Re: Nooses

[aburke5054@aol.com]

The fourth graders in the story seemed pretty satisfied with the extra 
work they put in and pretty confident that they would succeed on the 
test.  If kids working hard and getting a lot out of it is your example 
of racism, someone might think that your moral compass is off kilter. 
How sad that would be.

Art

-----Original Message-----
From: Horn, James <jhorn@monmouth.edu>
To: arn-l@interversity.org
Sent: Thu, 24 Jan 2008 11:26 am
Subject: [arn-l] Nooses

All the March Nooses Across Louisiana

Racism has never been just about Jena, Louisana. Since 2000 the 
Louisiana State
Department of Education has used the Louisiana Education Assessment 
Program
(LEAP), with its ground-breaking 4th and 8th grade retention policy 
that Michael
Bloomberg has now emulated, to strangle children, teachers, and schools 
into a
rigid, mindless, behavioral control system that would be an 
embarrassment even
in a totalitarian state.

While music, art, social studies, science, health, recess, field trips, 
and
loving teachers have been left behind, the constant surveillance of 
practice
tests, the fear of failure on an individual level, and fear of failure 
at the
school level (thanks to NCLB) have turned poor, black, and brown 
Louisiana
schools into year-round test preparation chain gangs.

Children in grades 4 and 8 have to pass both the reading and math 
sections of
the LEAP in order to move on to the next grades. All Louisiana 
elementary
schools are to have a School Performance Score (SPS) of 120 by 2014. At 
Lincoln
Elementary in Iberia Parish, they started this journey in 2000 with an 
SPS of
54.8. Now 7 years later they are at 71.7. At their current rate of 
improvement,
the 4th graders today at Park Elementary will be 30 years old when 
their school
reaches the 2014 target for all schools in Louisiana.

In the meantime, hundreds of thousands of children will have been 
labeled
failures because of the poverty they can do nothing about. In the 
meantime, they
will have been robbed of an education whose purpose of democratic 
citizenship,
creative thinking, survival and health skills, cultural and artistic 
awareness,
global awareness, ecological understanding, will have been all 
sacrificed in
order to obtain an iron-fisted control over the next generation of 
compliant,
ignorant, dependent, duped, and incapacitated drones willing to be 
ordered about
by a numerically-shrinking white elite. This is the true banality of 
evil,
unacknowledged in our presence, and given the name of equality and 
goodness.
What kind of people have we become.

And in the meantime, too, test preparation goes forward at Park 
Elementary with
the hollow hope of success this coming March. Last March 50% of 4th 
graders
failed the LEAP, thus learning the loss of hope at an early age. From 
the New
Iberian:

   BY RANDY LOUIS, THE DAILY IBERIAN

    This year teachers and staff members at Park Elementary School are 
making
sure every student is prepared for the LEAP and i-LEAP tests by 
offering
after-school tutoring to give students a second look at the math 
concepts and
language arts skills they will see on the two tests, which are March 
10-14.

    The LEAP test taken by fourth- and eighth-graders determines 
whether
students pass to the next grade. The i-LEAP, taken by students in the 
third-,
fifth-, seventh- and ninth-grades, does not determine whether a student 
is
promoted to the next grade.

    Evelyn Louis, principal at Park Elementary School, said about 80 
students at
the school have taken advantage of the after-school tutoring.

    “We have been preparing students since Oct. 1 for these high stakes 
tests
that they will be taking later this spring,” Louis said. “The students 
have 30
to 45 minute intervals in which they focus on Math and English-Language 
Arts
skills to help them prepare for the test.”

    Louis said students recently took a benchmark test to see where 
they stand
and most of the students did pretty well on the practice test.

    “Some kids have a little touching up to do before the big test, but 
for the
most part, I think the students and teachers are doing a really good 
job
preparing for the test,” she said.

    “The kids are into it and overall everyone is doing pretty well. 
Hopefully
the afternoon training will benefit all the kids on the i-LEAP and LEAP 
tests
who have participated in the after school tutoring.”

    Llamira Crosby and Tanasia Leon, fourth-grade students at the 
school, said
they have been attending after-school tutoring since it began in the 
first week
in October.

    “Tutoring has been a little sophisticated but I have been doing 
pretty good
with all of my worksheets that we have been working on,” Crosby said. 
“I know I
am going to pass the LEAP test because I am focused and I have been 
doing the
necessary things to be successful on it.”

   Leon agreed.

   “During tutoring we have been doing a number of math and English
activities,” she said. “Staying after school has helped me out a whole 
lot, and
I believe I am ready for the LEAP test. I know I will pass it.”
________________

Will Leon be in the 50% that does pass it?






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