After teaching public school in Texas for three years, I now realize that although slavery has been outlawed for over a century, it didn’t cease to exist. It merely transformed itself first into the plantation-style management of Texas prisons and then infected the public school system with the implementation of No Child Left Behind in 2001.
Creative, experienced teachers such as myself were deemed no longer qualified to teach subjects we had been teaching for over years if we did not have a university degree in that subject. I managed to escape the initial wrath of NCLB for a few years by accepting a math position at a school in Egypt. After teaching two years there, I taught math and science at two Mexican schools for three years.
By the time I attended another international teaching job fair in February 2006, the NCLB infection had finally spread to foreign private American schools and international schools that were accredited through American agencies. Although the accreditation process is voluntary, schools with the best reputations are accredited to show that their educational program and facilities meet a certain standard, which becomes a matter of public record. In order to charge rich parents top dollar, and pay foreign teachers competitive salaries, private schools outside the States must be accredited and maintain their status.
Therefore, heads of schools and principals were reluctant to interview me for math positions since I was a licensed science teacher who had taught science for only three out of eleven years. Fortunately, I had learned of this bias before going to the job fair and knew to market myself as a HS science teacher.
Although a principal at a school in Colombia had contacted me to schedule an interview for a middle school math position, I had made up my mind to retire from teaching MS since I could not visualize myself going through puberty with middle school students another school year. Nonetheless, I interviewed with that school since I’d only arranged three other interviews–the fewest number of interviews I’d attending international teaching job fairs.
With a tremendous stroke of good luck, the first offer I got was the one I wanted: the IB Biology position at an American school in Honduras. Not only would that position give me current HS science experience, but the school would pay to send me to IB training in New Mexico prior to the upcoming school year. I was in heaven! (Of course, my ego was further inflated by receiving job offers from the other three interviews as well.)
I taught in Honduras for three years during which time, the American economy had started its downward spiral. Yet, after eight years of teaching outside of the States, I was ready to return. Plus, my family had pretty much ordered me back now that we’d just elected our first Black president; so, in their eyes, my self-imposed exile of Dubya’s reign was over.
Realizing that I’d return to the States as a virtual foreigner no matter where I set roots, I researched the best cities for jobs, housing and singles. I narrowed my choices to three cities: Chicago, Boston and Austin. After further research, Austin looked like my best chance to set down roots. I moved to Austin in July 2009 and although I didn’t have a job, I was optimistic and used the unstructured time to work on three paintings in rotation along with three novels.
By mid-August, I started to feel disappointed that I was missing the sweet first week of school when everything was shiny and new. By the middle of that week, I interviewed and accepted a HS science position with the Austin Independent School District. By the end of my first week on the job, I seriously questioned how in the hell I could have overlooked the fact that this wonderful city was a part of Texas.
For the first time in my 14 years of teaching, I did not have the creative freedom to teach the way I wanted. I had to abandon most of the wonderful things that I’d done at other schools, which had made me such a hot commodity in the international teaching market.
To my horror, we science teachers had to use the exact same lessons for 80% of the time, which did not include all the assessments, each with their own acronym. So, for less than 20% of the time, I could teach lessons that I had created or as I referred to it “go off script.” In reality, I hardly ever took the time to write my own lessons since I would not have had the time to use them between the common scripted lessons and the constant pressure to assess the students.
The first year at any new school always puts me in survival mode. So my second year at an AISD HS, things were marginally better. At least I knew all the assessment acronyms. And unlike my first year, I did not have to teach my classes in two different rooms, shared with three other teachers. Although my teaching creativity was still bound by 80% of scripted lessons and invasive assessments, I had the pleasure of decorating my classroom with the cloth from the different countries where I’d taught or traveled through. It was only a small window of freedom, but I took it.
After my second year, I realized that although I felt very controlled, my students were just a technological breath and a few civil liberties away from being enslaved.
Imagine, if you will, a system that regularly judges if students meet a certain standard. If enough students fail to meet the standard, then resources are taken away from a school rather than augmented. With fewer resources and viable alternatives, these students become disenfranchised and eventually find themselves entangled with the judicial system.
Yet kiddie jail is the old model. The new and improved model, which I predict is only a few generations away, won’t need to sequester nonviolent youth. Once the efficiency of the never-ending cycle of assessments improves, resources can be channeled to nurture those youths who have the academic aptitude to succeed while spending less on those who show no promise for higher learning. In this case, higher learning means beyond an elementary education.
Both groups of students can be tracked and when the inevitable happens to the lower tracked students, they can only bargain for shorter incarceration time by agreeing to have a chip implanted. No more ankle bracelets! Chip implantation is the wave of the future. With an embedded chip, the troublesome youth will no longer be visually stigmatized, but still be monitored.
Before you can say “invasion of privacy,” chip implantation will be touted as the efficient means to keep track of adult criminals, criminalized students and any other undesirables in our society. A few generations will pass and soon, the innocent will also be implanted for their own well-being just like receiving vaccines. At any time, those same chips that keep Americans safe and criminals tracked, can be used to prevent individuals from entering certain places or even crossing borders.
Neo-slavery will not rely on the color of one’s skin, but rather the content of one’s character. And the horror will start from the systemic assessment and data collection of public school students with the system’s arbitrary determination of how high the score must be in order to pass. We’ve already begun the process of putting young people on the auction block. Their collective test scores are reported publicly. The only thing that remains is to evolutionize the old “playground to prison pipeline” into the “crib to chip cyberhighway.”