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Tenth grade high school student contemplates an answer as he takes the California Standards Testing (STAR) in Wilmington, California. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
When I taught at an alternative public school for kids with exceptional social-emotional, behavioral, and learning needs, one of my students — I’ll call him Dante — got As in every class he took. School staff would frequently elevate Dante’s extraordinary focus and commitment as an example for his peers.
In the spring of Dante’s senior year, his counselor informed him he’d earned the status of valedictorian. His beaming smile of pride after hearing the news affirmed everything I love about public education. When his mother found out, she burst into tears of joy.
Then, abruptly, we were informed that there had been a mistake. Because Dante’s exceptional learning needs made it impossible for him to pass the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) — the standardized tests that Massachusetts requires high school students to pass prior to graduation — he would not receive a diploma. Without a diploma, he couldn’t be valedictorian — even though, according to his grades and the unanimous judgment of his teachers, he clearly deserved the honor. A wave of incredulity rippled through the staff as we tried to resign ourselves to this obviously cruel, unfair reality. For Dante, the news was devastating.
Even before the “giant federal wrecking ball” (to borrow leading education policy analyst Diane Ravitch’s phrasing) known as education reform, evidence from diverse fields had demonstrated a scientific concept known as Campbell’s Law: the more we base social decision-making on a specific quantitative measure, the more likely it is that that measure will become distorted, ultimately corrupting the processes it’s intended to monitor.
Just so, in the two decades since Congress reauthorized the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) as George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), researchers have collected a mountain of data showing that in the long run, attaching high-stakes, or punishments, to student standardized test scores does not improve educational outcomes. Instead, it results in a host of perverse consequences, with poor, minority, and disabled kids like Dante experiencing the greatest harms. This last point makes a lot of sense when you consider that standardized testing was first developed by eugenicists looking to organize people into racist taxonomies based on perceived ability.
But despite these serious problems — and the persistent, bipartisan unpopularity of the high-stakes testing regime inaugurated by NCLB — our current, Obama-era iteration of the ESEA (the Every Student Succeeds Act or ESSA) still requires states to impose inappropriate test-based accountability on students and school communities.
When we sort children into “proficient” and “failing” categories based on test scores, we’re not solving the opportunity gaps that show up in public education; we’re creating new ones. No one is helped, and many people are hurt, when we give students, teachers, and schools an impossible assignment and then sanction them for failing to complete it. Looking forward to the ESEA’s now overdue reauthorization, it’s high time we built accountability systems that nurture the humanity and potential of all kids — rather than placing artificial roadblocks in their way.
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.
Most of the things we need to do in life are nothing like standardized tests.
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.
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.
The most reliable predictors of kids’ standardized test scores are factors like socioeconomic status, over which schools have no control.
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.
Climate Defiance protesters at a Semafor event featuring Senator Joe Manchin, June 6, 2023. (Twitter / Climate Defiance)
On Tuesday, as apocalyptic wildfire smoke began to blanket the East Coast, the digital media start-up Semafor hosted the “definitive conversation on permitting reform” — sponsored by lobbyists for fossil fuel interests and set up as a victory lap for special guest Senator Joe Manchin, a West Virginia Democrat, who had just pushed through a controversial gas pipeline in the new debt ceiling law.
But within minutes of Semafor’s top editor congratulating the coal-baron-turned-senator on his victory, climate activists stormed the interview, derailing the event and leading the Semafor editor to scream on camera at the protestors, “Get off my stage!” The spectacle quickly went viral.
The event perfectly encapsulated the problems with Beltway news outlets’ lucrative corporate sponsorship model. By seeking out fossil fuel industry cash and cozying up to the industry’s favorite politicians as the world burns, media outlets are picking a side in the battle to protect the planet’s future livability — settling down with the arsonists against all other life on Earth.
“Media outlets need to reevaluate,” said Rylee Haught, an organizer with the environmental group Climate Defiance who was involved in Tuesday’s protest. “If they’re taking giant chunks of cash from fossil fuel CEOs, they should be prepared for us to call them out at any time and shut down an event like this. When you’re platforming people like [Manchin], you need to be prepared.”
Sponsored by groups with major ties to fossil fuel interests, the Semafor event was meant to “explore the futureshape [sic]” of permitting reform as “America’s economy enters a period of substantial infrastructure investment.” The outlet’s Beltway journalists were scheduled to interview “policy makers, business leaders, advocacy groups, and thought leaders” — including Manchin.
The conservative Democrat helped write many of the permitting-reform provisions included in the recent debt ceiling law negotiated by President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, a California Republican. Broadly speaking, the changes will expedite energy and pipeline projects.
Manchin publicly championed provisions in the legislation to fast-track the Mountain Valley Pipeline from West Virginia to southern Virginia, and shield the long-stalled project from further environmental challenges. Environmental groups say that the pipeline would emit at least twenty-six coal plants’ worth of greenhouse gasses and exacerbate the climate crisis.
“Congrats on that Mountain Valley Pipeline, how’d you do that?” Semafor’s editor at large, Steve Clemons, said to Manchin at the start of their conversation.
Within two minutes, activists with Climate Defiance had interrupted the interview, shouting about Manchin’s “dirty deal.” Semafor’s online video feed quickly cut to black, while video posted later by the protesters showed Clemons yelling at the disruptors.
Clemons and Manchin ultimately concluded their discussion in a smaller room. Once there, Manchin went on to brag about how the country is “producing more fossil fuel.”
