Clay Burell's Library tagged activism →  View Popular

Umm yeah, so I'm the valedictorian. Number one. But, what separates me from
number 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 50, or 120? Nothing but meaningless numbers. What really
is the difference between 3.8, 2.9, and 1.5? All these randomly assigned numbers
reflect nothing about the true character of an individual. They say nothing
about personality. Nothing about desire or will. Nothing about values or morals.
Nothing about intelligence. Nothing about creativity. Nothing about heart.
Numbers cannot and will not ever be able to tell you who a person really is. Yet
in today's society we are sadly becoming more and more number oriented. Schools
today are being forced to teach to the numbers. Children are no longer learning
because it is interesting and fun; they are learning to pass the test so that
the school will continue to be funded. New mandates across the country and in
our own state incorrectly correlate test scores with the worth of teachers and
schools. Not once do these new mandates take into account that schools in low
income areas will never have as many books, long term students, parent
volunteers, or state of the art facilities. How can anyone call these tests fair? Just as class rank and
SAT scores say nothing about
the true worth of a person, a child's or school's score on a test says nothing about the worth of the school or teachers. 

It is disturbing enough that throughout high school, GPA and grades are pushed as the most important things, while learning, the real reason we
are in school, falls by the wayside. The MCAS serve as just another set of meaningless numbers that add one more reason to focus on scores and
forget learning. 

The already teetering learning process, made difficult by the social dynamics of school cliques, disrupted by a constant lack of funding and
misplaced values, has been further torn apart by a few meddling politicians and yuppies who were bored and felt the need to create what
they call a standard.

But there’s a deeper point: since the Obama victory, many people seem to be suffering a kind of post-partum depression: unable to find any polls to obsess over, we read the tea-leaves and try to penetrate the president-elect’s mind. What do his moves portend? What magic or disaster awaits us? With due respect, this is a matter of looking entirely in the wrong direction.

Obama is not a monarch— Arne Duncan is not education czar– and we are not his subjects. If we want a foreign policy based on justice, for example, we ought to get busy organizing a robust anti-imperialist peace movement; if we want to end the death penalty we better get smart about changing the dominant narrative concerning crime and punishment. We are not allowed to sit quietly in a democracy awaiting salvation from above. We are all equal, and we all need to speak up and speak out right now.

It's my sense that the movement for service-learning has reached a crisis point. It isn't included in federal education law; it isn't a priority in an era of concern about reading and math; the federal funding has been cut (in real terms) since 2001; and the quality of programs is so uneven that outsiders could be reasonably skeptical about its value. On the other hand, the best programs are superb; they fit the outlook of the incoming administration; and there is strong support for service-learning in the Kennedy-Hatch Serve-America bill that both Senators McCain and Obama promised to sign. That bill would direct most resources to poor districts, which today are much less likely to offer service-learning. So we could be poised for improvements in quality, quantity, and equality. Or else service-learning could falter if Kennedy-Hatch isn't fully funded and the grassroots movement continues to shrink.