Writing and White Privilege: Beyond Basic Skills

For students classified as "at risk," preparation for accountability testing rarely offers the middle-class luxury of time and space for imaginative writing. As Julie Landsman (2001: 161) suggests, "White people too often want solutions to be quick and easy. They want something they can follow and in a few months, a few years, the problem will be solved." Standardized testing fits the criteria for "solutions" that are "quick and easy," at least on the surface. If a specific "standard" is set for all children, then institutions can be certain that students who achieve the standard are in control of basic skills—and that all students are held to "high expectations" (Traub 2002: n.p.).

Nonetheless, "high expectations" are often defined in terms of "standard" written English and rote memorization of the rules. Institutions deem these "basic skills" as necessary in order to achieve high scores on accountability measures, and these "basic skills" then become the basis for curricula. In Texas public schools, for example, K-12 "writing" is defined primarily as standardized test preparation (see Texas Education Agency 2002), which is particularly detrimental for poor children, children of color, and immigrant children whose first language is not English (McNeil and Valenzuela 2000). For many first-year college students, then, placement in basic writing courses is just the next phase in a school experience that for years has marked them as "other" or "different."

When I taught basic writing for the first time in Houston, my students were native speakers of Spanish, Urdu, Vietnamese, and Black English Vernacular, languages that were inseparable from culture—and culture that was inseparable from race. Such "differences" became even more complicated in the days following 9/11 when these first-year students were particularly vulnerable to harassment based on perceived racial/ethnic identity. Some claimed that they were afraid to reveal their ethnic identity at school and on the street; in order not to reveal "accented" speech, they didn't speak. One student worried that her immigrant family would interrupt her schooling by returning home to live with relatives in more secure circumstances.

More central to this essay, my students and I struggled throughout the semester with the contradictory goals of preparing for high-stakes testing and facilitating growth as imaginative writers and thinkers. After all, the working-class schools that my students had attended before college did not typically encourage pupils to articulate problems. As Jean Anyon (1996: 250) suggests regarding working-class schooling, "the teachers rarely explain why the work is being assigned, how it might connect to other assignments, or what the idea is that lies behind the procedure or gives coherence and perhaps meaning or significance."

In order to address, and hopefully resolve, this contradiction, I asked students to explore their public school experiences, especially as they related to writing and testing. To this end, students wrote literacy narratives and analytical essays, often working in a writing-workshop environment that included peer responses from a small group or the whole class. In addition, students read and discussed Langston Hughes's (2001) highly anthologized poem "Theme for English B" and wrote their own poetry on the same topic. As Gloria Anzaldúa (Anzaldúa and Lunsford 2000: 254) might say, we "cross[ed] into each others' worlds" as we attempted to become a community of writers; outside of the classroom, however, our communities were usually separated from each other and further segregated in terms of race, ethnicity, and social class.

Despite our work unpacking the inequities of past schooling, the realities and contradictions of current standardized testing remained ever present. As a critique of the testing situation, a student whom I will call Michael wrote the following poem:

English 1300 was given to me
because a cycle that started in elementary
I wanted to learn and I was taught
but when I look back all I see is one big plot
They pushed a style oh so lame
it makes me look back...