All in all, the event lived up to its promise to illustrate the “futureshape” of something — not permitting reform, but rather the looming clash between industry-funded news media and activists who want to save the planet.
Semafor isn’t the first media company to employ the corporate sponsorship model, in which newsletters and events are “presented” or “supported” by companies with distinct financial interests in the topics being discussed.
It’s a lucrative business model, one that’s been very successful for Beltway tip-sheet companies like Politico, Axios, and more recently Punchbowl News. Politico’s flagship Playbook newsletter may feature a bullet point–style roundup of the day’s top stories, alongside a message from the tobacco giant Altria about how the company is “leading the way in transitioning millions of adult smokers from cigarettes to a smoke-free future.”
The corporate sponsorship model poses obvious potential ethical issues for journalists — especially when the sponsors have an interest in the stories being covered. Late last year, Semafor’s climate editor left the company because the company refused to stop running ads from the oil and gas giant Chevron on his stories.
Advertising has always been complicated for publications, though historically, it was protected by firewalls between a newspaper’s editorial and financial departments. With sponsored newsletters, the lines often blur further — as the journalists tend to frame their play-by-play coverage of legislative dealmaking in ways that encourage the policy outcomes that their corporate sponsors want.
One of the more odious developments in this corporate-sponsored news model is the events companies are hosting with writers and newsmakers, in the name of dialogue. These discussions pair lawmakers and policymakers with journalists under the banners of corporate sponsors — and that sponsorship often feels like the only real point to these events.
Punchbowl News, for instance, held a “pop-up conversation” with Maine Republican senator Susan Collins on Thursday on “national security and foreign relations,” sponsored by the defense contractor Raytheon. Next week, the outlet will host an event with Representative Steny Hoyer, a Maryland Democrat, sponsored by telecom conglomerate Comcast.
Semafor’s event description gave off a uniquely cash-grab vibe: “Today, permitting reform is paralyzed by a complex knot of interests tugging and pulling in different directions,” wrote the company. “As America’s economy enters a period of substantial infrastructure investment, particularly on federal lands, there is a need to unpack America’s permitting system and bring the many stakeholders involved into dialogue with one another.” (“Stakeholders” is Washington-speak for industry groups.)
The debt ceiling deal’s permitting-reform measures, which will help speed up approvals for energy and pipeline projects, should be a boon for the fossil fuel industry. Notably, the legislation did not include provisions sought by progressives to expedite approvals for electric transmission lines for renewable-energy projects.
The debt ceiling deal specifically fast-tracks the Mountain Valley Pipeline, which would transport fracked gas across hazardous Appalachian Mountain terrain, including through more than two hundred miles with “high landslide susceptibility.” The legislation attempts to block judicial review of permits issued for the pipeline project, potentially threatening ongoing court cases over it.
Manchin, who has been pushing lawmakers to approve these measures for much of the past year, was one of the top beneficiaries of campaign cash last election cycle from executives at NextEra Energy, the electric utility company spearheading the Mountain Valley Pipeline project.
The Semafor event was sponsored by American Clean Power, a purported clean-energy lobbying group that has backed the permitting-reform measures. NextEra reported donating $950,000 to the organization in 2021.
Semafor listed the US Chamber of Commerce, the nation’s top business lobby, as a “partner” on the permitting-reform discussion. The lobbying group, whose members include major oil and gas companies, received $100,000 from NextEra in 2021.
Climate Defiance describes itself as “a brand-new, youth-led, grassroots organizing collective focused on using peaceful, nonviolent direct action to resist fossil fuels.”
In April, the group led its first major action: attempting to blockade the entrance to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, the annual gala where the president makes jokes before the Washington press corps, demanding that Biden fulfill his promise to block new fossil fuel projects on federal lands.
Climate Defiance’s decision to protest at events with journalists and policymakers is deliberate: politicians and media are both climate problems for the same reason.
“Not only does Biden need to be held accountable, but we know that the same folks that are funding the worst politicians are also passing out cash to the corporate media outlets that will continue to say the things that the fossil fuels CEOs want them to say, more than uplifting folks like us,” said Haught.
Haught, one of Manchin’s constituents in West Virginia, said that the fight to stop the Mountain Valley Pipeline is a personal one for her, given how the fossil fuel industry has polluted the state and sickened communities. And she believes that events like the one Semafor held with industry groups and Manchin aren’t helpful.
“It was just a bunch of people in suits, having a conversation about having a conversation,” she said. “They literally sit around, and they’re like, ‘This is so important. And I’m so glad that we’re fostering all these ideas, everybody seems to have different ideas to how we move forward.’ But they’re really stalling for time, while fossil fuel CEOs continue to ravage the earth.”
The write-up from Semafor was a bit more positive, but it also contained what sounded like a dash of guilt.
“Semafor’s permitting reform event on Wednesday featured a robust discussion between host Steve Clemons and lawmakers, industry stakeholders, and environmentalists trying to find the sweet spot for a bipartisan deal,” the outlet wrote, adding: “It also featured a rousing edition of ‘Take Me Home, Country Roads’ from protesters upset over Manchin’s successful lobbying to approve the Mountain Valley Pipeline in the debt limit deal.”
In truth, without Climate Defiance’s intrusion, the Semafor event would have just been an unnecessary cash grab that few people watched. Instead, it became a viral illustration of all that’s wrong with the corporate-sponsored media model — and what climate activists are up against as they try to save the planet.
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