joseph Stern writing for Slate described as having "no basis in the Constitution as written," was ostensibly in response to Trump's indictment for attempts to subvert the 2020 election. A lot of analysts at the time focused on the impact of the decision on Trump's various indictments, and on the Government's authority to prosecute a former president for conduct while in office. Unfortunately, that is not the problem we have now. 

Others people, beginning with Justice Sotomayor in her razor-sharp dissent, foresaw the world we now inhabit.  In fact, Stern warned in that same article:

The immediate impact of the court’s sweeping decision will be devastating enough, allowing Donald Trump to evade accountability for the most destructive and criminal efforts he took to overturn the 2020 election. But the long-term impact is even more harrowing. It is unclear, after Monday’s decision, what constitutional checks remain to stop any president from assuming dangerous and monarchical powers that are anathema to representative government. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor put it in her terrified and terrifying dissent, “the President is now a king above the law.”

As predicted, the decision has emboldened Trump 2 to enthusiastically expand his power grab. Now we live in a world where people are being illegally abducted off the streets by masked officials and illegally disappeared. Where legally constituted agencies are being illegally demolished. Where legal U.S. citizens are being illegally detained and sometimes deported. For an interactive look at the carnage, you can look in here. Or just watch the news.

It can be depressing. It definitely can be discouraging. Still, I think the lamest take on social media is whatever version of "Why bother? He'll just ignore the courts." 

First, even though he has thus far been able to evade some orders, some damage has been mitigated. Firings have been barred and rehires have been ordered. Funds have been unfrozen. I'm not a lawyer, but there are very good ones fighting Trump and winning: Marc Elias and the Elias Law Group, Lee Gelernt and the lawyers at the ACLU, Norm Eisen and the team at Democracy Defenders Action, the lawyers fighting for Harvard and the ones at Perkins Coie, Jenner & Block, WilmerHale and Susman Godfrey and many others. We're not in this alone.

Yes, many of these cases will end up before a very Trump-friendly Supreme Court, and rulings will be overturned and orders vacated. And that will be bad, but bad enough to give up trying? Right now there doesn't feel like there's a lot we can do to stop Trump, but one thing we can do is fight him in court for as long as the courts last. If we're going to bitch about Democrats not doing everything conceivable to thwart Trump, we cannot say the courts don't matter.

And if the Supreme Court is going to make shit up in order to give Trump what he wants so they get what they want, make them. Make them do the wrong thing. I'm not saying they're going to pay for it, but at least we continue to recognize the difference. 

Now I get why folks want to withdraw. It comes in waves of outrage and feels overwhelming. But using "It's pointless" as an excuse is the coward's way out. As for me, I'm pissed off that I have to spend the last decades of my life fighting against this asshole and his gallery of goons and hate-trolls. But resistance is never futile, and fighting back is never pointless, and I'm glad I'm still alive to do it. 

 

Back to the courts. Yeah, the Trump regime might end up ignoring court orders. But there is real value in forcing Trump to break the law. When courts rule against him, and he does it anyway, he is a criminal breaking the law. If they don't rule against him, or if no case is brought in the first place because "he'll just ignore the courts anyway," what he's doing becomes the new law. 

And even if he wins at the Supreme Court, even after multiple losses in lower courts, because the Supreme Court is corrupt and hell bent on gambling that we'll probably survive the present disaster as long as they get to rewrite the Constitution and remake the government in their preferred ideological image, there will be a record of the Court aiding and abetting Trump's unconstitutional behavior and criminality. A record on which to rely if we can ever muster the courage to expand the Court and reverse its own very special brand of lawlessness.

I'm not naive enough to believe there must be some kind of reckoning coming, a Truth and Reconciliation Commission or Nuremburg trials. I haven't a clue what will be left of us when this is over. It's just that, if we don't force Trump to break the law, he becomes the law instead of the criminal he is.

Make the Trump regime do the wrong thing. Otherwise we just let them do it and pretend it was right.

Time flies. This is from a couple of years ago. A lot has changed, but most of the important stuff hasn't. Alas.

The way the political world in the United States is now constituted, power is a zero sum game. There is no compromise. One side will act and exist, the other will fail to act and disappear. We must act or we don't exist. 

Until we do the good things the Republicans want to stop, and until we stop the bad things Republicans want to do, the existence of the Democratic Party is purely theoretical. If we don't do it now, the party and the republic will be merely historical.

Reposting this from June of 2022. Inspired by A.R. Moxon

A.R. Moxon @JuliusGoat writes the independent publication The Reframe. He's a wonderful, sharp writer and you should check out his work if you're not already familiar with it. His latest, "Lying to Fascists," discusses the trend of American fascists publicly rejecting democracy and law and declaring their vision for the future of the country. 

Using examples from Harrison Butker's Handmaid's Tale medley of nostalgic misogyny and racism, to Texas governor Greg Abbott's big heart for the right kind of murderers, to Supreme Court Justice(?!) Sam Alito finally coming out of the MAGA closet, Moxon makes the case that, with the threat level hovering somewhere between SEVERE and CRITICAL, now might be a good time to stop giving "[t]hese Americans who want to kill Americans" all this quaint credit for good faith and the benefit of the doubt.

Instead, he warns (emphasis mine):

Either they get their way, and society is no longer accessible to most of us, or they don't, and everyone including them gets to access society. Therefore, I think they shouldn't get their way or be treated as if they should. These are people who intend to destroy whatever they need to in order to rule over our lives to secure their own personal enrichment and comfort, and are so confident in their success that they announce their intent. They do not care about you, and they certainly do not care about your good faith efforts beyond the extent to which they make it easier for them to seize control. They will never give you credit for working to find their rationales reasonable. They will never return the benefit of the doubt you extend. Our mission is not finding ways to work with them. Our mission is finding ways to sabotage their efforts and to keep their targets as safe from them as we can.

It should be clear by now that the fascists will do anything to achieve their aim of power and control. There is no limit. And they will not stop. They can only be stopped, but only if we have the awareness and the willingness to do what needs to be done.

Moxon's piece is a good one and offers some principles and specific strategies for how we might go about saving the Republic. I encourage you to read it.

When I did, it inspired me and reminded me of this one of mine from June of '22. 

"This time, it's political."

This is going to be part rant, part call for help, and it's going to be long. If you want, you can tune back in next week for a regularly scheduled post on charter schools.  But if we don't deal with this it won't even matter.

I try not to write explicitly about politics in this blog. It's probably a holdover from my teaching days when I avoided sharing my politics with students. I was trying to teach them to think for themselves, after all.

So when a student would ask who I supported or voted for, I would often just give them what I stood for and let them figure it out.

"I'm for high taxes on the rich, assistance for the poor, less funding for the police and military and more funding for schools and libraries and parks and transit. I support DREAM, DACA, amnesty, and a path to citizenship for anybody who wants it. I'm against putting kids in cages. I'm for clean energy and at least trying to save our lives on this planet."

