Wake Forrest University Law School paying undergrads to take the GRE? What's that about? The article below brought back some teachings of Nana Baffour (Asa G. Hilliard III) and spawned this train of thought-
Mis-Education - Accreditation - Testing. It' is a business that has little to do with real education, skill, aptitude, or ability. When enrollment starts dropping money stops flowing in, and all of a sudden the vaulted "standards," and "test measures as predictors" become quite malleable or completely obsolete. See article below. Please remember this the next time you or your child are trippin' over test scores - high or low.
Nana Asa Hilliard taught me that academic "evaluation is for guidance, not judgement of the person or their abilities."
This is what AYA Educational Institute uses and teaches to parents and other educators. We call it EFG - evaluation for guidance. It's grounded in our Seven Steps To Recovery, River of Touches, and Grand Story of Success teaching processes. EFG is more than a new name or acronym, it a new vision and old Afrikan practice that makes cookie cutter curricula and standardized teaching/testing absurd. Real evaluation gives students and teachers feedback about what to do next, what to review, what is understood, even what is cared about. Intelligence and ability is a given, and the care you take to make the needed (though often inconvenient) changes communicates to the learner how worthy they are. It also demonstrates your real commitment to the educational goal.
Both educators and students make real adjustments. But that's the AYA world. In the real world, we've been socialized to take test standards as legitimate, and test scores as evidence of student ability or worthiness. Testing, as directed at us, is a tool of oppression.
Tamir Rice and the two second evaluation vs. the recent "Oregon Occupation" allow us to see that standards and assignment of meaning, intent, ability change to support the ruling or white supremacist agenda.
You see it again in New Hampshire vs. New York where in one place shooting up with heron will get you a hospital bed; in the other, it'll get you a prison bed.
Of course these are more graphic. It's a little harder to see when the subject is education, educational standards and testing. The base of the discrepancy is the same. Our success - test scores or guns - are lauded when they are used in service of oppressors. Think army. All other actions - lower test scores, not caring about the education curricula, or playing with guns for our own enjoyment or protection - are used to show us that we are worth-less. This continues until we stop believing in ourselves entirely or conform to using our success to serve aliens.
This is less a rant against oppression; I believe you already know that education - from accreditation to content to methodology to evaluation - in the hands of oppressors or their surrogates is a weapon. It's another wake up call to reach the parts of us that still cling to the belief that the prevailing education standards (pre-school through law school) and evaluation practices are legitimate.
But what about the new "common core" or "charter" or superintendent ...? Baffour/Asa called them merely "rearranging the chairs on the Titanic."
My prayer is that we use a higher standard FOR excellence - like the students' preparation and proclivity to use power (knowledge, skill, energy) to really change our condition instead of merely garnering white approval and white jobs. It's a prayer that we use the "evaluation for guidance" standard to guide our personal, familial and formal educational process. EFG heals instead of injures.
Now to get to the article below: "Now that evidence of the great law school brain drain is on display for all the world to see, with LSAT profiles of matriculants dipping lower and lower every year, law school administrators are trying even harder to find a way to weasel out of having to admit [only] students who have taken the LSAT"
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