 December 2000/ January 2001
American Friends Service Committee Peacework Magazine Patrica Watson, Editor Sara Burke, Assistant Editor Pat Farren, Founding Editor 2161 Massachusetts Ave. Telephone number: Fax number:
pwork@igc.org Peacework has been published monthly since 1972, intended to serve as a source of dependable information to those who strive for peace and justice and are committed to furthering the nonviolent social change necessary to achieve them. Rooted in Quaker values and informed by AFSC experience and initiatives, Peacework offers a forum for organizers, fostering coalition-building and teaching the methods and strategies that work in the global and local community. Peacework seeks to serve as an incubator for social transformation, introducing a younger generation to a deeper analysis of problems and issues, reminding and re-inspiring long-term activists, encouraging the generations to listen to each other, and creating space for the voices of the disenfranchised. Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC. |
If You Think the MCAS History Test is Relevant, This column, by Derick Z. Jackson, slightly shortened here, first appeared in the June 30, 2000 issue of The Boston Globe. (It also appeared in Poverty & Race, Vol. 9, No. 5, September/October 2000.) MCAS (the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System) is a test in English, math, science, and social studies given to all 4th, 8th and 10th graders in the state's public and charter schools (including special education students and students whose first language is not English). A passing grade is now required for graduation. In 1999, 50% of 10th graders failed the math test.
Of course, many readers saw nothing wrong with the questions. One wrote that surgeons, construction workers, and software designers may not need to know about the Edict of Nantes or the Treaty of Tordesillas at work but that such events "are not trivia--they are part of the framework within which we try to evaluate our own nation's attempts to shape the world." Let us be nice and assume the reader is correct. But if you are going to be correct about how our own nation shaped itself, you have to have other questions that are not on the MCAS tests:
1. According to Goree Island's slave museum, the number
of stolen Africans is the equivalent of emptying out the current
metropolitan areas of;
2. According to most histories, the number of stolen Africans
who actually made it alive to the Americas is the equivalent of:
3. The conservative value of slave labor to the American economy,
when it was analyzed in 1983, is nearly the equivalent of the
1999 spending budget for;
4. The World War II generation will bequeath $8 trillion to
its children. In the years 1929 to 1969, wages lost by African-Americans
to discrimination were:
5. One result of post-slavery discrimination is that the average
white baby boomer and the average black baby boomer will respectively
inherit:
6. Under "40 Acres and a Mule," about 40,000 newly
freed slaves were given Southern coastal land that had been abandoned
by unpardoned Confederate families. These black people held the
land for two years before angry white people stole it through
beatings, torture, and legal chicanery. During those two years,
the black occupants were known for:
7. New England is far from cotton fields and sugar plantations.
Thus it is interesting that Brown University:
8. In Lowell, Mass., in 1835, politicians, law enforcement,
lawyers, doctors and shopkeepers signed petitions to:
9. African-Americans fought in every US war, hoping their participation
would result in equality. After the Civil War, World War I and
World War II, black sacrifice for America and the world was rewarded
with:
By the way, the answer to all questions is (d). 
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