Oppression Has Become Standardized. Discussion for A.B., Melody, Steeve, Caroline, Marty

Patrick Camangian writes "I focus less on complying with any standards fetish and more on creating humanizing and transformative pedagogies that develop and evaluate young people on the qualities of compassion, critical analysis, and leadership needed to transform unjust social conditions" (459).

As educators I feel it is imperative to implement a more critical literacy pedagogy in the classroom. It is crucial that minoritized students from all grades are looking at what is being said implicitly and explicitly throughout all texts in society. It is problematic to think that there are students that go through most of their young adult life without thinking critically about the texts around them. In many ways I can attest to that experience as a student, who began to really think critically about normalized texts only this year as a grad student. It would only benefit all students to cultivate their critical literacy skills at a much earlier stage in their life, instead of the "teach to the test" methods that repress minoritized groups.

The standardized tests and educational policies are part of a much larger issue. The public school system and the policies that control them have only become a constricting part of the oppressive paradigm. After our class discussion last week it was baffling to find out who influences the policies of education and their possible alternative agendas. Policy slogans like "No Child Left Behind" and "teaching methods" vocabulary have become mere capital jargon. The fact of the matter is, the problem is not the child taking the test but more so the dominant power creating the standardized test.

I find the discrimination within the educational system very intriguing, in which certain types of schools offer different standardized tests. Lisa Patel Stevens and David Omotoso Stovall point out "when educational policy is an explicit stage where schools are increasingly privatized, mimicking markets where the rich grow more advantaged and the poor are sidelined, sequestered, and scrutinized, identification of these trends is not enough" (297). If all we are doing is identifying these trends, the reconstruction of the educational system is suppressed.

My big question is:

How can we as educators reconstruct the educational system beyond pedagogy and curricula on the local state or federal level?