I've been sitting here reading the responses to last Friday's blog, wishing I had the e-mail addresses of each poster so that I could respond to them personally. After I posted it Friday, I packed for a weekend trip and forgot about it--not about the pain, but about the actual blog entry. I was pretty surprised to return home and find that there were so many responses, not just from people I know --Jen and Kim--but from others, too. I was pleased, and more than a little humbled, to know that my words have found their way to a listserve and a home school support board, in addition to Susan Ohanian's site. What probably was the biggest surprise was seeing Elizabeth Jaeger's name. Elizabeth and her four friends, the "Downer Five", have been in my thoughts and prayers for several months now. I also received several beautiful e-mail messages from close friends such as Dick Graves, Mary Kay Deen, Sherry Swain and others.

Throughout these past few years, I have tried to keep reminding myself that there are still countless (?) good people in education who, in spite of the fact that the light seems to be going out rapidly, are still working to keep the sparks of sanity alive. However, there are far fewer who are strong and courageous enough to speak up–just a few here and there, it seems. I would tell myself, "They’re not bad people, they’re just weak or scared." I have come to realize and accept that we may never get people to speak out in droves in any given school district or area of the country, but far from being discouraged by this, it should serve to strengthen our resolve to be those lone voices here and there and to know that there are always those others who, whether or not they publicly acknowledge it, are saying the inner and victorious "yes!" to our words. I say that "yes!" when I read about the Downer Five and Doug Christensen and Stephen Krashen and Susan Ohanian and Ken Goodman. Those lone voices crying in the wilderness give hope to all, courage to some and, perhaps, repentance to many.

Most of the teachers and administrators with whom I work can discern the wrongness of NCLB, but they lack either the courage or the know-how to right those wrongs. Of far greater concern to me are those who seem oblivious to the immorality of it all and appear to be genuinely baffled and even irritated when I try to "inform their discretion", to quote Thomas Jefferson. I was accused of being unprofessional and of having a personal agenda to keep the system from working. I was determined not to be sidetracked by those personal attacks and to keep working to keep DIBELS out of my school. To that end, I printed everything I could find about it and distributed it to several of my co-workers. I bought Ken Goodman’s book and gave it to my principal. I knew DIBELS had already been purchased for all three schools in our district, but I still held out hope that somehow none of our children would have to be subjected to it. My blog might have been misleading in that it may have caused readers to infer that my school will be using DIBELS next year in Response to Intervention; it will not. My principal purchased a different tool for progress monitoring. Still, the first weeks of school will be spent administering it to every student in grades K-3 rather than on crucial community-building and gathering information on the whole child. I cannot for the life of me understand why people will not acknowledge that children need to be made to feel safe before they can learn or that learning is not divorced from feeling. Why are these truths viewed as fluffy feel-good extras when they are indisputably the bedrock of learning?

I think we absolutely cannot rest until sanity is restored to the system, beginning with a solid definition of what is basic and the conditions in which children, and indeed all humans, learn. It is imperative that the concept of the Big 5 is re-examined and re-defined to acknowledge the fact that the language arts are about communication: listening, speaking, writing, reading, viewing, thinking. Why in the world must people continue to attempt to quantify what cannot be quantified and plotted on a graph? Why must everything be reduced to numbers?

We must not let ourselves fall into that same numbers mentality; if we do, we run the risk of becoming discouraged when we can't drum up the support of large numbers of people. Whether it’s five as at Downer, or twenty, or one, speaking out is always risky because we do not know if others will join us or if our voices will be heard. However, one thing is certain: if we remain silent, it is guaranteed that they will not.