That usually did the trick. They got the picture. 

I don't have students to worry about anymore, and I've changed my mind about this blog--at least for now. I need to talk to you about politics.

The school battles we're fighting today, over "CRT," LGBTQ+ rights, identity inclusiveness and trans kids, "parent rights" and banned books and school "choice" and school funding and teachers unions and whether to do anything about what-the-fuck actual murders of school children are, of course, fundamentally political. And, fundamentally, they are part of the same big war we're fighting over voting rights and police reform and climate change. It's a war that has only two sides.

The Republican Party, one of the two major political parties operating in the United States is despicable, and the people who love them and work for them are despicable, too. Some of my friends say they're crazy but they are not crazy. Their fans may be nuts, but the Republican Party and the apparatchiks who do damage on a national-now-global scale are perfectly rational. 

Their actions serve a strategic purpose: holding on to power. In their drive for political power, Republicans and their media cheerleaders have cultivated a constituency addicted to conspiracy and grievance and the taste of blood. The party is now completely devoted to supplying their acolytes with enough rage to keep them coming back for more. 

On the other hand, the Democratic Party is in love with its own virtue. It's dedicated to preserving a romantic narrative of democracy and bipartisanship, and the fiction that if only we make the best argument in a nice way we will persuade our adversaries (don't say enemies) and win the day. Or maybe there's nothing we can do because the Senate. Or maybe the Constitution. 

This will not last forever. We will either become all one thing, or all the other.

In order to survive, we have to act, and our first act has to be telling the truth about Republicans. Every time we or our elected leaders (Senator Schumer? Mr. President?) make believe that Republicans are like us, that they care about the country or *regular folks* or anything in the universe except power, we lose a battle and they win one. 

They weaponize our credulousness as proof of our impotence and they are not wrong. And when they do, their numbers grow and a few more of us give up and stay home, convinced our leaders don't see what we see or know what we know. 

The president, the vice, from the White House podium, on national tv, they need to say it, out loud and every time. Every member of Congress, every governor, state legislator, city council and school board member at every rally, in every interview, needs to tell the truth: 

As long as Republicans believe that people who disagree with them are illegitimate, that guns > children's lives, that elections they lose are fraudulent, that crimes they commit are not crimes, that climate change is a hoax, or that history ought to be a soft pillow for racists and the truth is a matter of opinion, there are no good Republicans. 

For those of you thinking, "Bullshit. I'm a Republican and I don't believe those things," you are deluding yourselves and you should stop. Tell the truth: Either you do believe those things, in which case you're a terrible person and fuck you, or you are no longer a Republican. Congratulations.

Telling the truth is not easy and getting people to listen is ten times harder in this  putrid media backwash where corporations whose mission should be to inform us have defaulted to predetermined narratives; faulty assumptions; and timid, shrugging commentary when they aren't snickering and rolling their eyes.

The media--both Big and Social--take for granted that Republicans will obstruct. What did you expect? The reporters bat their eyes and swoon over the big, strong Rs who never give an inch while shaking their heads and snickering at the "we wanted to" Ds for even trying. Silly geese. More on this to come. 

So what can we do? We need the news. Democrats need networks to interview us and invite us on shows and ask us questions and cover campaigns and spotlight our issues. We know we can't depend on the media to be fair or shrewd, and we can't count on them to rise above their both-sides horse race "journalism." Still, facts do not speak for themselves. Facts have to be spoken by someone. 

So when the media fails and falls back on their assumptions and tired tropes, we need to push back. For most of us, that might look like the simple civic engagement that almost nobody does. For example, every time we see a ridiculous, mis-framed article in The New York Times or a vapid false equivalency on MSNBC or CNN, you and I can write letters (does anyone still?) and send emails and call our media faves to hold them to account. We can call out our local papers and radio stations. We can complain louder and louder until they hear us or hang up. We can cancel subscriptions. 

Every time one of our representatives in government does an interview where the news personality starts with "Why can't Democrats..." they need to confront that reporter and challenge the premise of the question. Everybody on the planet should understand the formula by now. We need to push back on the notion that it's our job to make the Republicans better people. We just need to beat them.

Every time Democrats tell the truth about Republicans instead of pretending they are like us, we win. We need to support candidates who will tell the truth in the White House and in Congress, but also for city council and school board where we need to show up to meetings and tell the truth ourselves. All of us can tell the truth in posts online and we can follow other people who do. We can tell our friends and our families (ouch!) the truth about Republicans especially if they are Republicans. Remember when your racist buddy used to send you racist shit about Obama? We can make our friends crazy with the actual truth. 

Honesty is an act of war. Each moment of truth is an attack on the life of the liars. Words alone won't stop the Republicans, but the truth is a prerequisite for victory. 

Now some really bad news. It's not just politics anymore. Republicans today are not only bent on the elimination of all opposition political-cultural-historical-pastoral, they and their party are armed and aimed at the entire tragically incomplete American project. All of their power-- cultural, economical, policial/judicial, as well as political-- is threatened by the prospect of an equitable, multi-racial democracy, and they mean to kill it. 

The Republican Party is a black hole at the center of our democracy. Built out of paranoia and anger, it depends for its survival on its ability to block light from getting through. Gun safety? Blocked. Voting rights? Blocked. Environmental protection? Renewable energy? Blocked. Police reform? Racial equity? Blocked. Economic justice, reproductive rights, workers rights, civil rights, business regulation, consumer protection, free and fair elections, the fucking post office? Forget about it. 

Obstruction works. It's how Medicare for All, Merrick Garland, and two impeachments were blocked. It's how George W. Bush became president, for fuck's sake. It's how eighteen-year-olds are able to buy weapons of war. Obstruction, blocking the aspirations of their foes is fundamental. It's the very core of minority power. 

Republican ideas, such as they are, are racist and hateful and generally unpopular, so the party only exists today as a nullifying force, material only to the extent it can stop progress and "own the libs." Which it does. Brilliantly. 

Under these circumstances, Republicans' refusal to compromise becomes existential. When Democrats pursue it we look weak and when we inevitably settle for a deal on their terms, we are the ones compromised. Look at the gun proposal that Senator Murphy and others had to beg for. I'm smart enough and old enough to know that something is better than nothing. But everyone knows that even if it ever gets written and if it ever gets passed, it won't be nearly adequate. 

That's why Democrats have to come out right now and say loudly and unambiguously that this is just a first step, that we are going to keep working for expanded background checks and a ban on the sale of war weapons. And I don't mean just the tens of thousands of us who marched yesterday, I mean Chris Murphy and Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden--the people who actually have a say in what we settle for. 

