The teaching of our kids is becoming rote, controlled and dull. And right about now, in schools across North Texas, kids are being groomed to take the test – the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills.

What really matters is where you take the test. Location, location, location determines if your kids are learning, or learning to pass the test.

In North Texas, where I instructed 120 fourth- through eighth-grade teachers, separate and unequal was evident everywhere I went.

Often I lamented, "If only Dateline cameras accompanied me."

A science room's lone electrical outlet limited instruction in a Fort Worth Catholic school, where the student body was 95 percent African-American and Latino. My graduate student teacher, a woman with cultural ties to her students, noted that her biology major didn't prepare her for teaching a lesson on electron microscopes with a room not wired for electricity. The lesson was short on experiences and more like show and tell.

Some retorted, "Well, at least they have the microscopes." Beware, that's a clear indicator of separate and unequal mentality – the notion that what passes as learning for "other people's kids" is deemed unacceptable for "ours."

Seventy of my former University of Texas at Arlington students currently teach in North Texas. They report:

"I am employed by Garland ISD. I am teaching fifth grade, all subjects. I am happy in my position, but find the conciliation between teaching academics and tests a bit stressing."

Justin

"I am teaching middle school reading and social studies in Arlington ISD. I had my first TAKS test last week. I did not freak my kids out by throwing TAKS pressure on them. I did the best job I could do in preparing them, and the rest has to come from them. I think the kids needed a break. I know I did."

Carolyn

"I am in (Mansfield ISD) and enjoying the history teaching aspect of my job, but not so much the 'everyone needs to pass' aspect. I feel as though I am bending over backwards, trying all types of learning activities, and students are still not passing. I have done games, moving, written and verbal reviews, using notes on quizzes, open book, etc., and I'm not succeeding."

Mandy

Research suggests that the time mandated for benchmark tests has severely narrowed the curriculum in some locales. In Arizona, one district's teachers and students have yet to experience spring break. Why? The test, of course. Spring break begins at 3 p.m. April 18, when standardized testing is complete.

Kids are blanketedly expected to test out evenly or grave consequences result. Schools lose funding; students are deemed failing; kids drop out; teachers quit and flee to a better setting; parents move their kids to private schools; and the paper prints your scores for all to see. The test becomes the symbolic equalizer. But what long-term impact will teaching test-type curricula present, when the goals of schooling in more affluent classrooms boast enriched agendas? A former student teaching in a Tarrant County district reports that her sixth-graders are learning Hindi and Mandarin through a curriculum driven by determined parents and astute business community members.

Curriculum mandates that are often deemed hidden by those who historically reference society's stratification maintain hegemony in spite of proactive teachers and administrators who counter some of the prescribed separate and unequal policies.

Yet, signs abound, and we are legally separating our students through unequal education policies that are, in part, attributed to ZIP code segregation. The evidence, seen from walking school hallways in Greenwich, Conn., and South Dallas, suggests that where you attend school matters, and that was hardly the intent of America's public education.

Barbara Torre Veltri is an assistant professor at Northern Arizona University.