Disability Is a Cultural Experience

Due to a genetic mutation carried over from Kent County, England, the population of Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, once knew an exceptionally high rate of inherited deafness. At its peak in the nineteenth century, Vineyard deafness affected as many as one in 155 people on the island. Because both deaf and hearing residents spoke a highly developed form of sign language, deafness posed no obstacle to full participation in economic, social, academic, and civic life.

In fact, according to education scholars Ray McDermott and Hervé Varenne, when surviving community members were later interviewed, “they could not always remember who among them had been deaf, for everyone spoke sign language, sometimes even hearing people with other hearing people.” In other words, the culture of eighteenth and nineteenth century Martha’s Vineyard was set up in a way that rendered deafness not a disability. Just consider that for a moment.

McDermott and Varenne use the example of the Vineyard deaf to illustrate how disabilities are not, contrary to normative discourse, the unfortunate possessions of individual people. Rather, they’re cultural experiences, produced by structures that enable some of us while disabling others. There’s nothing per se disabling about needing a wheelchair, for example. Disability shows up in the interaction between that wheelchair and the sidewalks, curbs, buses, and buildings designed exclusively for people who walk.

Likewise, the inability to pass a state test did not narrow Dante’s opportunities for any reason intrinsic to Dante. Most of the things we need to do in life are nothing like standardized tests, which require students to independently read and respond to decontextualized academic material for hours at a time. The road signs we use to travel from home to work, for example, and the tasks that make up our jobs, are generally not designed to trick us. Standardized test questions often are.

Similarly, at work and throughout our lives, we’re obliged to collaborate. You’d be hard-pressed to find a meaningful contribution to society that did not involve any teamwork. But collaboration is strictly forbidden in standardized testing rooms. Even if you qualify for special accommodations, the tests only measure what you can do by yourself — in a highly stressful, frankly dehumanizing vacuum. It’s quite a leap to say, as Massachusetts, Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, New York, Texas, Virginia, and Wyoming do, that students who don’t perform well under these conditions are categorically unfit for college or any career requiring a high school diploma.

It’s just as illogical to punish teachers or schools for poor standardized test scores. According to the American Statistical Association, school-level inputs only account for a very small percentage of student score variability — possibly as little as 1 percent. The most reliable predictors of kids’ standardized test scores are factors like socioeconomic status, over which schools have no control.

Poverty is associated with a variety of conditions (e.g., malnutrition, sleep deprivation, crowded or unstable housing, chronically overheated environments) that are known to lower test scores. These scores, in other words, capture a fundamentally economic problem caused by exploitative employers and a weak social safety net, and repackage that problem as the deficiency of individual students, educators, and schools.

In the heyday of neoliberal education reform, this made possible great reputation-laundering for lawmakers interested in projecting a concern for yawning inequality while doing nothing to redistribute wealth. Along the way, kids like Dante have been forced to feel an utterly pointless kind of misery.

A Brighter Future?

Earlier this year, Education Secretary Miguel Cardona urged states to use standardized tests as a “flashlight,” to reveal what is and isn’t working, not a “hammer.” These and other comments from the nation’s top education official reflect just how much the tides have turned against the harsh penalties that NCLB forced states to attach to student test scores.

This turning of the tides is also reflected in state education laws. Take the exit exams that are used to withhold diplomas from students like Dante. As recently as 2014, nearly half of all US states made high school graduation contingent upon standardized test scores, despite evidence that exit exams don’t improve students’ learning or future employment and that they make vulnerable kids more likely to drop out and become incarcerated.

Today, only eight states still use them (although more states have standardized test–based grade retention policies for younger students). Some states have even gone so far as to offer a legislative mea culpa, retroactively awarding diplomas to people who were denied them on the basis of test scores. A bill currently pending before the Massachusetts Joint Committee on Education would remove the MCAS as a graduation requirement. In Washington, Representative Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) has gained attention as a vocal opponent of high-stakes testing and the high-stakes testing industry.

The Beyond Test Scores Project and the National Education Policy Center recently published a report titled “Educational Accountability 3.0: Beyond ESSA,” summarizing two dozen leading educational assessment scholars’ shared vision for what the next ESEA reauthorization should prioritize. They make six broad recommendations, including developing systems of reciprocal accountability, so that school communities like Dante’s can hold lawmakers accountable for providing them with needed resources.

Assessment systems, they argue, should reflect the wide range of important things that public schools do, rather than focusing exclusively on test scores. They stress that many of the problems we’ve seen in the neoliberal education reform era, such as test score–driven school closures, “can be remedied or reduced by lowering the stakes that have been central to NCLB-style accountability.”

Cardona’s “flashlight, not hammer” advice is a welcome contrast to the rhetoric of people like Arne Duncan and Michelle Rhee. And as we can see from the example of exit exams, states do have some room to shift away from hammer mode while remaining ESSA compliant. Still, as long as the nation’s most important education law requires kids to take statewide tests throughout their public school careers, we’re likely to keep seeing complex, multifaceted people and institutions reduced to a profoundly flawed metric. And that means that a percentage of students will, like Dante, be arbitrarily labeled inadequate.

Young people should be focused on enjoying life, refining their interests and talents, and solving the world’s problems, not guessing which bubbles to darken to escape the worst abuses of a punitive education state. If we actually want to help schools better meet the needs of poor, minority, and disabled kids — a stated purpose of both NCLB and ESSA — we must allow them to assess learning in ways that afford all students the chance to show what they can do.