Otherwise, even before the game plays out where McConnell waits for things to cool off and for another story to dominate the news squirrel! and for Democratic leaders to give up, Rank-and-file Democrats are already disappointed and discouraged, largely because we don't have confidence that our reps will continue to fight for what we actually need.

Meanwhile, Republicans are gleeful that we have given them the opportunity to appear reasonable to The New York Times, while at the same time they are winking reassurances to the gun fetishists that nothing is going to change. Which gives them the chance to say they tried but We told you gun regulation wouldn't work.

There will never be genuine compromise from the Republicans because if the Republican Party were to allow actual, real progress, if even a little bit of light pierced the umbra, its structural integrity would fail and it would collapse. 

And don't even kid yourself: It's foolish to look for individual members to break free and "vote their consciences" or "do the right thing." Even setting aside the twin deviants Cheney and Kinsinger (Update: *Kinzinger), who in spite of their atrocious voting records have stood against their party (and been bounced as a result), the occasional unicorn won't overcome the filibuster, and where are we? No, their unity is essential to their power, and power is the only reason they exist. 

The Democratic Party is all that stands between the Republicans and the ending of American Democracy. And no matter how damaged and defective we are, what comes next is worse. We can't afford to waste our time taking each other apart. I know there's a fight among Democrats over whether our leaders are doing enough to earn the votes of would-be supporters. I get it. I've been in that fight, too. But, at least for now, it's the wrong fight. 

I voted for Al Gore. People who voted for Ralph Nader were wrong. I voted for Hillary Clinton. People who voted for Jill Stein and that Johnson guy were idiots. I voted for Biden. I wanted Warren. Others wanted Bernie--twice. People who didn't vote because they wanted somebody else don't understand how elections work. 

We shouldn't be accused of treason every time we criticize the party,  but there are only two sides in this fight. If the people we elected to fight for us are not prepared to do that, we'll get new ones. But we can't afford to sit it out.

Our only hope, and the only hope for the country, is to defeat all Republicans, and I don't just mean elect more Democrats. Obviously we need to do that; anyone who thinks the gun bill wouldn't be better if we had ten more Democrats in the Senate is deluded or trolling. But simply electing more Democrats is not enough if the ones we elect fail to act, even with the future of the country hanging in the balance. 

When I say Democrats need to defeat Republicans, I mean we need to destroy them. We have to smash them and their loathsome ideology. They are fascists. They are powerful and intensely committed. They will not quit. They will not be defeated by good intentions. 

Democrats need to do things. Being right, being the good guys, is not enough. People want wins. The Democratic Party needs to deliver. Every action we complete is a battle won. Every time we actually do something Republicans want to stop, or stop something they want to do, they lose a battle and a piece of their power.

Democrats don't need our elected leaders to deliver everything right now. We need our leaders to fight for everything, all the time. We need better gun safety measures. Fight for them. We need voter protections. You need to fight for them. We need legislation to save our lives on this planet. Fight! Sometimes it feels like you don't even think these things are important.

And don't hand us the bullshit "can't do it alone" and "we need more dems" excuses. We know that. We're voting for that. If you want people to keep fighting for you, if you want us to make calls, knock on doors, "chip in$10," if you want us to join, stand up together, resist, and March For Our Lives, you have to fight for us.

Every bill passed, debated or even introduced (Schumer!), every executive order signed (Biden! Defense Production Act! State of Emergency over firearms!), every postmaster general replaced (Mr. President, how in the hell can we not get this done?), every court case won, every seat flipped, every time we Run for Something and every time we win -- every righteous thing we DO, is a tiny little Gettysburg or Yorktown. Every time we "wanted to" or "wish we could have," or piss our "what if they do it back to us / they'll just undo it anyway" pants, the opposite is true. Right now we are losing the war.

The way the political world in the United States is now constituted, power is a zero sum game. There is no compromise. One side will act and exist, the other will fail to act and disappear. We must act or we don't exist. 

And all the fights over schools and libraries will be over. All the other fights, too.

Until we do the good things the Republicans want to stop and stop the bad things Republicans want to do, the existence of the Democratic Party is purely theoretical. If we don't do them soon, that existence will be merely allegorical.

Reposted, because we're still in the shit and we're running out of time and I can't think of another way to say "We're dying."

Sunday, May 19, 2024

Time flies. This is from a couple of years ago. A lot has changed, but most of the important stuff hasn't. Alas.

The way the political world in the United States is now constituted, power is a zero sum game. There is no compromise. One side will act and exist, the other will fail to act and disappear. We must act or we don't exist. 

Until we do the good things the Republicans want to stop, and until we stop the bad things Republicans want to do, the existence of the Democratic Party is purely theoretical. If we don't do it now, the party and the republic will be merely historical.

Reposting this from June of 2022. Inspired by A.R. Moxon

A.R. Moxon @JuliusGoat writes the independent publication The Reframe. He's a wonderful, sharp writer and you should check out his work if you're not already familiar with it. His latest, "Lying to Fascists," discusses the trend of American fascists publicly rejecting democracy and law and declaring their vision for the future of the country. 

Using examples from Harrison Butker's Handmaid's Tale medley of nostalgic misogyny and racism, to Texas governor Greg Abbott's big heart for the right kind of murderers, to Supreme Court Justice(?!) Sam Alito finally coming out of the MAGA closet, Moxon makes the case that, with the threat level hovering somewhere between SEVERE and CRITICAL, now might be a good time to stop giving "[t]hese Americans who want to kill Americans" all this quaint credit for good faith and the benefit of the doubt.

Instead, he warns (emphasis mine):

Either they get their way, and society is no longer accessible to most of us, or they don't, and everyone including them gets to access society. Therefore, I think they shouldn't get their way or be treated as if they should. These are people who intend to destroy whatever they need to in order to rule over our lives to secure their own personal enrichment and comfort, and are so confident in their success that they announce their intent. They do not care about you, and they certainly do not care about your good faith efforts beyond the extent to which they make it easier for them to seize control. They will never give you credit for working to find their rationales reasonable. They will never return the benefit of the doubt you extend. Our mission is not finding ways to work with them. Our mission is finding ways to sabotage their efforts and to keep their targets as safe from them as we can.

It should be clear by now that the fascists will do anything to achieve their aim of power and control. There is no limit. And they will not stop. They can only be stopped, but only if we have the awareness and the willingness to do what needs to be done.

Moxon's piece is a good one and offers some principles and specific strategies for how we might go about saving the Republic. I encourage you to read it.

When I did, it inspired me and reminded me of this one of mine from June of '22. 

"This time, it's political."

This is going to be part rant, part call for help, and it's going to be long. If you want, you can tune back in next week for a regularly scheduled post on charter schools.  But if we don't deal with this it won't even matter.

I try not to write explicitly about politics in this blog. It's probably a holdover from my teaching days when I avoided sharing my politics with students. I was trying to teach them to think for themselves, after all.

