More Than a Score

Contents

 

• Foreword
  
• Introduction
  
• Preface
  
• Teachers
  
• • 1. Our Destination Is Not on the MAP
    
  • 2. Dear Brandon: An Open Letter to a Student on What the MAP Boycott Meant to Me
    
  • 3. “Well, How Did I Get Here?”: The Many Paths to “No”
    
  • 4. The Rise of the Badass Teachers Association
    
  • 5. Standardized Testing and Students of Color
    
  • 6. Testing Nightmares
    
  • 7. Defending Young Children
    
  • 8. “Dream Bigger”
    
  • 9. Salt of the Earth School: “They Can't Break Us”
    
  • 10. ICE the ISAT: Boycotting the Test Under Mayor Rahm Emanuel's Regime
    
  • 11. The International [High School]: Arise Ye Over-tested Teachers
    
• Students
  
• • 12. Testing Assumptions: Zombies, Flunkies, and the Providence Student Union
    
  • 13. 518-455-4767
    
  • 14. Walk Out!
    
  • 15. Poems
    
  • 16. Being a Future Teacher in the Midst of the Movement
    
  • 17. Student Revolution
    
• Parents
  
• • 18. Long Island Opts Out: My Story of Resistance
    
  • 19. Playing for the Schools We Want
    
  • 20. Forget Teaching to the Test—Castle Bridge Boycotts It!
    
  • 21. “Opting Out of the Corporate Conversation”
    
  • 22. From “Shaming and Blaming” to the “Moral Agenda for Our Time"
    
• Administrators and Advocates
  
• • 23. The Word That Made Me an Activist
    
  • 24. Building the Movement Against High-Stakes Testing
    
  • 25. “Dear President Obama, We Need Literature over Test Prep": Discovering a Deeper Meaning in Life
    
  • 26. “It Was the Right Thing to Do”
    
  • 27. “What Could Be”: Inquiry and the Performance Assessment Alternative
    
• Afterword
  
• Acknowledgments
  
• About the Contributors
  
• Notes
  

Haymarket Books

Chicago, Illinois

Edited by Jesse Hagopian

The New Uprising

Against High-Stakes Testing

© 2014 Jesse Hagopian

Introduction © 2014 Alfie Kohn

 

Published in 2014 by Haymarket Books

PO Box 180165

Chicago, IL 60618

www.haymarketbooks.org

773-583-7884

[email protected]

 

ISBN: 978-1-60846-436-4

 

Trade distribution:

In the US, Consortium Book Sales and Distribution, www.cbsd.com

In Canada, Publishers Group Canada, www.pgcbooks.ca

In the UK, Turnaround Publisher Services, www.turnaround-uk.com

All other countries, Publishers Group Worldwide, www.pgw.com

 

Cover design by Rachel Cohen. Cover art by Kris Trappeniers.

 

Published with the generous support of Lannan Foundation and the Wallace Action Fund.

 

Library of Congress cataloging-in-publication data is available.

About the photos appearing on section start pages

 

Teachers:
Chicago Teachers Union president Karen Lewis speaking to thousands of protesters gathered on March 27, 2013, against the planned closure of more than fifty public schools.

Students:
Garfield High School senior Falmata Seid performs his poem “Modern-Day Slavery” at a January 2014 event commemorating the one-year anniversary of the MAP test boycott.

Parents:
Kirstin Roberts addresses the media at the “play-in” in the lobby of the Chicago Board of Education in spring 2013,
sponsored by the Chicago-based parent group More Than a Score. Photo by Sarah Jane Rhee, loveandstrugglephotos.com.

Administrators and Advocates:
Professor Wayne Au addresses the crowd at the Educating the Gates Foundation rally in Seattle on June 26, 2014. 

 

 

 

To the Garfield High School Bulldogs who boycotted the MAP test, changed my life, and ignited a movement

And to the test-defiers of tomorrow who don't yet know the might of their courage but will one day soon rise up to make education more than a score

Foreword

 

This is a dark and puzzling time in American education. As the essays in this book make clear, public education is under attack. So is the teaching profession. People who call themselves “reformers” seek to transfer public funds to privately managed schools and even to religious schools. These “reformers” want to abolish any job protections for teachers so that teachers may be fired at will or fired because they cost too much or fired because their students got low test scores. With few exceptions, those leading this movement to privatize public schools, to eliminate collective bargaining, and to change the nature of the teaching profession are not educators. Those who are leading the charge are very wealthy individuals, hedge fund managers, corporate executives, and venture philanthropists.

