She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Test, Measure, Punish: How the Threat of Closure Harms Students, Destroys Teachers, and Fails Schools, and shared the following:
Page 99 is the last page of a chapter, fusing some of the book’s main themes about how neoliberal accountability policies shape the educational experiences of marginalized youth. Specifically, this chapter explains why state accountability pressures drove the school’s already harsh disciplinary regime to get worse. The first part of page 99 reviews how this traditional public school (my case study of Sandview High) operated like the rather notorious “No Excuses Charter School” (NECS). However, I argue that the school’s obsession with social control was not just aimed at improving academic performance. Instead, there was also another state accountability pressure at play: improving students’ suspension and attendance rates, and this actually heightened the punitive setting. The second part of page 99 reviews some of the most painful costs of this regime for students.Learn more about Test, Measure, Punish at the NYU Press website.Sandview High seemed to be taking the lead from NECS to figure out how to make students perform well. Yet, the focus in NECS has largely been on test scores as the key motivating factor for harsh “no excuses” disciplinary practices for the “normalization of unethical practices.” In contrast, as this case study, and the supplementary data on the ESSA presented early in this chapter reveal, adding non-test student behavior data to the ongoing neoliberal accountability focus of “measuring and punishing” schools worsens punitive schooling, just as a focus on test scores degrades academic lessons.The Page 99 Test worked better than I predicted. The book’s main argument is that neoliberal accountability policies threatening schools with closure for low performance is as much about rising state carcerality (punishment and surveillance) as it is about the “business approach” traditionally associated with neoliberal education reform. Page 99 showcases the argument that state pressure on schools to improve their suspension and attendance rates is an overlooked part of how neoliberal accountability has, and continues to, include non-test metrics (like suspension and attendance rates) that also worsen education for marginalized youth, here exacerbating surveillance. I stress how this illustrates one of the ways in which neoliberal accountability ushers in more state carcerality. I also value that page 99 discusses the key consequences of this carcerality that I reveal across the book: how policing youth in school undermines their social development in terms of what they think they deserve, have to put up with, and how this is related to broader lessons for marginalized youth about what the state is and its agents. Throughout the book, I argue that neoliberal accountability policies provoked twin punitive regimes: testing and security, which had vast consequences on students beyond degenerating their academic education: it eroded their sense of political agency.
The pervasive social control at Sandview High, or what I call the school security regime, shaped students in ways that undermined their socialization for citizenship. Students felt mistreated, under surveillance, and contained, and often created narratives that normalized this treatment; all of which taught them that they were “custodial citizens.” That is, they were learning to tolerate an adulthood where they could expect the state to surveil them widely, even when such surveillance did not result in a formal arrest. This models the “custodial class” that Lerman and Weaver emphasize is created in the midst of wide-ranging neighborhood police patrol practices that include routine stop-and-frisks. As they note, if state surveillance is one’s only exposure to the state, there is little room to see the state as something you can make demands on as a democratic citizen entitled to make claims on their government. The intersectional analysis in this chapter also underscores the extra layers of vulnerability in students’ experiences with off-the-record punishment shaped by gender, race, and immigration. Their experiences reflect further social consequences of highly securitized schools, which create additional harms. I expand on these social consequences in the next and final chapter.
--Marshal Zeringue
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