So when a student would ask who I supported or voted for, I would often just give them what I stood for and let them figure it out.

"I'm for high taxes on the rich, assistance for the poor, less funding for the police and military and more funding for schools and libraries and parks and transit. I support DREAM, DACA, amnesty, and a path to citizenship for anybody who wants it. I'm against putting kids in cages. I'm for clean energy and at least trying to save our lives on this planet."

That usually did the trick. They got the picture. 

I don't have students to worry about anymore, and I've changed my mind about this blog--at least for now. I need to talk to you about politics.

The school battles we're fighting today, over "CRT," LGBTQ+ rights, identity inclusiveness and trans kids, "parent rights" and banned books and school "choice" and school funding and teachers unions and whether to do anything about what-the-fuck actual murders of school children are, of course, fundamentally political. And, fundamentally, they are part of the same big war we're fighting over voting rights and police reform and climate change. It's a war that has only two sides.

The Republican Party, one of the two major political parties operating in the United States is despicable, and the people who love them and work for them are despicable, too. Some of my friends say they're crazy but they are not crazy. Their fans may be nuts, but the Republican Party and the apparatchiks who do damage on a national-now-global scale are perfectly rational. 

Their actions serve a strategic purpose: holding on to power. In their drive for political power, Republicans and their media cheerleaders have cultivated a constituency addicted to conspiracy and grievance and the taste of blood. The party is now completely devoted to supplying their acolytes with enough rage to keep them coming back for more. 

On the other hand, the Democratic Party is in love with its own virtue. It's dedicated to preserving a romantic narrative of democracy and bipartisanship, and the fiction that if only we make the best argument in a nice way we will persuade our adversaries (don't say enemies) and win the day. Or maybe there's nothing we can do because the Senate. Or maybe the Constitution. 

This will not last forever. We will either become all one thing, or all the other.

In order to survive, we have to act, and our first act has to be telling the truth about Republicans. Every time we or our elected leaders (Senator Schumer? Mr. President?) make believe that Republicans are like us, that they care about the country or *regular folks* or anything in the universe except power, we lose a battle and they win one. 

They weaponize our credulousness as proof of our impotence and they are not wrong. And when they do, their numbers grow and a few more of us give up and stay home, convinced our leaders don't see what we see or know what we know. 

The president, the vice, from the White House podium, on national tv, they need to say it, out loud and every time. Every member of Congress, every governor, state legislator, city council and school board member at every rally, in every interview, needs to tell the truth: 

As long as Republicans believe that people who disagree with them are illegitimate, that guns > children's lives, that elections they lose are fraudulent, that crimes they commit are not crimes, that climate change is a hoax, or that history ought to be a soft pillow for racists and the truth is a matter of opinion, there are no good Republicans. 

For those of you thinking, "Bullshit. I'm a Republican and I don't believe those things," you are deluding yourselves and you should stop. Tell the truth: Either you do believe those things, in which case you're a terrible person and fuck you, or you are no longer a Republican. Congratulations.

Telling the truth is not easy and getting people to listen is ten times harder in this  putrid media backwash where corporations whose mission should be to inform us have defaulted to predetermined narratives; faulty assumptions; and timid, shrugging commentary when they aren't snickering and rolling their eyes.

The media--both Big and Social--take for granted that Republicans will obstruct. What did you expect? The reporters bat their eyes and swoon over the big, strong Rs who never give an inch while shaking their heads and snickering at the "we wanted to" Ds for even trying. Silly geese. More on this to come. 

So what can we do? We need the news. Democrats need networks to interview us and invite us on shows and ask us questions and cover campaigns and spotlight our issues. We know we can't depend on the media to be fair or shrewd, and we can't count on them to rise above their both-sides horse race "journalism." Still, facts do not speak for themselves. Facts have to be spoken by someone. 

So when the media fails and falls back on their assumptions and tired tropes, we need to push back. For most of us, that might look like the simple civic engagement that almost nobody does. For example, every time we see a ridiculous, mis-framed article in The New York Times or a vapid false equivalency on MSNBC or CNN, you and I can write letters (does anyone still?) and send emails and call our media faves to hold them to account. We can call out our local papers and radio stations. We can complain louder and louder until they hear us or hang up. We can cancel subscriptions. 

Every time one of our representatives in government does an interview where the news personality starts with "Why can't Democrats..." they need to confront that reporter and challenge the premise of the question. Everybody on the planet should understand the formula by now. We need to push back on the notion that it's our job to make the Republicans better people. We just need to beat them.

Every time Democrats tell the truth about Republicans instead of pretending they are like us, we win. We need to support candidates who will tell the truth in the White House and in Congress, but also for city council and school board where we need to show up to meetings and tell the truth ourselves. All of us can tell the truth in posts online and we can follow other people who do. We can tell our friends and our families (ouch!) the truth about Republicans especially if they are Republicans. Remember when your racist buddy used to send you racist shit about Obama? We can make our friends crazy with the actual truth. 

Honesty is an act of war. Each moment of truth is an attack on the life of the liars. Words alone won't stop the Republicans, but the truth is a prerequisite for victory. 

Now some really bad news. It's not just politics anymore. Republicans today are not only bent on the elimination of all opposition political-cultural-historical-pastoral, they and their party are armed and aimed at the entire tragically incomplete American project. All of their power-- cultural, economical, policial/judicial, as well as political-- is threatened by the prospect of an equitable, multi-racial democracy, and they mean to kill it. 

The Republican Party is a black hole at the center of our democracy. Built out of paranoia and anger, it depends for its survival on its ability to block light from getting through. Gun safety? Blocked. Voting rights? Blocked. Environmental protection? Renewable energy? Blocked. Police reform? Racial equity? Blocked. Economic justice, reproductive rights, workers rights, civil rights, business regulation, consumer protection, free and fair elections, the fucking post office? Forget about it. 

Obstruction works. It's how Medicare for All, Merrick Garland, and two impeachments were blocked. It's how George W. Bush became president, for fuck's sake. It's how eighteen-year-olds are able to buy weapons of war. Obstruction, blocking the aspirations of their foes is fundamental. It's the very core of minority power. 

Republican ideas, such as they are, are racist and hateful and generally unpopular, so the party only exists today as a nullifying force, material only to the extent it can stop progress and "own the libs." Which it does. Brilliantly. 

Under these circumstances, Republicans' refusal to compromise becomes existential. When Democrats pursue it we look weak and when we inevitably settle for a deal on their terms, we are the ones compromised. Look at the gun proposal that Senator Murphy and others had to beg for. I'm smart enough and old enough to know that something is better than nothing. But everyone knows that even if it ever gets written and if it ever gets passed, it won't be nearly adequate. 

