PPS Instructional Leader: yes to racist testocracy, no to anti-racism in the classroom?

Radical right-funded attacks against free speech in public schools have become commonplace. This onslaught is in full view on conservative primetime media, in contentious school board meetings, and in state legislatures around the country. They can be seen in the form of "educational gag order" laws targeting honest discussions of race, racism, gender, sexuality, and U.S. history. Using racist, homophobic and transphobic messages to manufacture outrage while painting public schools as untrustworthy and educators as dangerous to children is designed to erode trust in public schools, steering parents away from the institution. Ultimately, the attacks are designed to escalate school privatization, with the goal of eventually dismantling the entire system. The big picture end-game is the triumph of conservative ideology and defeat of critical thought that has the potential to inspire a movement for social justice and a class revolution.

While in other parts of the state and country these attacks are easily visible in heated televised board meetings, in Portland school privatization appears in the form of board book budget line items revealing lucrative partnerships with private foundations and billionaire-financed "non-profit" organizations, hefty contracts with private firms which outsource non-unionized labor, and hires of pro-reform administrators from districts decades deep into school privatization. Simultaneously we are seeing parent groups like ED300 fill social media with anti-teacher and anti-union messages. Meanwhile, outspoken educators who challenge the district's agenda are being pushed out in a pattern that disproportionately targets critical educators of color.

In a city with a history of progressive organizing and protest, Portland Public Schools (PPS) Senior Leadership has the sense not to outright declare their motives or allegiance to the conservative agenda. Yet, we see district leaders consistently cater to the demands of conservative groups such as ED300 on issues such as full reopening and choice in masking in schools during COVID.

One of PPS’ new district administrators is not only a high stakes exam-based reform enthusiast, but also a member of a group opposing Critical Race Theory--a framework used to examine the role of race in legal systems--in the classroom.

The administrator in question is Dr. Cheryl Proctor, a recent addition to Portland Public Schools Superintendent Guadalupe Guerrero’s senior leadership team. Dr. Proctor, who oversees curriculum and instruction, student support services, and school performance, was originally hired as Chief Academic Officer in July 2021. In January of this year, Dr. Proctor was promoted to Deputy Superintendent of Instruction & School Communities, a post formerly held for one year by the Texas-bound Dr. Shawn Bird (who succeeded Dr. Kregg Cuellar after Cuellar likewise departed for Texas only two years into the job).

Like Dr. Bird, Dr. Proctor came to Portland from Philadelphia, a city with a long history of school privatization schemes amidst robust community resistance. There, she worked in various leadership roles including Executive Director of School Improvement Planning and Evidence-based Supports, and Director of School Improvement and Regional Data Support. Prior to these roles she was a school administrator and Special Education supervisor in the Miami/Fort Lauderdale Area, Florida, after serving as a Reading Curriculum Specialist for one year. Her only experience in the classroom in a non-supervisory role was more than two decades ago as a Special Education teacher, a position she held for just over 2 years.

A Steadfast Love Affair with Standardized Testing and Accountability

A key area of Dr. Proctor's professional focus is on school "improvement," equating student achievement data on standardized tests with academic gains. In her 2017 Florida Atlantic University dissertation, which discusses mandatory 3rd grade retention as related to school performance in Florida, she lauds education reform built on a foundation of standardized tests without interrogating their validity. Of Ronald Reagan’s National Commission on Excellence in Education 1983 report, The Nation at Risk, Proctor writes that its findings “evoked a movement to better the curriculum taught to the nation’s pupils by raising the standards and revisiting practices past practices [sic].” The report, she claims, “opined the path to improve education in America.”

“No Child Left Behind, a law signed by President Bush in 2002,” Proctor continues, “was based on the tenets of increasing accountability for educational outcomes, broadening flexibility and control, schooling choices for parents, and employing highly qualified instructional staff implementing research-based proven teaching methods.”

Unquestioningly, she concludes that “its objective was to save our schools and generate improved student achievement nationally."

High-stakes testing has been protested and discredited again and again by education experts, teachers, scholars, researchers, and activists over the past two plus decades. It has been shown to undermine teachers’ ability to provide children meaningful education. Yet, it is still being used as a tool to turn so-called "failing schools" into private-run charters with non-unionized staff and to otherwise justify further steps toward school privatization.

Steven Singer is an education activist and teacher with first-hand experience in Pennsylvania schools. In a recent Common Dreams article arguing for the abolishment of high-stakes standardized testing, Singer paints an analysis of modern education reform diametrically opposed to the premise presented by Proctor. He points out that standardized assessments are not a valid measure of student learning; that they were, in fact, created as racist and classist sorting mechanisms, and have since become a tool for school privatization.

