More Than a Score (41 page)

HG:
Yeah. And you may see more of that, hopefully! During the state takeover one of the strongest actions we did was taking over the board of education building during a real showdown about whether the state would completely take over and wipe out local control entirely. We had a real impact—it ended up being a city-state hybrid-run school board. We've had a number of actions at the mayor's office and at City Hall and in Harrisburg where Philadelphians just finished a five-day sit-in at the state capitol.

Mass action is great, but probably the most important thing we've been able to do is convert mass action to political power. Our governor is a first-term governor and his election is right around the corner. He's double-digit points down in the polls, and for the first time ever, the reason is public education has become a top voter issue in the state and in our city. That's the key: to convert mass action to political power to see a change in not just our power structure but in a new societally driven moral agenda for our communities.

JH:
That's great. Without that kind of fight our schools will be lost. Did you see comedian Louis C. K.'s interview on [the
Late Show with David
]
Letterman
the other day?

HG:
I did not.

JH:
You should check it out. They are talking about Louis's kids in school and Letterman asks Louis, “So what happens if your kids don't pass these standardized tests?” And Louis says, “Well, my understanding is they just burn the schools down.”

HG:
[Laughs]

JH:
And he's hilarious, but he's actually not that far off.

HG:
—And kind of hitting way too close to home.

JH:
Can you talk now more specifically about how high-stakes testing has impacted the Philadelphia public schools?

HG:
High-stakes testing in Philadelphia has charted probably the same trajectory [as the rest of the corporate education reform movement]. After the state took over the city of Philadelphia, they needed to prove that the state takeover was worth it. And so the only way they felt they could possibly define progress in Philadelphia was through more frequent use of and increasing test score data. After all, if test scores rose, the takeover must have been successful, right? So as the state takeover proceeded and as the struggle of families here increased . . . test scores became the vehicle through which to silence critics and to force through an agenda that justified all manner of experimentation and abuse within schools. There was enormous pressure within Philadelphia to have constantly increasing test scores. We were seeing double-digit gains among students all across the board at certain schools that ought to make even a layperson skeptical. Philadelphia, as most people know by now, was investigated for cheating. The pressure on teachers and on principals and the demand that test scores increase were extraordinary. The idea that test scores were the only measure by which progress could be defined in Philadelphia led to abusive situations happening in schools and to children.

During the school closings process, test score data was brought out to justify the closing of a number of schools. This was clearly a very serious issue in part because the school closings were initiated by a private for-profit company called the Boston Consulting Group that was contracted with and paid for by a local foundation that solicited individual donors for the contract—some of whom, for example, were real estate developers and charter school investors. In our opinion they used their access to the city and district officials to press their agenda, and to this day, that list of sixty school closings has never been made public. But the more sinister part was that when the school district did come into these various school communities they would bring up the issue of test scores as one of the number of reasons to close a public school. But that was never part of [the original] explanation of why children were supposed to take these tests.

A normal person would think testing was about informing you to become a better teacher, a better student, a better school system. . . . But that was not the case. It's not like a school that did well on tests or schools that showed some measure of gain were rewarded; they were just subjected to more testing—and fewer resources. And then of course the schools that struggled the most, the ones that couldn't demonstrate “achievement,” were then punished as resources continued to be stripped away . . .

JH:
That's terrible. . . . What has the resistance to high-stakes testing looked like?

HG:
This past spring the district targeted two schools that they defined as being failures based on these new school report cards—which were based primarily on test data. In April, the district came in and told these two school communities that they had two options: one, they could either choose to remain with the School District of Philadelphia but they would receive zero resources, or two, they could vote for their school to be converted to a charter school. And they gave the parents in the schools one month's notice before their vote.

JH:
Wow.

HG:
One of the things we found was that the district would assume costs of up to $4,000 a student because of the charter contract. But if a school voted to stay within the school district, they would get no additional resources.

JH:
That's exactly how they use testing to push this charter privatization agenda.

HG:
One of the schools they targeted was the last public school standing in a predominantly African American neighborhood that had a long-time, stable community. This school had had three principals in over thirty years. Their current principal had been there for eight years. You don't see that level of stability in the district anymore. They had a teacher there who had taught for over twenty-seven years in the lower grades, and they had a significant number of staff people who had seen children through a whole generation at this school. And the perspective from the community was extraordinary. They completely rejected the narrative of failure and shame, which was really what the test score narrative is all about. It's about blaming and shaming communities into silence and accepting anything, literally anything, as a better option.

JH:
Right.

HG:
We had a month-long process as communities got organized and educated around this issue. We talked about schools as community anchors. We talked about stability and shared values of respect and culture. On May 1, parents voted by a margin of greater than two to one to stay within the district—plus to demand more resources!

JH:
That's an incredible story of resistance that holds a lot of lessons for parents around the nation about the need to demand more for our kids. I just have one last question. You have three kids in the public schools and I wonder what you hope their education would be, you know, if our movement was to grow large enough to defeat the corporate education reformers and put in place your vision for the public schools—what would that look like to you?

HG:
Education is fundamentally about creating these child-centered institutions that embrace all aspects of children. And I think that in some ways the narrow focus on testing has made crystal clear to a lot of communities how much testing and the corporate reform agenda disregard the life of a child. It's all about the test scores. It's all about reductive remedial math and reading. It has nothing to do with the arts or music. It has nothing to do with the needs of students, including counseling services, wraparound services, nursing and health care and the understanding that our schools are bigger than even the education of the child, that they are really responsible for the whole growth of a young person in the most vulnerable years of their lives.

And if we were to “win this battle,” it would be about teaching and learning institutions focused on the whole growth of a child and really strong community school institutions that affirm the culture, dignity, and value of our families and our neighborhoods. And this is just the opposite of what I think exists right now, where we have abdicated a collective societal obligation toward public education in favor of hyper-individualized, transactional approaches to learning, where children and families are thrown to market-based forces. My colleague Stan Karp says it so beautifully: we're treating parents like customers in search of services rather than citizens deserving of their rights. I don't believe in “going back” to some old-fashioned idea of schooling, though. I'm thinking about a new vision in this time, a community-centered, community-driven vision of schools. . . . I think this incredible power of a community-driven vision is the moral agenda for our society.