Lives On The Boundary

One of the major themes in Lives on the Boundary is the distinction between a person’s capability and the metrics society uses to measure aptitude and success. Rose argues that qualification and standardized testing are poor ways to place students in the educational system, and that they do more harm than good. He carries this theme throughout his book by sharing his own story and the stories of his students, and he leverages these narratives to show how testing furthers both educational and socioeconomic inequality.

Rose begins this discussion with his own bungled test results. As a rising high school student, Rose’s placement test scores are accidentally swapped with those of Tommy Rose, a very low performing student. Unfortunately, the error goes undetected for two years. The error is only caught when Rose’s biology teacher, mystified by his strong performance in class, digs into Rose’s personal records. The school moves Rose back into regular classes immediately, but Rose knows this correction hinges on dumb luck. He tells readers that “the telling thing” about his situation “is how chancy both my placement into and exit from Voc. Ed. was; neither I nor my parents had anything to do with it” (30). Regardless, this error shows how standardized tests paint a woefully incomplete picture of a student’s intelligence and ability. The test could not tell the school about Rose’s immigrant status, his financial instability, or his ailing father; it could not tell his teachers about his passion for chemistry or his love of campy science fiction books. Instead, it generates a number that administrators compare to a rubric, and the recommendation has the potential to impact a student for this rest of their life.

Rose sees the damage caused by quantification and evaluation echoed again and again throughout his career as a remedial educator and advocate. For instance, one of Rose’s El Monte students, Mark, had an IQ test so low that he was labeled “special needs” by the school system. But after a few weeks, Rose realizes that Mark’s scores do not match up to his aptitude. Rose learns that Mark has a “slight lisp” that kids tease him about, so he just “stopped talking” (98). One bad test coupled with his inexplicable lack of verbal skills lands Mark in Rose’s remedial courses, even though the true cause of Mark’s issues is bullying.

Rose watches similar stories play out on the college level as well. Lucia, a non-traditional student at UCLA, ends up in Rose’s tutoring center because she has been evaluated as a “poor reader” because she struggles to read psychology textbooks. She is a single mother who has put herself through community college, but Lucia is labeled a poor reader because she struggles with the dense, theoretical texts of her upper-level psychology courses. But Rose quickly learns that Lucia’s problem comes from lacking the cultural context to understand many of the works, which posit ideas that run contrary to her cultural upbringing. Rose explains students like “Lucia are often thought to be poor readers or to have impoverished vocabularies (though Lucia speaks two languages); I’ve even heard students like her referred to as culturally illiterate (though she has absorbed two cultural heritages)” (184). However, Lucia’s problem has nothing to do with her literacy skills or ability. Rather, it comes from being thrust into a curriculum that fails to consider that not all students come from white, middle-class backgrounds.

Standardized tests are most damning for those who are the most poor, the most disadvantaged, and the most marginalized. Take, for example, the students of the Bay Area literacy program, who Rose says have a wide variety of medical issues: “diabetes, head injury, hypertension, asthma, retinal deterioration, and […] narcolepsy” (218). These are adult learners who have been steeped in poverty and disadvantage, and their literacy test scores are exactly what one would guess: abysmal. While Rose admits that their literacy skills are well below average, that does not mean they are completely illiterate. Most of his students can still help those with no literacy skills perform the tasks they need to survive, like reading “simple news articles” and “pay[ing] bills” (216). Ultimately, Rose uses his students’ stories to show readers that no standardized test can take into consideration the socioeconomic factors like race, poverty, violence, and cultural difference that change the ways remedial students interact with both language and social institutions like the educational system. These students come from low-income schools that don’t provide the same test prep education that others get, and they are denied the language they need to both understand and work the exam. They become caught in a system of unfairness that divides people into successful and not, which Rose believes creates an “ever more stratified society, by income, by educational opportunity” (253). Metrics, Rose argues, cannot paint the entire picture of a student, especially marginal students who are often caught in the vortex of vocational education and socioeconomic inequality.

Lives on the Boundary opens with a condemnation of the “back to basics” movement, which rises in response to the idea that America is in a literacy crisis. The movement believes that education needs to “return to the fundamentals; drills on parts of speech, grammar, rules of punctuation, spelling, and usage” to increase national literacy rates (5). Rose tells readers that this is a manufactured crisis, and he provides statistics to show that literacy rates have remained at a stable “30 to 40 percent” since the 1890s (6). What has changed, however, are the country’s demographics; whereas the illiterate at the turn of the century were white males, those who are considered illiterate today are minorities, immigrants, and other marginalized people. Rose uses this information to argue that the tactics used to teach literacy skills in past are wholly inapplicable to the present, and the idea that people were more literate decades ago is absolutely untrue. What happens is that people “figure that things were once different,” so they “look to a past—one that never existed—for the effective, no-nonsense pedagogy we assume that past must have had” (7). The result is an archaic solution that does not take into consideration the needs of modern students and ends up placing otherwise intelligent children “on the threatening boundaries of the classroom” (8).

Although Rose only spends a few years as a vocational learner, the experience impacts him on a fundamental level. He finds himself more and more disinterested in school, mostly because he misses out on the fundamental ideas that build on themselves as classes assign harder and harder work. Instead of having to confront his own inability repeatedly, Rose “fortified” himself “with defiance,” choosing instead to be disaffected by school rather than despondent (43). Later, Rose realizes he did what most remediated students do: he took “on with a vengeance the identity implied in the vocational track” (29). In other words, students placed in vocational courses lean into the idea that all learning—be it reading, writing, or arithmetic—is beyond them (29). Instead of merely thinking of themselves as bad at school, vocational students think of themselves as innately slow, dumb, and incapable.

This becomes even more apparent for Rose once he starts working with marginalized students one-on-one. Although Rose’s El Monte students are very young, they are astute enough to know they are treated differently than their classmates. Because these students fail often, they start to think of themselves as failures, which in turn diminishes their own sense of what they can be. The same is true for Rose’s veteran students, who themselves were once vocational learners. They put themselves out there for one last go at an education that was denied them by virtue of their own remediation. As Rose continues on in his career, he realizes the real danger facing marginal students is not their own aptitude but rather the label they are assigned. He tells readers that the “danger here was that [the students] might not be able to separate out their particular problems with the calculus or critical writing form their own image of themselves as thinkers, from their intellectual self-worth” (173). That is why remedial students drop out of classes and, sometimes, school; they believe they are intrinsically “‘stupid’” and that they “‘don’t belong’” (1, 4).

It is easy to stop the analysis at the door of the classroom with the belief that educational labels only limit educational performance. But Rose believes such a view is shortsighted. He argues that students carry these negative labels out of school buildings and into their families, workplaces, and throughout their lives. The problem rests with the ease “with which we misperceive failed performance” as somehow indicative of a person’s worth. Ultimately, Rose believes the educational system ignores the “degree to which this misperception both reflects and reinforces the social order,” and it uses labels like “vocational” and “marginal” as a way to brush struggling students aside (205).