That's why Democrats have to come out right now and say loudly and unambiguously that this is just a first step, that we are going to keep working for expanded background checks and a ban on the sale of war weapons. And I don't mean just the tens of thousands of us who marched yesterday, I mean Chris Murphy and Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden--the people who actually have a say in what we settle for. 

Otherwise, even before the game plays out where McConnell waits for things to cool off and for another story to dominate the news squirrel! and for Democratic leaders to give up, Rank-and-file Democrats are already disappointed and discouraged, largely because we don't have confidence that our reps will continue to fight for what we actually need.

Meanwhile, Republicans are gleeful that we have given them the opportunity to appear reasonable to The New York Times, while at the same time they are winking reassurances to the gun fetishists that nothing is going to change. Which gives them the chance to say they tried but We told you gun regulation wouldn't work.

There will never be genuine compromise from the Republicans because if the Republican Party were to allow actual, real progress, if even a little bit of light pierced the umbra, its structural integrity would fail and it would collapse. 

And don't even kid yourself: It's foolish to look for individual members to break free and "vote their consciences" or "do the right thing." Even setting aside the twin deviants Cheney and Kinsinger (Update: *Kinzinger), who in spite of their atrocious voting records have stood against their party (and been bounced as a result), the occasional unicorn won't overcome the filibuster, and where are we? No, their unity is essential to their power, and power is the only reason they exist. 

The Democratic Party is all that stands between the Republicans and the ending of American Democracy. And no matter how damaged and defective we are, what comes next is worse. We can't afford to waste our time taking each other apart. I know there's a fight among Democrats over whether our leaders are doing enough to earn the votes of would-be supporters. I get it. I've been in that fight, too. But, at least for now, it's the wrong fight. 

I voted for Al Gore. People who voted for Ralph Nader were wrong. I voted for Hillary Clinton. People who voted for Jill Stein and that Johnson guy were idiots. I voted for Biden. I wanted Warren. Others wanted Bernie--twice. People who didn't vote because they wanted somebody else don't understand how elections work. 

We shouldn't be accused of treason every time we criticize the party,  but there are only two sides in this fight. If the people we elected to fight for us are not prepared to do that, we'll get new ones. But we can't afford to sit it out.

Our only hope, and the only hope for the country, is to defeat all Republicans, and I don't just mean elect more Democrats. Obviously we need to do that; anyone who thinks the gun bill wouldn't be better if we had ten more Democrats in the Senate is deluded or trolling. But simply electing more Democrats is not enough if the ones we elect fail to act, even with the future of the country hanging in the balance. 

When I say Democrats need to defeat Republicans, I mean we need to destroy them. We have to smash them and their loathsome ideology. They are fascists. They are powerful and intensely committed. They will not quit. They will not be defeated by good intentions. 

Democrats need to do things. Being right, being the good guys, is not enough. People want wins. The Democratic Party needs to deliver. Every action we complete is a battle won. Every time we actually do something Republicans want to stop, or stop something they want to do, they lose a battle and a piece of their power.

Democrats don't need our elected leaders to deliver everything right now. We need our leaders to fight for everything, all the time. We need better gun safety measures. Fight for them. We need voter protections. You need to fight for them. We need legislation to save our lives on this planet. Fight! Sometimes it feels like you don't even think these things are important.

And don't hand us the bullshit "can't do it alone" and "we need more dems" excuses. We know that. We're voting for that. If you want people to keep fighting for you, if you want us to make calls, knock on doors, "chip in$10," if you want us to join, stand up together, resist, and March For Our Lives, you have to fight for us.

Every bill passed, debated or even introduced (Schumer!), every executive order signed (Biden! Defense Production Act! State of Emergency over firearms!), every postmaster general replaced (Mr. President, how in the hell can we not get this done?), every court case won, every seat flipped, every time we Run for Something and every time we win -- every righteous thing we DO, is a tiny little Gettysburg or Yorktown. Every time we "wanted to" or "wish we could have," or piss our "what if they do it back to us / they'll just undo it anyway" pants, the opposite is true. Right now we are losing the war.

The way the political world in the United States is now constituted, power is a zero sum game. There is no compromise. One side will act and exist, the other will fail to act and disappear. We must act or we don't exist. 

And all the fights over schools and libraries will be over. All the other fights, too.

Until we do the good things the Republicans want to stop and stop the bad things Republicans want to do, the existence of the Democratic Party is purely theoretical. If we don't do them soon, that existence will be merely allegorical.

One good thing.

In my last post, which was a while ago, I wrote: : "There is a real, if messy, pro-democracy movement in the United States. The official leadership of the Democratic Party just isn't part of it. We need new management."

Some things have changed since then, and some things haven't. Democratic leadership did rise to this particular occasion by (so far) refusing to strike a shitty, illusory deal, and instead allowing  Republicans to shut down the Government and at least symbolically "defund" the murder mayhem machine. True, the regime is stealing funding approved by Congress for other purposes and redirecting it to their Secret Police and other favored horrors, but that's them breaking the law. As I've written before, there is value in forcing them to break the law in order to do the things they want to do.

Also, I still think the "health care health care health care" strategy is limited and could, under a more strategic regime, box the Dems into providing votes for a phantom deal. However, it is working right now and the Government is "unfunded" as we speak. It's not a perfect plan, but anything that makes dictatorship more difficult for them is worth doing. Sand in the gears, resist at all levels, make it hurt. And we know it's causing Mike Johnson and Republicans at least some pain because the Republican shutdown has got them pretending to care about someone else's pain, in this case the people they are not paying and the people they are throwing out of their jobs altogether.

So let's put this to rest right now: Every single one of the firings we are seeing was written on Project 2025 stone tablets well before Trump2 stumbled into the now-gold-plated office. 

Democrats should reset their talking points to include: 

1. Republicans run the entire Government. If Government isn't running, it's the Republicans not running it. 

2. Republicans blaming Dems for the firings of workers or shuttering of agencies or impending plane crashes is fucking ridiculous. The destruction they are visiting on the country--including the illegal firings--was inevitable once Trump was re-elected.

Republicans and so-called Conservatives have been working on and planning to and salivating over gutting the federal government for years. Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 was in the works in 2022, and its little brother, Trump's Agenda 47, oozed out of the cesspit the next year (Go back and take a look if you have the stomach for it; yes, he did in fact tell us exactly what he planned to do. Anyone pretending they "didn't vote for this" is either lying, delusional, or too stupid to live free. And anyone pretending that the pretenders aren't pretending should not be listened to). Grover Norquist joined Ronald Reagan's "Government is the problem" team in the 1980's. Point is, this is a decades-long project and Dems got nothing to do with it.

There is literally NOTHING any of us can NOT do that will keep them from doing what they want to do, intend to do, have already planned to do anyway. They will never stop. We will have to DO THINGS to stop them. 

