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

4. Commodification, Privatization, and Political Economy of Statistical Discourse

4 / Commodification, Privatization, and Political Economy of Statistical Discourse Houston Story At a House Public Education Committee meeting on February 27, 2001, I arrived to find that the meeting was standing room only. A large group of mostly Black parents crowded the room wearing green T-shirts reading “Children Equal Profit.” When their time came to speak hours later, these parents, who have been characterized by education literature as apathetic, revealed that they had driven from Houston to speak about the commodification of their children. Testimony revealed that the parents created Children Equal Profit as a parody of CEP, Community Education Partners, in Houston, a for-profit company that provides alternative schooling or alternative placement for students who violate school rules on violence, part of a zero-tolerance policy. The parents told the committee that Rod Paige, as superintendent of the Houston Independent School District (HISD) signed an $18 million annual contract with CEP to guarantee that twenty-five hundred students would be placed in alternative placement for 180 days regardless of infraction, despite the district’s own policy of alternative placement for 11 days up to the end of the school semester. While an NAACP representative provided statistics on the disproportionate alternative placement of students of color, the most moving testimony came from the stories of parents desperate to find better opportunities for their children. One parent told of her five-year-old child having bruises on his arms from being pinned by a teacher and of a teacher being asleep in the classroom set aside for autistic children, calling the alternative placement 64 \ Chapter 4 “not education, just a place to put students where they don’t need to get education.” Children were placed in isolation in a small area with a partition for hours at a time, said the mother, and she added, “What happens to children who are not able to explain?” Another mother stood up and explained that they tried to place her child in alternative placement allegedly because “he doesn’t think before he acts and needs more severe punishment.” She also said that the principal lacked concern for her child, waiting until the TAAS test to place him in a class. She quit her job in order to send her child to another school, a private school, for which she had to leave at 6:15 in the morning just to get her son to school on time. For her, this committee meeting was the only forum in which to voice her protest, and she posed the question to Representative Paul Sadler, the education committee chair, “What can you do?” He responded that unless she put her child back in the public school system, there was nothing he could do. Sadler, however, grew angry upon hearing about the contract and asked a board representative for HISD about the contract, saying, “I’m a little bit concerned with a contract that guarantees twenty-five hundred students to AP [alternative placement]. How could a board approve such a thing?” The board representative responded with a statistical discourse claiming that “schools were much safer” with the CEP alternative placement, and that there was a pattern of schools being slow to send students there. In “Numbers Racket,” Metcalf (2001) wrote that CEP was established by a group of Republicans from Tennessee with ties to former secretary of education in the senior Bush administration, Lamar Alexander . Metcalf argued that the alternative placement was a way to avoid high dropout rates, and found that chaos ruled. Parents were not receiving report cards, exams were not being graded due to understaffing, students were being placed in classes lower than their abilities, teachers were given classes of thirty to forty students, and fighting often erupted. According to one student, “It was like a jail” (Metcalf 2001: 24). A research specialist for the HISD Department of Research and Accountability , Thomas Kellow, found that while students’ academic performance at CEP worsened over time, an Internet press release claimed that CEP achieved “an average growth in reading of 2.4 grade levels and an average growth in math of 2.2” (24). When Kellow e-mailed eighteen hundred statisticians about the data, he was reprimanded by the district, was “moved to a workstation without Internet access,” and found that his computer had been tampered with (24). Metcalf ended his article with this poignant quote from a female employee at CEP: “Rod Statistical...