Angie Sullivan teaches young children in Clark County, Nevada. She is a one-woman crusader for the rights of children.
She writes:
How best to discriminate against small young persons of color in Nevada. . .
1. Fail to hire teachers for impoverished communities – staff with substitutes.
2. Ensure that no one will want to work in impoverished communities because you punish anyone who does.
3. Fail to fund.
4. Replace instruction with repeated and incessant testing – if the students fail, test them some more rather than provide additional support. Drive them into the pavement with testing. Smash them. Make sure they cannot get better by replacing all instruction with additional testing. 13 tests is not enough! Let’s invent another! We don’t need the same test – we just need more tests!
5. Retain. Any small child who is not able to score like a white kid in Connecticut by the time they are seven . . . Punish them with repeating another non-instructional, non-supported year obsessed with testing year. Ignore every study that shows that retention is closely linked to not graduating and social stigma. Punish small children and punish them hard! Don’t you dare support them as would be required to succeed – whip them, whip their teachers, whip their schools.
That is a summary of what is occurring right now in the Nevada State Board meeting
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I cannot watch this destruction.
Kids are more than a score.
It is a rare few kids that benefit from retention.
It takes between 5 to 10 years for language learners to be proficient in academic English – if they are supported.
Underfunding and no recognizing the significant need because of poverty in our community – is a problem.
The kids who will be retained will be brown – because that is what has happened in every state that has implemented #readby3.
O God hear the words of my mouth let those who implement this horrible crime see. I cannot bear to watch. All I can do is weep. How did we get to this horrible relentless place?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Angie,
I too feel this angst, and every time I state it in emotional tones as you have, it is rejected as hyperbole. I wish that the white middle class would personalize the conditions for black youth. We have a condition in the public schools which is similar to the one recently uncovered in the Federal Department Of Veteran Affairs. Unless the country changes the culture that demeans teachers and maintains a fraudulent, authoritarian administrative system within the schools, the testing will go on until the entire public education system is replaced by a digital process. I am still waiting for someone with a significant amount of prestige to reveal the truth, but I suppose even courage has it’s limitations.
Ian Kay
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Some of us are doing that — but the black community itself must also be heard. Unfortunately, right now, the NAACP, Urban League, et al are supporting the testing regime — white teachers such as myself and others are screaming “this is wrong”, but the Democrats are not listening to us.
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In Louisiana, the problem is dire. With students failing the test twice in 4th, and repeating the grade and failing the mandatory test again in 8th grade, many are so far behind that they dropout in 8th grade. If they make it to high school and cannot pass the exit exam, even though all class work has been completed, failing this one test means they cannot graduate from high school, even if they were the valedictorian. The test supersedes all of their work for the four years of high school. There has to be a better way. We are losing too many of our children.
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This is what the research says about retention. They should read it before they implement a policy with harmful consequences.
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Where men and women have eyes but cannot see,
Where they have hearts but cannot feel,
Where they have heads but refuse to think,
Where their consciences are stilled,
Where the children’s eyes are sad, but no one cares,
Where the sincere are punished, but no one cares,
Where there is lamentation, but no one hears,
Where there is devastation that is praised,
Where there is destruction that is applauded,
Where courage and hope have yielded to fear and despair,
From such a place, from such a place,
From such a place, from such a place
Let us either flee, let us either flee
Or let us fight, let us fight,
Let us fight!
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