And You Paid a Company in New Jersey for This - weekly column

Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

And You Paid a Company in New Jersey for This

Last week a 5th-grade child in Lumberton, Texas suffering through the STAAR test (which is the successor to the TABS, and then the TEAMS, and then the TAAS, and then the TAKS, all to the greater glory of the Texas Education Agency) found an illustration which contained a bad word.

You and I would agree that it is a bad word, though the purveyors of what now passes for popular entertainment are pleased to promote it to all, and it is flung around like poo by men and women of all ages in social situations. Hearing a bespectacled, demure-looking granny snorting the f-bomb in a coffee shop while surrounded by children does not speak well for contemporary mutual respect.

The Texas Education Agency, which is what bossy old Miz Grundy became when she went off to college and put on even more airs, cycles through a lot of taxpayer dollars to take care of themselves, bother other people, and inflict cycles of alphabet-soup exams on children.

The TEA is fond of bullying districts, and as an acquaintance more familiar with their ‘tude than I says, the TEA should now taste their own cod liver oil and be required to submit to the local school districts a three-part corrective action plan and regular status reports, and if they fail in remediating the matter of naughty words on their made-in-New Jersey tests to understand that their elected board (yes, you elected them) is subject to being replaced by an appointed board and a state monitor.

According to The Texas Tribune (https://salaries.texastribune.org/state-comptroller-payroll/departments/texas-education-agency/positions/commissioner-texas-education/), Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath receives $220,375 annually for his service to the children of Texas, so, yes, for that kind of cabbage he should being watching his own office and its doings.

The various exit-level exams used in this state are sold to Texas by Pearson Publishing, a British company headquartered in London and with marketing tentacles all over the world, and by Educational Testing Service in New Jersey, which is far more foreign than Britain.

A salient question is why Texas families are taxed by the Texas state government to pay out-of-state and out-of-country companies to generate tests for Texas children in Texas schools.

Are there no universities, schools of education, and publishers in Texas who can build exams (with or without awkward pictures) and publish textbooks for Texas children, or are we to be forever a cultural colony somewhere beyond Carlo Levi’s Eboli?

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With Our Number Two Pencils We Will Rule the World!

Mack Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com

With Our Number Two Pencils We Will Rule the World

The other day I spent several hours proctoring a standardized test of the sort so beloved of a multinational entity named Pearson – young Texans sitting alphabetically at tables in a gymnasium and silently blotting bubbles and writing essays within the lines.

If you want to know who or what Pearson is, go to www.pearson.com and, well, good luck. I think Pearson, not China, owns us.

The State of Pearson, um, Texas gave me not just one but two different booklets explaining my difficult task, and a sheet of paper with an oath of secrecy requiring me not to know anything about what a hundred or so young’uns were doing and not to speak to anyone about that which I did not know about what a hundred or so young’uns were doing, and what could be more logical than that?

As I walked my post in an unmilitary fashion for Pearson-ness I thought upon these things:

1. I am old.
2. I am overweight.
3. I am holding a coffee cup.
4. I am supervising people who are working but am not actually doing anything useful myself.
5. Thus, I must be a Chief Petty Officer.

Some works of literature will never serve as sources of gobbets for standardized tests. You may have noticed that there are now only three contemporary categories of fiction, one for men and two for women.

The covers of every new book for men feature, in dark tones, any combination of the following: 1. an image of the Moscow Kremlin, 2. an image of an onion-domed Russian church, 3. a swastika, 4. a hammer-and-sickle, and 5. a semi-automatic pistol.

For women there are two categories. All the covers of books in the first category show precisely two – never one, never three – Adirondack chairs on a beach. As we all know, every woman’s life is centered on two Adirondack chairs on a beach and not on her job at BurgerX-Treem while her parasite accessory hangs out in their trailer all day playing video games. Also note that the beach is never cluttered with ranks of rotting seaweed or piles of beer cans.

The second category of fiction for women is all about a pale, rather vacant-eyed young blonde wearing a white beanie with two white strings hanging down. I have no idea why.

What is The Main Idea? Give support from the text. Do not write outside the lines.

As for me, I look forward to seeing a book with a cover featuring a Chinese girl wearing a white beanie while posing in front of the Kremlin with a semi-automatic pistol, tap-dancing on a swastika, and proctoring a standardized test, all at the same time.

Let us compare notes by candlelight, in a hidden underground bunker outside Prague, about conspiracy theories, albino test proctors lurking in shadowy Vatican corridors, secret Templar codes, hidden Nazi gold stashed in a 1939 Imperial Airways passenger plane submerged at the bottom of Lake Sam Rayburn, the Club of Rome, the Third Murderer in Macbeth, the 666 Beast Computer in Belgium, demented Navy CPOs on secret missions to poison the world’s supply of lapsang souchang, and King Solomon’s DNA hidden in a microchip – they can all be traced back to (dramatic pause) Pearson’s. Bwahahahahahahaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!

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