Being Tested

The Weight of Living (Reilly, 2011)

I.

My grandfather was a piano player.  I'm told he took great joy in sitting down to play and did so most days--sometimes for himself, most times for an audience. He died the summer before I was born.

He was a complicated man who drank too much and never studied piano. He just had an ear for it. As did his son and his four daughters.

"Pop could hear any tune and play it," my Da would tell us, a smile broadening across his face. I grew up listening to Art Tatum and stories.

When my Aunt Pat died, the family piano came to me. I had taken formal lessons until high school, as did my middle brother and earned some awards, but never really did feel the music.

Neither of us play these days, although now and then I sit at the piano and coax from the keys the opening to Bach's Two-Part Invention in D Minor--a piece I taught myself.

My husband and son would tell you that I don't play it well. Fortunately, I don't need to.


II.

And Full of Sleep (Reilly, 2012)

When I was no more than 8, I traveled with my mom to visit her friend who lived up the coast in Rhode Island.  We left my brothers in NJ. It was late June.

The friend's home I can't recall, but I'm thinking it was some sort of cottage--or perhaps hoping that was true. How we narrate events corresponds with who we see ourselves becoming.

What I do remember is that it was filled with canvases she had painted.  I had never met an artist, nor a woman who lived on the coast all on her own.  Most everyone I knew was connected to someone else and most certainly this was true for the women.

There was a lushness to her work and though I can't recall the subjects she painted, I feel the thickness and smell of the paint that permeated the rooms.  I can recall how primary the colors appeared and how sticky her homemade jam felt on my fingers as I painted a cat on a fence with a tree again and again on a large, round white plate. She took a look at these attempts and told me I was destined to be an artist and to lose no time starting.

When I arrived home I painted pictures on the back of the six-panel door to my bedroom. There was no hesitation. No need for permission. These panels were my canvases, save the painting I got to do at school,  until I moved from that house at 18 and married a painter just a few years later.

I stopped painting completely in my early 20s and didn't begin again until I crossed 40.  It's hard to predict a future. There are no school-based tests that can ready us to live a life.

III.

When I first met Rob, what I most recall was the cadence of his voice as he spoke about a Richard Powers' novel he had just read. His was a voice tipped in pleasure.  We were in graduate school. English majors. And whereas most of the other students waxed on about reading Dante or Woolf, here was this young guy from Brooklyn telling us about three farmers on their way to the market.  I talked about reading Kate Chopin's The Awakening and how it filled me with necessary courage.  I was 28.

During that semester I would come to know Rob's work as poet and novelist and years later I still hear the rhythm of his poet voice resound in the ordinary acts of ordering at a restaurant, talking to his mom on the phone on Sunday mornings.

There is no test that can predict the immense love triggered solely by the sound of your lover's voice. There is no readiness for this. It can't be taught although it will be tested.

Christmas in Harlem (M.A. Reilly, 2013)

IV.

None of things I most love to do are tested at school--well at least not the high stakes variety.

Perhaps this is true for you too, for there are far more critical things in our lives than our capacity to "do" school math and school reading.  Nor are good performances on these measures accurate indicators of a life well lived.

We know this in our bones.

We know this at the critical points in our lives when we are truly tested.  I need only recall the rattle in my own mother's chest as she died to know what is important and what is just folly. Watching the life slip from her body has tested me in ways little else has ever done.

When I think about schooling in 2014, I wonder how it is that our obsession with testable minutia could ever have gotten so far whacked that we now pay obscene amounts of money to testing corporations to give us information we have never needed while pretending that such bare offerings have some significance.

They do not.

In the name of certainty and testing, we are sacrificing spaces of permission and replacing these with spaces of compliance--both for teachers and children.

Let's forget getting kids ready for college and career.  That's not really our job.  Let's help them to live better. Here. Now. 

Dear Secretary Duncan...

Last night my family and I traveled to Connecticut to attend the Masuk High School choral concert conducted by Dr. Robyn Gangi.  What was so different from other concerts I have attended was that this was less a performance and more an invitation to watch a master teacher and his students create.  It was intimate, deeply moving, and reminded me of the immense value of the arts. To move an audience requires keen intellect, grand empathy, and significant skill. All were displayed last night and had I polled the audience I am confident that there would not have been one among us who would not have said that these young people are 'career and college ready' with nary a paper test to be had.

Have a listen. This was from last night.




Here's the choral group in 2009 (and yes, it is announced at this engagement that the choral group had been invited to sing at the Vatican).




The arts matter in ways we are simply foolish to not acknowledge. As Maxine Greene says, they disturb us into awakening.  They matter more than school math and school reading and the mountain of tests that accompany these subjects. They matter more than STEM and more than PISA results. They matter most, because they awaken the imagination allowing us to be better and (other)wise. Truly, in a world defined by its inter-connectivity, can there be anything as important as becoming (other)wise?  Regardless of our economic circumstances, geographies, gender, ideologies, beliefs--we learn and express what it means to be human via the arts.

Who will our children become when the influence of the arts is denied, repressed, underfunded?

Secretary Duncan, alongside the increased testing that you have supported, funded, and championed that narrowly focuses on school math, reading and writing--the arts are being written out of school budgets and the very academic subjects you want to be privileged are being reduced to only that which can be tested. Now to be sure,  I am not saying that you are the cause of this, but I am saying that your continued emphasis on high stakes testing makes the actions of school boards and administrators inevitable.  This out-of-whack funding will only get worse when billions more are siphoned from public school budgets to pay companies to produce Pineapplegate-quality tests.  More arts programs and deep engagements with learning will be underfunded, and along with these our children will be lost.

The idiocy of this is that the very outcomes your administration and moms like me seek can be found inside quality arts programs like Dr. Gangi's. The study of music is as scholarly as it is embodied; as serious as it is joyful. It is agency personified. Go ahead and look at these young people in Dr. Gangi's choral group and tell me that you cannot see their commitment and agency--hear their voice and skill.

Secretary Duncan, you need to help this country balance its priorities and can do so by recommending a moratorium on high stakes testing for just two years and in its stead fully funding the arts and teachers.

If you ask America's teachers, its local communities, and its artisans to solve the concerns related to student achievement--they will answer.  It will be the start of a revolution that privileges children, not profits; method and outcome.  By the way, Dr. Gangi is retiring from public education in a few weeks. Last night's concert and another scheduled in two weeks represent his final work with these students. He'll have some time on his hands and perhaps you could tap him and others like him who also are leaving public education and ask them to guide you.

If you ask, many will answer and nary a corporation will be among them.