Singer writes:

"Standardized tests were supposed to be the magic remedy to fix our public schools. They were supposed to make all students proficient in reading and math. They were supposed to ensure all students were getting the proper resources. They were supposed to ensure all teachers were doing their best for their students. But after more than four decades, standardized tests have not fulfilled a single one of these promises. In fact, all they’ve done is make things worse at public schools while creating a lucrative market for testing companies and school privatization concerns."

Singer calls the above-mentioned Reagan-era Nation at Risk report hailed by Proctor as "the origin of modern educational reform," "a campfire tale about how America’s public schools were failing." He debunks it, explaining that the study was "misleading and full of statistical and mathematical errors." As many opponents of high-stakes education reforms have done before, Singer lays out a convincing case that the true motive for standardized testing has been profit by dismantling the public school system.

He writes:

"Standardized testing has grown from a $423 million industry before 2001 to a multi-billion dollar one today. If we add in test prep, new text books, software, and consultancy, that figure easily tops the trillion dollar mark.  Huge corporations make the tests, grade the tests and then sell remediation materials when students fail. It’s a huge scam. 

But that’s not the only business created by this policy. Test and punish opened entirely new markets that hadn’t existed before. The emphasis on test scores and the 'failing schools' narrative stoked unwarranted distrust in the public school system and a demand for more privatized alternatives. Chief among these was charter schools."

Meanwhile, Dr. Proctor, who will likely be a key presence in the upcoming contract negotiations between PPS and Portland Association of Teachers, insists on the validity of and investment in testocracy, which teacher and activist Jesse Hagopian defines as testing conglomerates profiting from the sale of standardized exams as well as "the elite stratum of society that finances and promotes competition and privatization in public education rather than collaboration, critical thinking, and the public good."

Hagopian writes:  

"The testocratic elite are committed to reducing the intellectual and emotional process of teaching and learning to a single number—a score they subsequently use to sacrifice education on the altar devoted to high-stakes testing by denying students promotion or graduation, firing teachers, converting schools into privatized charters, or closing schools altogether. You’ve heard of this program; the testocracy refers to it as 'education reform.'"

It was an audacious move by the district to place an advocate of testocracy as fervent as Dr. Proctor in charge of instruction in a district of educators largely skeptical of bubble-in test score-based reforms and part of one the most powerful teacher unions in the country.

Omission of Historical Context that Speaks Volumes

Proctor also speaks positively of school vouchers in her doctoral thesis, entirely ignoring their origin in the brain of a radical right economist, Milton Friedman. She seems unaware of their use as a tool that white Southern racists used to flee and simultaneously defund newly integrated public schools, with the goal of ultimate demise of the public school system. It was Friedman, after all, who said that “the ideal way [to give parents control of their children’s education] would be to abolish the public school system and eliminate all the taxes that pay for it.”

As historian Nancy MacLean writes in the Washington Post, "White Southerners first fought for 'freedom of choice' in the mid-1950s as a means of defying the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, which mandated the desegregation of public schools. Their goal was to create pathways for White families to remove their children from classrooms facing integration," thereby bleeding the public education system dry until it withers and dies.

In contrast, Proctor says this about school vouchers:

 

"In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court decision in the landmark case, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas altered the face and philosophy of education once more, and education became a constitutional right (Labaree, 2011). The decision stated, 'republican equality for citizens has turned into equal opportunity for consumers' (Labaree, 2011). Milton Friedman, who first suggested vouchers in the 1950s, understood that public schools represented the public good (Harvey, 2011). Vouchers offered parents and students the opportunity to make choices and take responsibility for their education, while also encouraging more competition and innovation within the school system."

As MacLean writes, "improving education was never the true reason for free-market fundamentalists’ embrace of vouchers. . . The vouchers were a tactic. The strategy they served was to stick parents with the full cost of their children’s schooling and the labor of finding and arranging it." Privatization was the end goal and racist dog whistles the means to achieve it in the 1950s just like they are today.

Proctor claims that vouchers offered parents and students educational choices. However, following the desegregation ruling, in some places like Prince County, Virginia, no schools whatsoever-- public or private-- would serve Black students. Even the Black families who received vouchers had no options left as the schools would not accept their children.

Examining her dissertation and professional history, Proctor seems to have no problem with the practice of providing families with taxpayer-funded vouchers for private schooling or turning public schools into private charters.

