If you've ever watched
The Wire, or you're interested in education, you might like to read "Political Geographies of the Object," a
quite
interesting analysis about the way the show presents “the test” and
schools. (Contact me, I can set you up with the whole article--I've pasted in the section on the test below.)
Preceding the discussion of
the test, the authors explain “object-oriented philosophy.” Basically,
they contend that objects—wiretaps, cell phones, standardized tests—have potent
capacity to affect behavior, relationships, and especially power. As best
I can tell, objects both empower and constrain actions, and the authors are
particularly concerned with how objects shape “stateness” and expressions of
state authority in the lives of people. The wiretap itself, for instance,
was first used in the 1930s, and the court initially said that conversations
were not protected “things” (so the absence of a warrant did not invalidate
those initial taps). When the court overturned this decision in the
1960s, the authors observe, it was effectively acknowledging that conversations
are protected “things.” The wiretap caused a reconsideration of
what a conversation is and how those things may or may not be governed by state
authority and power. In other words, the object (wiretap) caused a
reconsideration of the conversation as “thing,” which caused a review of state
power and behavior. Along the way, the wiretap and the conversation moved
to a status as “object” that requires understanding and evaluating their nature
and role in the power relationships between the state and the people.
The authors point out that
the show makes a similar analysis of the standardized test….
From the article:
The test
Surveillance technologies like wiretaps and
cameras are perhaps the lowest-hanging fruit, the most obvious tools in
facilitating a state effect. The mundane and routinized school test of Season
4, however, is perhaps the most potent of all objects on The Wire. In the
process of examination to determine competency, a test elicits excitement,
hope, determination, confidence, and even hubris; it
also upsets stomachs, causes anxiety and headaches, euphoria and suicide. A
test may evoke strong emotions, but it achieves more: the test e and its allies e increasingly organizes and
cultivates a state effect in the lives of children. Tests restrict the exchange
of information between teachers and students to a circumscribed set of
possible connections and pathways, standardizing the discovery of knowledge.
The test, too, is an object. The reduction of a
test, however, to its brute materiality --pens and paper, or computers and mice-- completely misses the
action that the test itself mobilizes in the world. An object like the test
doesn’t replace the ‘human’ as the sole explanandum of
stateness (any more than the human is able to fully produce the state effect);
rather it enlarges it, opens it up, and sees power as it is performed in
action, constantly made and remade by the bits and pieces of the world. While
educators design and create the test, tests are also autonomous, able to
transform their ‘creators’ through the (metaphysical)
conditions they set in motion. This is the ‘reverse adaptation’ that Langdon Winner
(1977, p. 229) describes as “the adjustment of human ends to match the character of the available [technological] means.”
Over the past 25 years, standardized tests have
reversed engineered the US public educational system. The Season 4 test is a
simulacrum of the mandated achievement test that emerged in response to the
1983 report of the US National Commission on Excellence in Education, A Nation
at Risk. The report warned that if the country were to remain economically
competitive at the inter- national level, the skills of the nation’s workforce would have to
improve dramatically. By 2001, the standardized achievement test became the
cornerstone of the Bush Administration’s No Child Left Behind policy. Nearly all US
states have reset content and performance standards, intended to enforce more
rigorous teaching and learning expectations, through new systems of school and
teacher accountability for test scores (Hurst, Tan,
Meek, & Sellers, 2003).
In Season 4, administrators, teachers and
students, textbooks, classrooms, and the teacher’s lounge at Edward J. Tilghman Middle
School are pulled into the test’s force field: shaping how lessons
are taught and ultimately reinforcing the already limited options of these
underclass students from inner city Baltimore. Not only is the test deployed to
assess the capabilities of students but it also becomes, by association, a test
of Tilghman (as an institution) and of the teachers (and their ability to teach
effectively). As such, the test becomes one of a multitude of objects
(including books, computers, pencils, uniforms, hall passes, school lunches,
etc) that collaborate to affect how the students relate to each other and to
their teachers and how the teachers relate to each other and to administrators.
Importantly, the test also resists the aims of its
original formulation. Based on the premise that setting high standards and
establishing measurable goals can improve individual outcomes in education, the
test instead tends mostly to measure how well students are trained to take it.
Moreover, the incentives for continued improvement of student scores has caused
many states to actually lower their official standards. One result of this variability
in standards was identified in a study by the National Center for Education Statistics (2007),
which reported that the differences in the fifty states’ observed test scores were largely due to differences in the stringency of each state’s standards.
The paradoxical relationship between testing and
learning is demonstrated in The Wire through the character of Prez, who by
Season 4 has left the police force and now teaches math at Tilghman. By
mid-season, after some false starts, Prez actively engages the students in math
exercises that encourage them to use their knowledge of the streets and the
illicit economies in which many of them operate. Students are ecstatic: they
solve probabilities using dice games, building confidence, joking around, and
working in teams. But during later episodes, Prez is increasingly pressured to
switch from this organic form of learning to working through abstract problems e phrased in the dry
language of the Maryland State Assessment test e as ‘test day’ gets nearer. In a scene from episode 9, assistant
principal Marcia Donnelly informs Tilghman teachers that they all must dedicate class time to help students prepare for the reading comprehension
section of the upcoming state test, in order to raise the school’s overall test score. Even
Prez, as a math teacher, must take on reading comprehension. In ensuing scenes,
his students grow bored and restless while he attempts to instruct them on how
to correctly answer test questions through reference to material on classical
Rome. Unsurprisingly, the topic has no intuitive resonance with the students
and it soon becomes clear that the lesson is a terrible failure, signaling as
it does, future failure. In episode 4, Howard ‘Bunny’ Colvin --a former police major who eventually becomes a field researcher on a
University of Maryland grant studying repeat offenders among Baltimore youth e makes a cogent
observation:
Bunny: Kid’s right. This is bullshit.
