This is only a test. If this were a real emergency, we'd never be taking all of this lying down.

A student's face popped up on Facebook. "I don't say 'Hey' to you enough," appeared next to the picture. It was sweet, and immediately jarring; either I'd forgotten that people did live on after Brooklyn Comprehensive died or I'd temporarily forgotten that I no longer worked there.

The student is graduating from SUNY Purchase. For him, the time which had gone by was very sweet and untarnished by the closing of schools. I'm so glad it is, and find it heartening to imagine that there are people out there for whom the last four years have not been shattering. This is not a complaint against where I am teaching now. It's just a recognition of the fact that a world I miss is entirely gone. So is the world in which we once laughed at the Regents Exams as jokes -- when they were much harder, and I was in high school. Now we pretend they are something serious and grandiose that set "Standards." But, I digress. The point has been made by the many community colleges who find themselves filled with students who have passed Regents exams and are not functional in the subjects in which they were tested. I don't really care about the quality of the exams students face except that they've supplanted our ideas of what a real education is or could be. We've also truncated our belief in the possibilities of our children. We have done a lot of shifting around.

Three schools in which I have worked have been closed down. One major influence, dead. Two colleagues retired. The others scattered among schools living inside schools -- let's just say they all work at some "Formerly-Known-As-Academy-Campus High School." Many of them are working with overage and under-credited students who will age out with no place to go to next. And there are people who think that's okay. Last year, I encountered many teachers who felt students were being given too many chances. I understand. They wanted the failing grade they gave the kids to stand for something. It does. It stands for the fact that students are arriving at high school unprepared, ovewhelmed and desensitized to the possibilities that an education might offer them. I don't care whose fault it is, honestly. It doesn't matter. What matters is that, under better circumstances, some of these students could go on to graduate from competitive colleges.

Smaller budgets, fewer offerings and less and less compassion are not those circumstances.

But, this is only a test, right? We wouldn't really let over 100,000 kids drop out, unable to contribute to our economy and at the mercy of others to defend their rights? That would be boorish. Like the fact that we don't have national healthcare -- even China has national healthcare.

Oh.