And any Democrats wobbling over ridiculous Republican accusations (every accusation is a confession) or soggy "Won't Democrats pay a price?" questions from NewsBots or pointing fingers at other Dems for being too much or not enough, should be fired into the sun and replaced with humans who understand the war we're fighting and the battlefield on which we're fighting it.

So we have done this. We have called and written our leaders and they have, so far, stood strong in this one battle. We'll see about tomorrow.

The War On Teachers Part Two: Working Conditions - Testing. Obviously.

I've written several times about the savage testing regime that has gripped U.S. education the last twenty-plus years and about the bogus data it generates. This post looks specifically at how testing and its diabolical siblings, standards (generally some iteration of the Common Core Standards) and accountability (h/t Steve Nelson via @nancyflanagan), function as weapons in the War On Teachers. 

Testing stands at the center of the evil trinity--standards, testing, and accountability--and acts as a transformer taking the energy stored as potential in the standards and delivering it as kinetic in the sorting system of accountability, a system whereby certain students, teachers, and schools are glorified and the rest labeled as "failing" and punished.

It's a crazy circular shell game where each part of the trinity only exists because of the other two, and underneath it all is the assumption that teachers are not doing their jobs. 

We need standards because teachers are not teaching.

We need tests because we have standards.

We need scores because we have tests.

We need rankings because we have scores.

We need consequences because the scores "prove" teachers are not teaching.

Rinse. Repeat.

• We want to look like we're serious about education so we need to ensure teachers are teaching. 
• Therefore we create standards so we can hold students, teachers, and schools accountable. 
• Then we test to see if students are meeting the standards. 
• We use the scores to punish teachers and schools for not meeting the standards we created. 
• See? We are serious about education!

How does this cerberus of testing function as a weapon in the War On Teachers?

1. It narrows the curriculum.

The devotion to Big Standardized Testing (h/t Peter Greene @palan57) strangles the curriculum leaving only certain kinds of knowledge, expressed only in prescribed ways, as legitimate--and measured. 

As Alfie Kohn described it in 2001: "From high-quality high school electives to focused discussions of current events (such as last November’s historic election), some of the richest learning opportunities are being squeezed out."

To defend standardized testing, you are likely to hear some version of business management guru Peter Drucker’s assertion that “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” I once heard “We measure what we value,” which I thought was ridiculous because my students and I valued respect, collaboration, flexibility, curiosity, creativity, humor, persistence, and lots of other things depending on the day. 

None of these ever showed up on the standardized exams--not that I’m discussing what did show up because, of course, that would be breaking the oath they make us all sign to protect the market share and business model of testing companies.

We value what we test because we can easily measure it. Over the last two decades, schools have come to value only what they measure, and we've mostly only measured English and math. Not art. Not theater. Not music. Not dance. Not even history. In California we dabble with science (though not in the Big Smarter Balanced "SBAC" Summatives), but only because, when reminded that the testing is flawed because we only test English and math, their answer was "Then let's find a way to test more."

All this testing results in an impoverished curriculum, not simply in the subjects emphasized but also in the broader, more potent sense of "curriculum" which considers "all aspects and dimensions of the educational experiences which pupils have during any period of formal education, and of their underlying principles and rationale" (A.V. Kelley, The Curriculum: Theory and Practice).

The Standards that dictate curriculum are bad enough in and of themselves, but once they are run through the test compactor things only get worse. From Peter Greene in 2019:

In Florida, as in all states, it is not the standards that drive curriculum--it is the Big Standardized Test. For example, the Common Core language standards include standards that address speaking and listening, but nobody worries about aligning to those standards because they won't be on the test. The standards about reading literature could be met by doing deep dives into complete works, but that's not how most schools are teaching those standards, because that's not how they're assessed on the Big Standardized Test.

I would argue--and have--that the Standards are like air cover for the BS Test blitz. The Enemies of Public Schooling and their collaborators invented a rationale--Common Core--then they use it to justify the entire testing-industrial complex.

An important 2007 report written by JenniferMcMurrer for the Center on Education Policy and based on CEP's "nationally representative survey of 349 responding school districts"  found that "about 62% of districts reported that they have increased time for English language arts (ELA) and/or math in elementary schools since school year 2001-02 (the year NCLB was enacted), and more than 20% reported increasing time for these subjects in middle school since then." 

In order "[t]o  accommodate this increased time in ELA and math," the report found that "44% of districts reported cutting time from one or more other subjects or activities (social studies, science, art and music, physical education, lunch and/or recess) at the elementary level." 

Corresponding data from middle and high school was not included, likely because of the lack of schedule flexibility and graduation requirements.

However, the study did take note of important changes taking place beyond elementary school. Describing a table titled "Changed Their Curriculum to Put More Emphasis on Content and Skills Covered on State Tests Used for NCLB," researchers found that "[a]t the middle school level, about 43% of districts reported that they have changed the English language arts curriculum to a great extent, and 42% said they have changed the math curriculum to a great extent to put greater emphasis on tested content and skills." And "[t]he responses were very similar in these subjects at the high school level."

Just a note: The percentage of districts reporting some level of curriculum shift was 90%.

Additional notes: The shift toward time spent on tested subjects was significantly greater in "districts with at least one school identified for NCLB improvement." Furthermore, "Districts with at least one school in improvement also reported in greater proportions than districts without schools in improvement that they have decreased time in social studies, science, and art and music." (emphasis mine)

And the curriculum has not just gotten narrower, but thinner as well as schools have devoted more time to test prep "and skills covered on the state tests used for NCLB."

In his study titled “High-Stakes Testing and Curricular Control: A Qualitative Metasynthesis” published in Educational Researcher in 2007, author Dr. Wayne Au has this to say:

"The primary effect of high-stakes testing is that curricular content is narrowed to tested subjects, subject area knowledge is fragmented into test-related pieces, and teachers increase the use of teacher-centered pedagogies." 

Of course, you know this. It was true in the mid-2000s and it's true today. Whatever Common Core may have meant in the imaginations of hopeful teachers and some of its architects ("designed to help students grow as thinkers"), when standards are fed into the Big Standardized Testing Pulverizer, teachers are often left "bereft of joy in their profession."

There is no dimension of the curriculum--not the formal curriculum, not the informal, not the hidden curriculum, not the planned curriculum and not the received curriculum, that is not negatively impacted by our testing obsession. And because of the incessant focus on two specific areas, English and mathematics, all other dimensions of schooling, from social studies to chess club, suffer from atrophy until they shrivel up and die.

All this is to say that no, it's not a dream. The testing monster really has eaten a lot of what we used to call school and a lot of what students used to love about it. For the best teachers, those who don't believe that the things on the Big Standardized Test are the only things worth learning, who believe that we are being stripped of something valuable beyond words, it's nearly impossible to endure. 