The attack on public schools and the teaching profession is fueled by a zealous belief in test scores. The narrative of the so-called reform movement claims that public schools are failing because test scores are low, or because there is a test score gap between children who are advantaged and children who live in poverty, or because the average test scores of American students are not as high as students in other nations. The reformers then insist that public schools must be closed and replaced by privately managed charters. The reformers place the blame for low test scores on teachers; their solutions: weaken or eliminate unions, offer higher pay for higher test scores, fire teachers whose students do not get higher scores.

Reformers treat standardized tests as both a measure of quality and the goal of schooling. They don't care that their fetishizing of tests has perverse consequences, that it leads to narrowing of the curriculum, cheating, teaching to the test, and gaming the system. Reformers don't care that their focus on scores as the be-all and end-all of schooling has warped education, particularly in districts where children have the highest needs and the lowest scores. Test-prep is all-important; it leaves no time for projects, activities, and deep learning.

The reform narrative is reflected in federal policy, in George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind and in Barack Obama's Race to the Top. Teachers are demoralized by the deskilling caused by federal policy. They are expected to comply, not to create or innovate. They are judged by their students' test scores.

Standardized tests are not good enough to serve as the arbiter of the fate of schools, teachers, or students. They do not capture all that matters in education. They are subject to many kinds of error. Sometimes the questions are confusing. Sometimes there is more than one right answer. Sometimes they are incorrectly scored, whether by humans or machines. Standardized tests are normed on a bell curve, and they distribute privilege. On every such test, the results reflect family income and family education. Those who have the most end up on top; those with the greatest needs cluster at the bottom. Standardized tests don't close gaps; they don't produce equity. They reinforce existing inequities. Elite private schools, where many reformers send their own children, seldom, if ever, rely on standardized tests; instead, the teachers write their own tests.

The forces arrayed against public schools and teachers are formidable because of their wealth and political power. Yet this collection of essays demonstrates that there is cause for hope. Teachers, parents, students, and scholars are speaking out. The test boycott at Garfield High School in Seattle in 2013 was a dramatic act of conscience and consciousness-raising. The creative resistance of the Providence Student Union showed that high school students were thinking more clearly about the meaning of their education than the state board of education or the state commissioner of education. The critique of high-stakes testing by parents in Texas managed to persuade the state legislature to roll back its excessive testing mandates.

Hardly a week goes by without a new act of resistance by parents, teachers, administrators, or local school boards. More and more groups are forming to spread the word about the importance of saying no to high-stakes testing. The movement to stop the testing behemoth is growing, and it is not going to be assuaged by a moratorium of a year or two. When the moratorium on high-stakes testing ends, the problems with the tests and the punishments attached to them will resume.

Those who support public education and a respected teaching profession can find hope in the stories of resistance in this book. They can take solace in the fact that none of the “reforms” promoted by this punitive movement have improved schools or the lives of children and that no other nation—at least none that we admire—is attacking its public schools and its teaching profession. What is happening today is so bizarre and anomalous that it cannot prevail. Everything the “reformers” advocate has failed and failed again. As the American public awakens to the threat posed by this fraudulent “reform” movement, the resistance will grow stronger, becoming an unstoppable force.

Jesse Hagopian, Karen Lewis, John Kuhn, Nancy Carlsson-Paige, and the many other contributors to this book have proven their commitment to children and to real education. They are on the front lines. Long after the “reformers” have lost interest in controlling the nation's schools, these dedicated educators will still be there. They will not quit, nor will they tire. For them, education is not a pastime or a hobby; it is their life's work. They will still be teaching and leading and caring for children long after the “reformers” have found something else to do.

 

Diane Ravitch

July 2014

Brooklyn, New York

Introduction

In early March of 1999, on a chilly Sunday morning in San Francisco, more than a thousand educators packed into a huge convention center space during the annual ASCD (Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development) conference. They were there for an event I was hosting called “The Deadly Effects of ‘Tougher Standards,'” which I'd promised would be not just a presentation but “an organizing session, an attempt to form a national network of educators who have had enough and are ready to become politically active.”

I should mention that I had (and have) no formal affiliation with any institution, no foundation support, no administrative assistant. At the time I didn't even own a copy machine. Nevertheless, I felt compelled to do something ambitious. I wanted to pull together folks from across the country who were as fed up as I was about prescriptive, one-size-fits-all curriculum standards; high-stakes testing; and the widespread tendency to classify these things as examples of “school reform.” A gratifying number of people with families and full-time jobs—and, like me, no expectation of compensation or even an operating budget—signed up to be state coordinators in this new, loose confederation.