THE ATLANTIC OCTOBER 2019 65ONE DAY I
ASKED ANOTHER
PARENT WHETHER
HER SON WOULD
TAKE THE TESTS.
SHE HUSHED ME—IT
WASN’T SOMETHING
TO DISCUSS
AT SCHOOL.her grandmother, who had been the heart of the fam-
ily, there was no objective measure to act as a fl ashing
red light. In the name of equality, disadvantaged kids
were likelier to falter and disappear behind a mist of
togetherness and self-deception. Banishing tests
seemed like a way to let everyone off the hook. This
was the price of dismissing meritocracy.
I took a sounding of parents at our bus stop. Only
a few were open to the tests, and they didn’t say this
loudly. One parent was trying to fi nd a way to have
her daughter take the tests off school grounds. Every-
one sensed that failing to opt out would be unpopular
with the principal, the staff , and the parent leaders—
the school’s power structure.
A careful silence fell over the whole subject. One
day, while volunteering in our son’s classroom, I
asked another parent whether her son would take the
tests. She fl ashed a nervous smile and hushed me—it
wasn’t something to discuss at school. One teacher
disapproved of testing so intensely that, when my
wife and I asked what our son would miss during test
days, she answered indignantly, “Curriculum!” Stu-
dents whose parents declined to opt out would get no
preparation at all. It struck me that this would punish
kids whom the movement was supposed to protect.
If orthodoxy reduced dissenters to whispering—
if the entire weight of public opinion at the school
was against the tests—then, I thought, our son
should take them.
The week of the tests, one of
the administrators approached me
in the school hallway. “Have you
decided?” I told her that our son
would take the tests.
She was the person to whom I’d
once written a letter about the ideal
match between our values and the
school’s, the letter that may have
helped get our son off the wait list.
Back then I hadn’t heard of the opt-
out movement— it didn’t exist. Less
than four years later, it was the only
truth. I wondered if she felt that I’d
betrayed her.
Later that afternoon we spent an
hour on the phone. She described
all the harm that could come to
our son if he took the tests—the
immense stress, the potential for
demoralization. I replied with our reason for going
ahead—we wanted him to learn this necessary skill.
The conversation didn’t feel completely honest on
either side: She also wanted to confi rm the school’s
position in the vanguard of the opt-out movement
by reaching 100 percent compliance, and I wanted
to refuse to go along. The tests had become second-
ary. This was a political argument.
Our son was among the 15 or so students who took
the tests. A 95 percent opt-out rate was a resound ing
success. It rivaled election results in Turkmenistan.
As for our son, he fi nished the tests feeling neither tri-
umphant nor defeated. The issue that had roiled the
grown-ups in his life seemed to have had no eff ect on him at all. He returned
to class and continued working on his report about the mountain gorillas of
Central Africa.THE BATTLEGROUND of the new progressivism is identity.
That’s the historical source of exclusion and injustice that demands
redress. In the past five years, identity has set off a burst of explora-
tion and recrimination and creation in every domain, from television to
cooking. “Identity is the topic at the absolute center of our conversations
about music,” The New York Times Magazine declared in 2017, in the intro-
duction to a special issue consisting of 25 essays on popular songs. “For
better or worse, it’s all identity now.”
The school’s progressive pedagogy had fostered a wonderfully intimate
sense of each child as a complex individual. But progressive politics meant
thinking in groups. When our son was in third or fourth grade, students began
to form groups that met to discuss issues based on identity—race, sexuality,
disability. I understood the solidarity that could come from these meetings,
but I also worried that they might entrench diff erences that the school, by its
very nature, did so much to reduce. Other, less diverse schools in New York,
including elite private ones, had taken to dividing their students by race into
consciousness-raising “affi nity groups.” I knew several mixed-race families
that transferred their kids out of one such school because they were put off
by the relentless focus on race. Our
son and his friends, whose class-
room study included slavery and
civil rights, hardly ever discussed the
subject of race with one another. The
school already lived what it taught.
The bathroom crisis hit our
school the same year our son took
the standardized tests. A girl in sec-
ond grade had switched to using
male pronouns, adopted the initial
Q as a fi rst name, and begun dress-
ing in boys’ clothes. Q also used the
boys’ bathroom, which led to prob-
lems with other boys. Q’s mother
spoke to the principal, who, with
her staff, looked for an answer.
They could have met the very real
needs of students like Q by creat-
ing a single-stall bathroom—the
one in the second- fl oor clinic would
have served the purpose. Instead, the school decided to get rid of boys’ and
girls’ bathrooms altogether. If, as the city’s Department of Education now
instructed, schools had to allow students to use the bathroom of their self-
identifi ed gender, then getting rid of the labels would clear away all the con-
fusion around the bathroom question. A practical problem was solved in
conformity with a new idea about identity.
Within two years, almost every bathroom in the school, from kinder-
garten through fi fth grade, had become gender-neutral. Where signs had
once said BOYS and GIRLS, they now said STUDENTS. Kids would be condi-
tioned to the new norm at such a young age that they would become the fi rst
cohort in history for whom gender had nothing to do with whether they sat
or stood to pee. All that biology entailed— curiosity, fear, shame, aggression,
pubescence, the thing between the legs—was erased or wished away.