2. Testing is a huge time suck.

Not only has testing narrowed the curriculum by shifting instructional time to tested subjects, the tests themselves and the attendant preparation for them devours whole weeks of class time. 

Teachers are profoundly aware that simply getting to know 30+ human beings (times five, at least) and getting them pointed in a meaningful direction and figuring out what each of them needs in order to make progress in that direction--takes every minute of every day. 

Now ask teachers to spend a large chunk of that time going in an entirely different direction and you know what they have? A lot less time.

For example, a 2015 study from the Council of the Great City Schools, which describes itself as a coalition that "brings together 78 of [the] nation’s largest urban public school systems," found that "In the 2014-15 school year, 401 unique tests were administered across subjects in the [then] 66 Great City School systems" and that "Students in the 66 districts were required to take an average of 112.3 tests between pre-K and grade 12." This number did not include "optional tests" or other teacher- or school-developed tests.

An average eighth grader spent over four days taking these mandated tests, and that "does not include [extra] time to administer or prepare for testing, nor does it include sample, optional, and special-population testing," which anyone can tell you is where the majority of time is spent. The actual number of days testing is bad, especially since many of the tests have no time limits, and running into weeks of make-up testing compelled by the pressure to be sure schools aren't playing games and every single student is tested. 

LAUSD is one of the "Great City Schools" that participated in the survey. 

I've shared this before, but a picture is worth a thousand...

 

Or, to put it another way:

For California's user-friendlier version redesigned to cloak the endless testing in endless jargon, you can go here. And once again Florida shows us that it can always get worse.

But that's just the actual testing, the most visible part of the iceberg. Ninety percent is underneath the surface, sucking the life and time out of every week in the semester. Here's a brief look at the submerged portion of the iceberg in my last couple of years in the classroom.

In ninth grade we were not required to give the mandated Common Core exam, or "SBAC" (they save that for eleventh grade), but we did give--in addition to the practice PSAT (that's right, a practice test for the practice test)--an additional five periodic assessments, "encouraged" by the district and therefore mandated by our school, assessments designed to raise their scores on the SBAC, a test they'd be taking two years later. 

Five mandated tests. And after each one our school would devote an entire PD day to analyzing the scores, and each teacher would need to prepare a presentation explaining their performance. I'd like to say their students' performance, but it's never really framed that way. So that's two weeks before the assessment prepping and sweating, one day for the test (plus make-ups), a week of preparing your explanation, and a half-day of humiliation. More on that later.

Four weeks of teaching, two weeks of test prep, a week of analysis. A day of humiliation. Rinse. Repeat. Where does all the time go?

3. The tests are invalid and misleading.

Nothing drove me crazier than being forced to hack up our curriculum and cut out great units that students loved. Each year new ninth graders would come in with questions based on what they had heard from older sisters or brothers or friends. "Are we going to do the debate? Are we going to do poetry?" 

Because of the need to accommodate growing testing expectations, more and more often the answer was "No. I'm sorry." And for what? As I've written many times (here and here, for example), the score data produced by these Big Standardized Tests is bullshit. 

In other words, the test scores do not mean what they say they mean. Why? As UCLA professor W. James Popham wrote all the way back in 1999, "Employing standardized achievement tests to ascertain educational quality is like measuring temperature with a tablespoon."

In their "Standardized Tests Do Not Effectively Measure Student Achievement" (rpt from Ch. 3 of The Myths of Standardized Tests), Phillip Harris, Joan Harris, and Bruce M. Smith write that 

Contrary to popular assumptions about standardized testing, the tests do a poor job of measuring student achievement. They fail to measure such important attributes as creativity and critical thinking skills. Studies indicate that standardized tests reward superficial thinking and may discourage more analytical thinking. Additionally, because of the small sample of knowledge that is tested, standardized tests provide a very incomplete picture of student achievement.

Testing is a sorting technique that tracks poverty and propels a "failing schools" narrative. The data are both invalid and unreliable and, at best, measure the degree to which a student reproduces a set of favored knowledge within prescribed terms of expression, in a single-session time period.

As any teacher (and anyone else who cares to know) can tell you, a test only represents a sample of what a teacher wants the student to know and be able to do. Give a student a test on the same information on Monday and again on Friday and the scores might go up or they might go down depending on any number of variables: sleep, hunger, the temperature, who's been fighting at home, and whether the student studied the selected information. 

To focus so intensely on the Big Standardized Test is distracting and dishonest. The time and attention we devote to testing signifies that testing is the most important thing we do in school and that students' scores are meaningful measures of their achievement. It's worse than worthless. It's destructive.

4. The testing and the scores it produces are weaponized against teachers, schools, and the students themselves.

Schools. 

Test scores are fed into the sorting bin and then published without context, magnifying their importance and giving observers the impression that the scores are reliable indicators of the quality of their schools. Schools are ranked and subject to public shaming as the media beat the "failing schools" drum. Malinformed, lucky parents gloat over the misimpression that the scores make their school the best. Malinformed sometimes angry parents shake their heads and spring into action looking for a new situation for their kids. 

Until the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015, the law of the land was No Child Left Behind which allowed for schools that failed to meet their "adequate yearly progress" to be sanctioned. Edweek broke it down this way:

1. A school that misses AYP two years in a row has to allow students to transfer to a better-performing public school in the same district.

2. If a school misses AYP for three years in a row, it must offer free tutoring.

3. Schools that continue to miss achievement targets could face state intervention. States can choose to shut these schools down, turn them into charter schools, take them over, or use another, significant turnaround strategy.

Number one is a corker. It theoretically lets students jump to another school, but in L.A. a lot of those seats were all booked up. Never fear, there's a charter opening just across the street. 

Number two is interesting, because every school I ever worked in offered tutoring, and I can't even fathom what the alternative to "free" would be.

That last one we used to call the death penalty. Reconstitution is firing everybody and replacing the entire staff--occasionally permitting some to re-apply for their jobs. That's one of those other "significant turnaround strategies."

(For more fun reading, here's a requirements and sanctions comparison of NCLB and RTTT.)

Now ESSA is the latest wrinkle and it looks like it broadens the standard definition of "high-quality education" and pays more attention to equity and fairness. It also looks to shift a lot of the headaches--including the punitive stuff--to states. More than likely they'll oblige. Stay tuned.

Teachers.

We are talking about The War On Teachers, after all. Test scores have been used extensively in teacher evaluations and as an incentive (merit pay). Beyond that, testing and test scores can result in everything from private "talks" in the principal's office to public PD humiliation. 

Humiliation, you say? Remember those five periodic practice tests from earlier? The ones that carved fifteen weeks (plus) out of every school year? The ones that were supposed to raise actual test scores two years later? This is about that, from March 2022:

And so, after each test we would look at how dismal our scores were and compare them to the previous test to see if they went up or down. In a PD about *data* we would assemble in the elementary cafeteria and show each other our dismal scores (our students’ scores) and make up a story about why our scores might have gone down or up, and we’d make posters and cut out student names and put up the posters around the cafeteria and go one-by-one around the room and tell our stories and answer for our sins. That is, those of us in the math and English departments. All others adjourn to your rooms to work on teaching stuff.