Parenti: Test material
doesn’t exactly speak to their
world.
Bunny: Yeah, it don’t speak loud to mine, neither.
Bunny’s terse observation recognizes the test as having
the power to configure learning as a
theoretical activity rather than a situated educational moment in the lived
experience of the students. As viewers, we can also see the test at work
organizing a set of expectations about students as laborers-in-training being
prepared to participate in an imagined future workforce and a way of life that
simply isn’t open to them.
Perhaps the most forceful aspect of the test is
its ability to produce statistics that script the future of the schools, its
students, and its teachers. The Wire demonstrates how the test unleashes a
catalog of statistics that drive teacher and course preparation; circulate
between the classroom and the teachers’ lounge; and cause anguish and disagreements as
well as resignation and defiance. US educational research has demonstrated how
statistics are a highly problematic measure of achievement (Popham, 1999) forcing students to become consumers
of certified knowledge rather than
guided producers of enabling knowledge and informed action. As research by Porter-Magee (2004) found, in the United States
the standardized test and the resultant focus on achievement statistics also
inhibits teacher quality by constraining the autonomy of teachers as situated
pedagogues and turning them instead into agents of mass production. Even more
powerfully, the statistics open or close doors to student futures, producing
myriad practices that in most cases aggravate rather than solve their problems
of underachievement. Again, Bunny Colvin, in episode 10, makes a telling point
about the test in a conversation with his University of Maryland boss, Dr.
David Parenti.
Bunny: Hold on, hold on. Look, what he’s saying is this: you can
put a textbook in front of these kids. Put a problem on the blackboard, teach ‘em every problem on some
statewide test -- it won’t matter, none of it. Cuz
they not learnin’
from our
world, they learnin’
from theirs.
And they know exactly what it is they training for and exactly what it is
everyone expects them to be.
The test -- and the subsequent statistics that facilitate its
generalizable meaning -- serves to
draw a boundary around teaching and learning practices. It enables some ideas
to be thought while others become peripheral, outside the bounds of legitimate
knowledge. The result is that the subjects being taught in school get narrowed
down to put more emphasis on the subjects being tested, which inevitably
constrains the students’
range of
knowledge, not to mention their confidence and expectations. Ultimately, as Guisbond and Neill (2004, p. 13) argue, the
emphasis on the standardized test in the United States “ignores real factors that
impede improvements in teaching and learning, such as large class sizes,
inadequate books, and outmoded technology, as well as nonschool factors like
poverty and high student mobility”. These problems are no more apparent than at
Tilghman, where students like Dukie face homelessness and Michael has to care
for his little brother (even picking him up at parent- teacher night) and
drug-addicted mother, while scrimping together a household budget from welfare.
The test also reconfigures the spaces in which it operates.
While it would be exaggerating the power of the test to suggest that it
determines everything that happens in the middle school class- room, it would
be equally problematic to ignore the profound effects and affects it produces.
When the mode of teaching shifts from students solving math problems by
relating them to calculations that are a part of their daily lives to one
where they are expected to solve standard abstract word problems based on
unfamiliar normative assumptions, the classroom becomes a site of frustration
and boredom where pleasure, excitement, enthusiasm are curtailed along with
improvisation, creativity, and questioning. Not only does the test shape the
intimate spaces of the classroom, it also affects e as Guisbond and Neill (2004) contend with respect to US education
more generally e
the ability
of all schools to attract teachers, with low achieving schools in poor
neighborhoods being doubly disadvantaged. Because academic progress is measured
through the test e
with all the
problems that attend to it such as cultural bias, failure to measure
higher-order thinking, and the problem of measurement error -- an urban geography of
uneven educational achievement results.
As Season 4 reveals, when the schools in the
largely white and more affluent suburban Baltimore
County get compared to the schools in the largely black and lower socioeconomic
neighbor- hoods of the city of Baltimore, a geography of achievement and
failure becomes solidified, condemning some
schools to further impoverishment while others grow more affluent in resources. As
well, the test produces a hypothetical and homogeneous national space of
content standards and curricular preferences while the sites of its actual
application are ones where heterogeneity proliferates. The test generates a
force field that reorients bodies,
other objects, and spaces e all of which must, in the words of Assistant Principal
Donnelley, “teach to the test”. Encountering the test in
The Wire is to recognize it not as a benign entity that neutrally proceeds
along innocuous pathways; instead, it activates, sorts, elevates, rejects,
overwhelms and deactivates the objects and assemblages of objects it encounters
constituting a geography of success and failure that reshuffles life chances by
devaluing organic and experiential knowledge production for the sterility of
certified facts.
