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

6. Between Women and the State of Texas :Representation and the Politics of Experience

6 / Between Women and the State of Texas Representation and the Politics of Experience America’s measurement of me has lain like a barrier across the realization of my own powers. —Audre Lorde (1984: 147) I’ll end with a story for the record. Teachers are being instructed to have their bags ready, in case kids vomit. If kids vomit, they are told to put the test inside that bag. —Representative Dora Olivo, April 30 testimony1 C ollecting narratives of students’ experiences with testing lay at the heart of Representative Dora Olivo’s political strategy to garner support for the multiple-criteria bills. The “children’s stories” aimed not only to deconstruct statistical testing discourses, but also to document the extent to which continual testing and fetishization of the resulting statistics objectifies and dehumanizes students, as well as alienates teachers and school administrators. This focus on countering statistical discourse with narratives of experience signaled a shift from the method of countering the hegemonic statistical discourses of testing with statistical subjectivity or statistical counterdiscourse that had been so central in the GI Forum case. According to Peters (1997), the polar opposite of statistics is narrative (78), and I would politicize this polarity, suggesting that testimonials often become the counterdiscourse or the contre-histoire of statistics, a way of asserting or reinserting agency.2 Even the common U.S. colloquialism of “becoming a statistic” Between Women and the State of Texas / 121 signifies a loss of agency, a slippage into determinism and anonymity, and a subject position to be avoided (Woodward 1999). This tension between determinism and free will has laced the history of statistics as an administrative science (Desrosières 1998; Hacking 1991). According to Desrosières (1998), “[I]n 1753, a plan to take a census of the population was violently denounced by the Whig party as ‘utterly ruining the last freedoms of the English people’” (24).3 By positioning stories as political testimonies, the strategy of collecting stories not only brought visibility to the implications of knowledge production, but also gave me the impression that this strategy emerged from a “womanist” (Walker 1983: xi) politics, a politics of transfrontera (Saldívar-Hull 1999). Imagining Feminism, Imagining Transfrontera The full-time staffers for Representative Olivo were women, and midway through the session, only women of color. While there were several men deeply embedded in the Representative’s political network, especially from MALDEF, it was the presence of women that made the deepest impression on me. The team that the Representative built was made up of Latina, Black, and White women, some representing the major civil rights organizations, some teachers or administrators from the public schools, and others university professors. The lobbyists visiting the office that seemed to give the most support to the multiplecriteria bills were women, from organizations made up of, for example, midwives, retired teachers, and interior decorators. I believe that the bill brought together these women because of Representative Olivo’s racial and gendered identity, since the bill was written in the context of Prado ’s ruling on the GI Forum case on racial discrimination. All of the women remarked, “We love your sign,” which read, “Let teachers make the final decisions, NOT corporate test makers.” A common sentiment spoken in the office was that women do all the work—taking care of children , educating them, and working, which reminds me of these lines from Anzaldúa’s “To Live in the Borderlands Means You”: “Cuando vives en la frontera / People walk through you, the wind steals your voice / You’re a burra, buey, scapegoat” (1999: 216). For me, these women, particularly in the office, lived on the frontera, a space that made me interrogate the line between state and civil society. Because of the breakdown of border-making processes of nation-states with globalization, Trouillot (2001: 133) has suggested that anthropologists need to “look for state processes and effects in sites less obvious than those of institutionalized 122 \ Chapter 6 politics and established bureaucracies.” While I agree with Trouillot, I found that government sites, such as Representative Olivo’s office, because of the “trajectory” (Omi and Winant 1994)4 of racial politics in which people of color are literally incorporated by the U.S racial state, can be viewed themselves as a type of border site, in the Anzaldúan sense. Kaplan, Alarcon, and Moallem (1999) conceptualized this border site as a place “between...