The tests were all different and tested different standards and skills. We were told we could not test the same things twice to see if we had made progress. We compared scores from different kinds of tests and had to pretend that the improvement or decline from one test to the next meant something. “Wow, those kids really got it this time.” “Oh (downward inflection), that’s disappointing. What did you do differently?” “I taught different stuff!” And we did this for years.

I tried several times during the early days of this catastrophe to point out that we were not actually measuring progress or the lack of it. “It’s apples to orangutans!” “Five answers to five questions is not a valid measure of proficiency!” “Who chose four correct answers as the benchmark for proficient? And why?” “Skills? Standards? I looked at the data and my student scores precisely tracked their reading levels. Aren’t we really just assessing their reading?” I was... unheard.

Our analysis didn't mean anything because the scores didn't mean anything. Nevertheless, every five to eight weeks we engaged in this round-robin flagellation and excuse-fest, and we nodded and made posters, all the while knowing it was nonsense and getting sicker and sicker because there was so much more we could have been doing for our students. Humiliating.

The public shaming over test scores is disgraceful. The use of evaluation methods based on test scores, such as "value-added measurement," is, in the words of Dr. Au, "Neither Fair Nor Accurate." 

Douglas F. Warring, in his 2015 article "Teacher Evaluations: Use or Misuse?" in the Universal Journal of Educational Research sketches out the requirements for a more accurate system, offering that "to be fair and to provide trustworthy estimates of teacher effectiveness, value-added measures require complicated formulas that take into account as many influences on student achievement as possible."

One of the things worse than VAM evaluations that aren't honest is merit pay that is. Or may be. Here Lam D. Pham, Tuan D. Nguyen, and Matthew G. Springer from Vanderbilt University show that bribing teachers for higher test scores that, again, are not meaningful ... works. Sometimes. "In some contexts." 

Evaluating teachers based on test scores doesn't improve teaching. It doesn't produce achievement. It doesn't raise test scores unless that's all you want, and you're okay with the curriculum getting further squashed, and you've got a bunch of extra cash. 

It. Doesn't. Work. And everybody knows it. More humiliation.

Students.

Students are punished in ways gross and subtle. A study by David Figlio published in 2006 in the Journal of Public Economics found that from 1996 to 2000, Florida schools found an "incentive to re-shape the testing pool through selective discipline in response to accountability pressures." In an article published in the University of Florida News, Figlio described it this way: 

Introduction of high-stakes testing to improve school accountability has apparently led these schools to disproportionately punish low-performing students during the testing period to try to ‘game the system.’

Although Florida has changed "accountability rules" to prevent this abuse, other penalties remain. Florida uses test scores for retention/promotion decisions, which can be discriminatory and closely associated with dropout rates.

For students who fail to excel on practice exams there's extra homework focused solely on the tests.

Dr. Peter Gray writes in Psychology Today from earlier this year ("Standardized Testing and the Destruction of Education") that testing suppresses creativity and that "the more we test, the more we reduce students' interests." 

In her 2016 paper for the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Christina Simpson underscores the stress, either from direct threat of retention or implied consequences to their teachers and schools, that students are under. 

Citing Dutro, E., & Selland, M. (2012), “I like to read, but I know I'm not good at it” published in Curriculum Inquiry, Simpson writes, "how students perform on high-stakes testing can affect their beliefs about their own competence and potential as learners." 

Professor David C. Berliner, educational psychologist and Regents' Professor Emeritus of Education at Arizona State University, has this 2003 research report reviewing the negative impacts of the testing regime on student motivation, graduation rates, and learning. It makes so much sense that it's no wonder education bosses ignore it.

What we are doing to students is incredibly destructive. There was a moment, sometime during the pandemic, when it looked like we might break the cycle. We would sober up and realize what shits we had been. Alas, no. Our "industry demands" Education Secretary decided that somebody--perhaps (the testing) industry?--needed data during a worldwide health crisis. Turns out that glimmer of hope was nothing but a mirage. We have returned to our regularly scheduled programming and we can get back to torturing kids.

Just imagine being one of those students--one of the ones you know quite well because, you know, you teach them every day. And imagine that you have been taking tests for what seems like your entire school life and that these tests are calibrated to yield a certain number of “not proficient”s every year, and that for as long as you can remember you have been one of them.

If you are reading this right now and you’re thinking “well that’s one kid” or “a few kids--intervention!” you have not done your homework. We’re talking about fifty to seventy percent of our kids in California.

And even though you are “not proficient,” you have been going through school and learning stuff and passing your classes and doing pretty well, but every time you think you know something the test gets harder and you are once again one of the “not proficient”s. And imagine you don’t even find that out until the next year when there’s nothing you can do about it.

It must really suck, right? And so after having been battered and beaten with a number two pencil for long enough, a lot of those kids get discouraged and give up. Not all of them, but certainly enough for us to ask, “What significant and actionable information are we collecting by putting kids and parents and teachers and schools and districts through all this every year and sometimes every month? Why are we even doing this?”

And this, for many of us, is the breaking point. It was for me. It was terrible being shamed for something that had been years in the making when I had only known these kids for a few months. It was scary being threatened and punished for something over which I had little control. It was frustrating and miserable losing whole regions of learning and instead devoting so much time to something that did not reflect the most important things we were doing together in the classroom.

But all that was nothing compared to what it does to kids.

As I watched my students struggle each year, or give up, or do well and think that meant something, I got more and more discouraged. No amount of evidence or activism could steer the ship away from the iceberg. We seem perpetually unable to examine the data and change course accordingly. 

I couldn't in good conscience--and mine is only fair--be a part of it any longer. I felt it was abusive and damaging, perhaps deliberately so. I was not alone. 

I know it is all part of the plan. I know that testing is another battlefield in the War On Teachers and on public schooling, and that if the Enemies of Public Schooling can degrade the teaching profession enough that nobody wants to do it, then the entire institution collapses.

On the off chance somebody is out there listening and actually wants teachers to stay, here are some ideas.

In the project to destroy public schools and replace them with a "free" marketplace of schools, no strategy has been more important, more effective, and more broadly supported--even by people who should have known better--than testing.

Here it is through the eyes of a student: 

Standardized tests are ineffective and overly stressful for the students. Students may perform worse because of tests that are supposed to measure how well they are doing. Testing doesn’t even serve the purpose it is intended to. In the crusade to record student performance, standardized tests are driving grades and student morale into the ground.  Schools need to focus more on mental health and less on testing!

If Charlie West understands it, we all should.