USA Ranks High in Societal Child Abuse
In February 2007, next door to the houses of Congress in the richest country in the world, Deamonte Driver, a 12-year-old homeless child, died in a District of Columbia hospital after an infection from a molar spread to his brain. As it happened, his ten-year-old bother, who complained frequently about toothaches, had been diagnosed with six abscessed teeth last November, but the boys’ mother had difficulty finding a dentist. There were bureaucratic snafus over Medicaid and even when the papers are in order, few dentists will accept Medicaid patients. As of March, two of the ten-year-old’s infected teeth had been dealt with.
Can you imagine how this boy has been doing in school? Can his school possibly be at fault here for his adequate progress?
According to the Washington Post, fewer than one-third of the children in Maryland’s Medicaid program received any dental services in 2005, the latest year for which figures are available. The figures were even lower in Virginia and the District of Columbia. If you want to learn more about the widespread national resistance to high-stakes testing and inhuman 'education reform' policies, visit Susan at her website.
Meanwhile, our professional organizations and unions, ever on the defensive about high-stakes testing and NCLB, continue to issue papers about validity and reliability. Our children are dying and our organizations drone on and on about “the need for reliable data.” The trouble is we’re looking at the wrong data.
Educators need to get aggressive about highlighting the data that matters to children. A good place to start is “Homeland Insecurity: American Children at Risk,” a publication of the Every Child Matters Education Fund. www.everychildmatters.org Every Child Matters has gathered data on overall child vulnerability, things like child poverty, infant birth weight, teen deaths per 100,000, juvenile incarceration rates, and more. I compressed their data into a chart and added which states administer high stakes tests as a requirement for a high school diploma. One can only conclude that plenty of states use this diploma requirement as a smokescreen, drawing attention to the so-called failure of schools as a diversion from the fact that corporate politicos are unwilling to make a real investment in the children’s well-being.
We educators need to abandon our esoteric arguments about test data and turn the argument to the real needs of children. We need to write op eds and letters to the editor, focusing on the very real vulnerability of the children in our care. Our corporate politicos have a lot to answer for. It is long past time that we start asking the right questions.
