Do We Really Love Our Children?

Why do we allow the educational system to embarrass our children year in and year out through the placement of their test results on the front pages of the local papers? Why do we talk as if we love our children, but appear oblivious to their hurt and pain?

Quite frankly, we should all be fed up with this repeated trend of embarrassing our children. The voracious testing mania is so pervasive in public education and has, unfortunately, become the central mechanism in education reform in Maryland and across the nation.

It appears that school officials in Maryland and Baltimore have come to believe that the salvation of our schools requires that we concentrate on testing our students rather than on teaching them. Moreover, school officials seeking to offer a rationale for the abominable test scores engage in bureaucratic "doublespeak" and flagrant perambulation around the truth. So, what is the truth?

The truth is that we have a public school system filled with black and brown students who are not understood, loved, expected not to achieve beyond mediocrity and who are feared. And while school officials brag about budget surpluses and restructuring initiatives, black and brown children are victimized by a system that continues to justify a pecking order based on race and class, and constantly remind those students that they deserve their place in it.

Most of us have grown tired of the test scores because we really don\u8217\'92t know what they really mean or what they really measure. So rather than focus so much attention and time on testing. We should demand that our school officials spend more time addressing the following questions for starters:

1. Why is there such a tremendous achievement gap between black and white students?
2. Why can't we get a true picture of student achievement broken down by race and gender?
3. What are the current retention, suspension and expulsion rates based on age, race, class and gender?
4. Why do we have so many teachers in the system who no longer love or understand the students they are now teaching?
5. Why are principals and teachers not held accountable when a significant number of their students fail and/or drop out of school?

I recommend that we stop embarrassing our students and start teaching and nourishing them. If we truly love our children, then let us act collectively and decisively to stop the conspiracy of silence that maintains a system of low expectations.

If we truly love our children, then let's stop waiting for the next elected official or school chief to rescue them, and become more active in the charter school movement and/or create more independent schools. We owe our children much more than we have given them thus far, and we must be willing to sacrifice everything for their success in the classroom.

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