Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Vacuum

     

     When I was a senior in high school, Rhode Island was just testing out digital portfolio assessments and graduation requirements. The administration, through the teachers, told us that we would have to do these things, but because it was a trial run it was not life or death. We would still graduate as long as we participated and if we did really well we'd be exempt from our exams. I think if presenting in front of my digital portfolio panel the way that students are now, I would have been a lot more cautious with how I handled the whole business. Of course I have no doubt that I would have felt comfortable anyway because I found out that my favorite teacher would be on the panel. My best friend had my aunt on her panel. She'd met her at a family party already and she's a really nice former elementary school teacher so it was no big deal for her either and she's just about the most anxious person I know.

    Of the quotes that Au had displayed at the beginning of our reading for this week. Of those quotes, two of the three presidents were Republicans. Trump hasn't had much of a hand in education other than appointing the infamous Betsy Devos, so it's not really clear where he stands on it other than that he seems to have no issue with privatizing public education. With Bush his record is a little more clear. His administration was responsible for the No Child Left Behind Act, which as Au said, very definitively, "There are race-based gaps in standardized test scores. Closing those gaps should be the goal for achieving racial equality in education," (Au, 243) like it's the simplest thing in the world. If you just punish students enough for not meeting those assessments, then they'll be motivated to succeed.

   The truth is that it is the tests themselves that are flawed and not the students taking the test. Supposing that the bell curve theory is true, which it is when there is no bias in the test questions, there will always be a smaller number of people who excel, a large number in the middle of the pack, and and some that will rank the lowest.  The problem with this notion is that it assumes all students are able to easily access the knowledge that is being tested. The only thing to ensure that the achievement gap no longer exists is when there is, "proportionate success and failure between groups, such that we have equal numbers of rich and poor students passing and failing, equal numbers of black, white, Asian, native, and Latinx passing and failing," ( Au, 246). With standardized testing, there is no comfort level. Students are expected to sit down, shut up, stay still in the presence of a proctor they don't even know. When I student is at the bottom of the bell curve, they end up being targeted for more isolation, more stillness, more stagnation. The forces of the educational vacuum are acting on them and they are likely to get sucked into the void and lost there unless there is some force that is pulling them away from that danger. That's just physics.

I think that having assessments like digital portfolio presentations are a way to begin the process of narrowing this divide between students of color and white students in test scores. In that type of evaluation there are numerous opportunities to present individuality and growth within a span of four years. Having a digital portfolio did not feel like a colonizer's assessment. It embraced the subjective as well as the objective aspects of a student's education and used both to determine success. For me the best part of presenting to the panel I had was choosing work from my art classes to show them. That was when it not only felt like a portfolio in a sense that I was familiar with from my immersion is visual arts, but also I was literally showing them my brain. I drew a very swirly human brain in charcoal in my drawing class, but I was also telling them the story of how I created each assignment and what my thought processes were as I was working on it.