Our Year of Barely Blogging

Actually it's more than a year that we've been barely blogging. When last I posted, dear readers -- if any of you are still out there reading — I promised so very much more than I could deliver.

I promised I'd write about how our girl's dad helped her increase her Regents* exam score by 22 points. I promised I'd write about her fledging friendship and her trip with her class to the Grand Tetons. I promised to write about our work doing neighborhood organizing. And I didn't do any of that. Nothing. Not a word.

I'd say that I let you down, except I probably didn't. You'd probably figured out long ago that I just wasn't going to be blogging much. You'd watched my blogging dwindle to one post a year over several years' time. There'd be the weeks, and then months, of dead air, with any new post an apologetic explanation of absence, like this one — sweeping leaves off a nearly abandoned site.

It wasn't just the time-consuming work of fighting the
construction that has stolen our sunshine
and disrupted our sleep.

Where did we go? It wasn't just the time-consuming work of the neighborhood organizing. Or the full time job. Or continuing the work of getting our girl through high school (she's a junior now). Or the visits to Dementiaville (aka LA) to take care of my 89-year-old mother. All that that might have been enough to induce this silence, but that wasn't it. It was other things. 

Or the flying back and forth to LA to deal with my
mother's declining memory and cognition.

There was (and is) the nagging feeling that things are different now that she's a teen. It's not just that she can read whatever I write — that's been the case for years now — but also the feeling that I want her to be telling her own story. You know the disability rights motto of "nothing about us without us." 

The goal is hearing the autistic person's story, not just the autistic's parent's story. I take that seriously. And she has started telling her story, with an Instagram account. But I don't know if I should link to it or not. There is her privacy. And besides, she has more than a hundred followers there anyway: other folks who love Pokemon, My Little Pony, and Hello Kitty. It seems also that there is a place for our voices — for parent and caregiver voices — even as we cultivate our girl's voice. 

And then there was (and is) the occupational hazard of over-thinking things. 

Some of the colleagues that I've been reading argue that the work we do of sharing on the internet is just a way of participating in communicative capitalism, or platform capitalism, or what other people have long called the spectacle. The argument goes like this: We write, post, share, click "like" and engage via social media that capture our attention and our affect — our love itself — and sell them to marketers. Every corner of our electronic lives helps someone turn a profit. The logic of these analyses is irrefutable: fortunes are being made off of our free content, off of our desire to connect, off of our desire to share.

But still, do we want to share less, live less,  love less, just because Google, or Facebook, or Twitter or Instagram or Tumblr executives are riding high on the profits they turn from our attention?  

I don't have an answer to that question just now, but I'll be working on it this year, writing here and elsewhere. I don't know if the gift economy of blogging has any chance of succeeding when the platforms are siphoning off so much at the top, but I'm going to see where the gift of writing with and about our girl takes me in the year ahead. If I pick up any momentum, I hope you'll come along for the ride. We may stall, or sputter, or just run out of steam. But let's see how far we get in the year ahead. 

*Regent Exams are the standardized tests that New York's kids have to take to get a high school diploma. 

Modern Rites of Passage: Or Reflections on the Tyranny of Standardized Tests

Please review the illustration below and answer the question that follows. 

Question from New York State Regents Sample Earth Science Exam, January 24, 2013.

Now pretend that your future college and employment options depend on your ability to answer said question (and 84 others like it).

And while you're at it, pretend that you are 14- or 15-years-old. And that you have an autism spectrum disorder.  Or dyslexia.  Or haven't had breakfast.  Or your parents just divorced.  Or whatever else might be going on in the life of a 15-year-old. 

Can you answer the question?

I can't.  Even if I don't imagine all the other variables in this thought experiment, I can't answer the question correctly. 

In fact, I can't answer most of the questions on the 9th grade New York State Earth Science Regent's exam.*

Has that hampered my prospects in life? Perhaps. I'm not an astrophysicist. I'm not a geo-engineer. And I'm not a meteorologist.  I'm okay with that.  I'm a tenured university professor at a highly-respected university in New York City. I've won numerous federal grants. I'm the author of a well-received book in my field from a major university press. Most people who know me think of me as rather well-educated and knowledgeable.

Usually I wouldn't share this information about myself, but it seems relevant to these tests as some metric of educational attainment.

But if I were 15-years-old today, there is a good chance that I would not earn a high school diploma in New York State. Well, let me clarify that. I might earn what's called a "local diploma" in New York State. 

Anywhere else (as far as a I know) a high school diploma is a high school diploma. But in New York State we have an educational caste system where some kids earn a "Regents diploma," some earn what's called a "local diploma," and some earn an "IEP diploma." 

To earn a Regents diploma you have to earn at least 65 points on five Regents exams: English, Math, Global History, American History, and one science (either Earth Science or Biology). To earn a local diploma you have to have 55 or more on these four exams. Without that, you either don't graduate or, if you have an IEP, you can earn an IEP diploma. You can go to a private college with a local diploma, but you can't go to the New York State University (SUNY) system, the most affordable schools in the state.

Since last summer we have been working hard to see that our girl will pass the five Regents exams that are required for the Regents diploma. The first of these exams took place in June. A passing score is 65 or above. A "low pass" is 55-64. And below 55 is a non-passing score.

After a year of work toward passing these exams, our girl earned a 64. That is, she missed a regular passing score by one point. One point. 

She had a near perfect score on the lab section of the exam: 15/16.  She routinely earns A's and B+'s on in-class exams that cover the same material. Her teacher said this exam just had too much vocabulary for her.

I was thrilled for her that she had passed, even with a low pass. Her father is heartbroken and angry that she didn't earn at least 75 points since she does much better than that in her course work.

For two weeks after the exam scores were in, we spoke, and argued, and spoke, about almost nothing else: he wants her to study all summer with him and retake the exam in August. I want her to have a summer break, revel in having passed it (4 of the 39 students in her class did not earn even a low pass), and start to look a the vocabulary for the upcoming Biology and Global History exams.

I understand his position: he thinks that these exams and the information therein actually matter in life. He thinks it's a worthy goal to pass these exams with high scores. And he thinks letting her get by with a low pass is giving up on her and her future.

And I think these exams are unnecessary and damaging hurdles that destroy a natural love of learning and replace it with a desire to pass, to score, to win – and often, to cheat a system that is unfairly rigged against our kids. I think they contribute to the single most annoying question I get in every class I teach: "Will this be on the test?" I think these exams are destroying our kids' lives, turning them into test-taking machines. Having her study for these exams is, in my mind, nothing more than a necessary evil.

So we don't agree. We won't agree. We've agreed to disagree. We haven't decided what to do: whether she will retake the exam in August or not.

What I do know is that as a society we seem to love our educational standards more than we love our kids if we are willing to subject them to this adolescent rite of passage called standardized testing.

So-called primitive tribal societies would incise their young people's skin with magical markings and rub in ash to create the raised welts of scarification, or send them into the forest to fend for themselves to mark the passage to adulthood, reincorporating them into the group when they healed or returned from their quest.

Here in New York State we are somewhat more subtle. The scars we create are invisible: we mark our children's neural pathways with specialized technical knowledge that will likely be of no actual use to them, send them into the ordeal of testing arena, and then reincorporate them into a stratified society based, in part, on how well they perform this task.

We can opt out of this rite of passage, but what sort of future can we imagine for our girl if we do? That is the question we have pondered for the past three weeks. What do you think about high stakes exams for our kids, ASD and otherwise? What have you done about such tests?

* The answer for the exam question, if not to these bigger questions, is "D. White dwarf." You can look at this exam and any of the other archived Regents exams at: http://www.nysedregents.org/