Objectifying Measures: The Dominance of High-Stakes Testing and the Politics of Schooling

2. Contextualizing Education within the Racial Politics of Texas

2 / Contextualizing Education within the Racial Politics of Texas I n a speech before the American Enterprise Institute in January of 2004, Education Secretary Rod Paige compared opponents of the president ’s No Child Left Behind Act to 1950s-era segregationists. According to Paige, the No Child Left Behind Act represents a political equivalent to the Brown decision itself, and the fact that “the very critics and organizations that applauded Brown and worked to implement it” are opposing the law—what he contends is leaving “minority children behind”—could only be explained by these organizations’ commitment to “special interests” (Archibald 2004). For Paige, “racism cannot end as long as there is an achievement gap” (Archibald 2004). Subtracted from Paige’s equating of the alleviation of racism with the achievement of a statistical equality in standardized test scores (between a White and Black norm) is the impact of social and politico-economic factors that shape racial inequalities within schooling (see McNeil 2000b). Of particular importance is that the No Child Left Behind Act was in 2001 the latest reincarnation of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, an act that established Title I, described by Cook (2005) as “the largest, most far-reaching federal K-12 program, with $13 billion sent annually to school districts to help educate children living in poverty ” (24). Whereas the funding of schools under Title I was a central part of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, meant to provide relief for poor schools,1 the No Child Left Behind Act has attached a punitive dimension to the funding, as “schools that don’t meet adequate yearly progress face sanctions, including takeover, and must allow students to 24 \ Chapter 2 transfer to another school of their choice” (Cook 2005: 26). Considering the volume of scholarship that documents the historical negative impact of standardized testing on students of color and racial equity (e.g., Miller 1974; Fraser 1994; Valencia and Guadarrama 1996) and acknowledgment that results of standardized testing correlate with socioeconomic status and parental educational background, why would increased standardized testing be regarded as the harbinger of equality? Paige’s suggestion that opposition to increased state-mandated testing parallels support for segregated systems commits a form of thinking comparable to doublethink (Orwell 1984 [1949]) that Sandoval (2000) called “retranslation,” particularly characteristic of neoliberal and neoconservative hegemony: “[T]he late-capitalist retranslation of difference allows hierarchical and material differences in power between people to be erased from consciousness, even while these same economic and social privileges are bolstered” (75). In fact, the “‘leave no child behind’ mantra” represents the Bush administration’s rearticulation of a discourse used by Marian Wright Edelman in articulating the goals of the Children’s Defense Fund (Townsend 2002). Speaking against policies that would drastically reduce services for families and children, Edelman issued a response entitled , “Mr. President, We Want Our Slogan Back.” In this chapter, I examine the ways in which the movement toward intensifying high-stakes testing in Texas, rather than redressing segregation, reproduces racial and class-based school segregation. Contrary to Paige’s suggestion that critics of testing are segregationists, state-mandated testing in Texas is inextricably linked to racial politics in the state, particularly the realignment of the Republican Party as anti–New Deal and anti-Brown. Racial Politics in Texas History The current state of racial politics in the Texas education system reflects and emerges from the dynamics of the history of Texas. The incorporation of the state of Texas into the United States in 1845 brought about a racial dynamic unlike that in the states of the Southeast. Texas was first colonized by Spain in 1690, largely through the establishment of missions by the Franciscans that required the formation of alliances with Texas and Coahuiltecan Indians (Ménchaca 2001: 101). According to Ménchaca, while the Spanish imported about two hundred thousand African slaves—mostly Malinke from Mali—to Mexico, the colonies in Texas had few African slaves (2001: 43, 112). In 1810, “mestizo, mulatto, Contextualizing Education within Texas / 25 black, and Indian masses” revolted against Spain in the Mexican War of Independence (Taylor 1998: 37). Gaining independence by 1821, the newly independent Mexican government instituted liberal racial reforms that naturalized all nonslaves as citizens and instituted the legal infrastructure to undermine slavery (Ménchaca 2001: 162, 163). According to Taylor, the liberal laws enticed fugitive slaves and freed men and women to migrate...