ABSTRACT
High-stakes events inundate teachers and students through standardized tests fundamentally designed block access and force student retention. Students evaluated against whiteness in norm-referenced testing models realize pieces of themselves yet invisible to the district and high schools they ultimately attend. Intersectional bruising surfaces for these students in formal benchmarks as well as in heightened interpersonal exchanges, hampered by peak anxieties for all. Cultural anthropology analyses of ancient civilizations underscore the importance of applying critical lenses in personal, communal, and formal acknowledgments of race, gender, class, and network in urban schools and communities. The teacher leans on cultural history content to support students’ complicated identity development processes, when threatened existentially by unrelenting systems of testing and secondary schooling. The erosion of her resilience and resistance speak to the physical, emotional, and mental grind involved in teaching, and the cumulative wear on individuals in continual battle with the institution that houses them. Belonging, independence, and detachment are presented through migration histories as well as through navigations of the community. The unanticipated academic language of standardized tests provides a broad metaphor for teacher agency and student access in a pivotal moment in educational policy, and the overwhelming devastation singular events can wreak.
