No Profit In Ending Poverty

Here's an extremely sobering, depressing, thought-provoking interview with the creator of the acclaimed HBO series The Wire. David Simon was a crime reporter for twelve years with The Baltimore Sun before turning to a career in television. Here's an excerpt from the interview, conducted by the inimitable Bill Moyers.

DAVID SIMON: The people most affected . . . are black and brown and poor. It's the abandoned inner cores of our urban areas. . . . (E)conomically, we don't need those people. The American economy doesn't need them. So, as long as they stay in their ghettos, and they only kill each other, we're willing to pay a police presence to keep them out of our America. And to let them fight over scraps, which is what the drug war, effectively, is. . . (S)ince we basically have become a market-based culture and it's what we know, and it's what's led us to this sad denouement, I think we're going to follow market-based logic, right to the bitter end.

BILL MOYERS: Which says?

DAVID SIMON: If you don't need 'em, why extend yourself? Why seriously assess what you're doing to your poorest and most vulnerable citizens? There's no profit to be had in doing anything other than marginalizing them and discarding them.

Simon's solution?

I would decriminalize drugs in a heartbeat. I would put all the interdiction money, all the incarceration money, all the enforcement money, all of the pretrial, all the prep, all of that cash, I would hurl it, as fast as I could, into drug treatment and job training and jobs programs. I would rather turn these neighborhoods inward with jobs programs. Even if it was the equivalent of the urban CCC, if it was New Deal-type logic, it would be doing less damage than creating a war syndrome, where we're basically treating our underclass. The drug war is a war on the underclass now. That's all it is. It has no other meaning.

What Would Replace "Grade Level"?

I think common sense says that any single measure that claims to assess something is always enhanced by a different kind of measure that attempts to corroborate its claims.

So if I want to know if my kid knows something about the Revolutionary War, I might give her a multiple-choice test. But I'd also want her write a 3-page paper on the cause of the war, give a presentation on the Battle of Bunker Hill, and write and act in a skit about George Washington. At the end of the unit, I'd want her to select items she worked on and place them in her portfolio and then write a meta-cognitive summary of what she learned, the challenges she faced in learning them, and how she overcame them.

Duh, right? Most good teachers do these sorts of things all the time. All of these assessments/measures focus on the question of what my kid knows. But each produces different information in different ways. And each involves different skills.

So go tell that to your state DOE. What will they say? Something like, "These classroom-based assessments are very nice, but they're certainly not reliable. We can't possibly accept your judgement about what students in your classroom know and can do."

THAT'S the problem.

Of course you can't accept the teacher's judgment if punitive high stakes are associated with the assessment, e.g., the teacher getting fired (thanks NCLB!) or the school getting shut down (thanks again, NCLB!) So there's an incentive (thanks Campbell's Law!) to cook the books and make things seem what they aren't.

It doesn't have to be this way. Ultimately, what we're really concerned about is (1) what do kids know? and (2) what can kids do? A single measure (usually a norm-referenced, multiple-choice test) that tells me if my kid is "at grade level" does not tell me what my kid knows and what my kid can do. It tells me if my kid's score is the same as her peers, below her peers, or above her peers. In short, it tells me zippety-doo-dah.

Multiple measures (such as the ones I mentioned above) are the evidence we need to answer the questions (1) what do kids know? and (2) what can kids do? These measures reveal nothing about "grade level," i.e., where these kids are "supposed" to be in relation to each other. Rather, these measures give a very real sense of where these kids ARE. Once we know where they are, we can help them get to the next place. How they get there and when they get there is an open question. But in the best circumstances, getting there is kind of fun. Anyone remember teaching and learning is supposed to be fun? It's different for each kid and for each teacher. It's what learning is all about, and what makes teaching a thrill.

Not On The Test