Experience Turning Schools Around

As a Boward County Schools principal, Proctor led the transition of a school from a traditional model through a turnaround initiative. As Assistant Principal, she described several of her accomplishments in distinctly for-profit enterprise terms such as showing "positive trends in the achievement of improvement goals in the areas of operation (key goals), business practices (efficiency) and customer satisfaction." During and shortly after completing her doctorate, Proctor soared beyond the confines of single-building leadership and into district leadership in Philadelphia. There she was in charge of school improvement and as part of her job identified schools "with regard to turnaround implementation with progress and performance monitoring." Turnaround is often coded language for designating a school for "improvement" by means of program evaluation, which can be used to justify turning it over to a for-profit or non-profit charter school chain.

Philadelphia has scores of schools that have been subjected to this process, serving as the training ground for administrators hired by PPS.

Three Rs, but not Race

Most curious of all is Proctor's membership to a LinkedIn anti-Critical Race Theory group entitled, "Education Executives: Presidents/Provosts/Principals/Deans/C-Suite (NO Politics in the Classroom)." The group is private and requires those requesting to join to sign a no-CRT-in-the-classroom pledge. The group, owned by Christopher Andrew, Pennsylvania-based COO at Space Tourism Magazine, is "meant to be a GLOBAL 'Think Tank' for Educators in regards to New Trends, Best Practices, Mutual Assistance, Leadership and ALL THINGS Academic." The group description includes the following pledge:

"We as a united group pledge to carry on the values of Free Speech----WE opposed any [sic] and ALL forms of Censorship and Racism inside of schools and outside of school, including any Technology platforms that attempt to muzzle opposing voices, as that clouds the beauty of Free Speech, spirited debate and mutual respect for our brothers and sisters. ***We pledge to focus on the STUDENT and to keep all forms of CRT, bias, politics and/or hate out of the classroom. This allows us to create a peaceful place for quality learning and harmony to occur. All forms of hurtful & harmful Critical Race Theory (CRT) are not permitted in this group. We support the notion of teaching honest, true history and will defend our rights to do so. We give voices to EVERYONE as THAT is the essence of "real" education. TOGETHER we can ADVANCE the world thru Rigor, Merit, Competition & Love. OUR PLEDGE: NO Politics or CRT in the Classroom; EVER."

The only group rule listed is, "agree to our NO POLITICS and NO CRT in the Classroom Pledge." Without agreeing to this, membership is not possible.

Andrew, who founded the group, also runs the Society of College Medicine website, which claims to be the largest STEM/STEAM group in the world. On its "Report Violations (2022)" page, concerned citizens are asked to report "subversive" activities on college and K-12 campuses. Any activity that disseminates "hurtful ideologies (example Critical Race Theory and such) [sic]," is to be reported to the Society to be investigated. The litmus test for determining a "hurtful ideology" is feeling uncomfortable.

The site urges: "Do you have teachers who attempt to inject politics/ideology into the classroom? If so, please report them to us. We will investigate, and if found to be accurate we will factor it into our Power Ranking system."

For K-12 schools, the page offers a list of five "quick and sure ways to tell if something is inherently wrong at your school district:"

1. Your school board meetings have turned into yelling matches between 2 distinct sides.
2. You see bias reading materials (primarily CRT) listed in a Diversity/DEI Reading list, teacher training books/manuals and/or other areas on a DEI webpage, library or classroom(s)? Either directly using the term Critical Race Theory (CRT) or masking it.
3. You feel a new type of “tension” on school grounds and in the classroom that was not present in the past.
4. Teachers notice that some groups of students are noticeably quiet and not as engaged as before. If DEI/CRT is new to the school, look for that this school year. Sadly, you can expect that.
5. Censorship is being applied on school grounds, local school district social media groups and/or School Board Meetings. If parents are being cut off, and not allowed to speak. Something is clearly wrong.

Those who notice any of these "very bad things" that "do not belong in a caring, intelligent and forward thinking school district," are asked to report them.

When a top leader, in a district which espouses a commitment to racial equity and social justice, belongs to a professional group dedicated to a witch hunt against those ensuring these values permeate public education in schools, this should be a cause for alarm.

The district is gearing up for contract negotiations with the Portland Association of Teachers within national rebirth of labor power and simultaneous rightwing attacks on labor. Meanwhile, PPS seems to have fortified its ranks with leaders committed to escalating testocracy, public-private partnerships, and the march toward school privatization. Among these newly added leaders are those willing to sow an atmosphere of fear and compliance by silencing, retaliating against dissent, and reporting of activities perceived as a threat to the conservative status quo. Educators and the wider community must be prepared to face this head on.