too many voices

I'm listening to Sufjan Stevens, partially because I enjoy the song "Transfiguration" but mostly because I can't take anything too manufactured right now. Sometimes I think I've got the soul of an anarchist and I just want freedom.

The district and the state department keep giving us an endless loop of "just wait" and "what about?" with respects to the restructuring. "Judging by the data I can't see how it will increase student achievement (read 'test scores')," the superintendent explains. So, that's it. I presented pages of research on both service learning and technology integration. The same goes with the Technology Magnet I spent hours developing.

Sometimes I feel as though standardized education is a fundamentalist religion. I feel like the guy at the Catholic Church who thinks the saints are nonsense and who doesn't like the vestments and the hypocrisy and the pages of rules. I feel like I'm faking it. Like the Jesus sticker guy who says "God bless" all the time, I've learned to say words like "data" when I mean ideas. AIMS tests are the sacred cow and there is a part of me that wants to make hamburger out of it.

The problem is that the system has too many voices. The more people I work with, the more I have to accomodate until eventually, ever so slowly, I fit that mould of the factory-based education. The state needs one thing, so I market my idea, prostituting something good to make a beuracrat happy for a few minutes. Then, I persuade the district with data from schools I have never visited.

I start to feel like Red in One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest and I start to wonder if I'm the one who is insane. Am I wrong to believe that the purpose of school is not to raise test scores but to help students to gain wisdom and live well? I want to break out of the factory. I want to nail my Wittenburg Door starting with "Children are not data," and extending my thesis.

Then I wander the school, this cathedral of data. And like the Catholic who can't believe, I think of quitting. Except when I sit down and glance at a student article. I read it and it's beautiful - an interview with an immigrant attached to a letter to a state legislator; and like the man in the cathedral who can't believe, I see my version of the transubstantiation and in a place so sick and sad and rife with conformity, I get the sense of mystery that God is there. So, I think I can continue.