More Than a Score (6 page)

The central contradiction of high-stakes testing—an incongruity propelling the revolt against these tests forward today—is that knowledge is fundamentally a social phenomenon, yet high-stakes testing attempts to organize our society to deny this fact by individualizing scores and attaching punishments to them. Lev Vygotsky, known as the “Mozart of psychology” for his influential work in child and adolescent psychology and cognition, described mental development in his book
Mind in Society
as a “sociohistorical” process both for the human species and for individuals as they develop. His approach to education understood that ideas have histories and are produced in the context of the society in which they arise. Moreover, human beings learn in concert with one another, and the social conditions of people's lives play a central role in shaping their development.

While Vygotsky understood the social dimension of knowledge, this did not mean he was opposed to assessing an individual student's learning. To explain the interplay between the social and individual aspects of knowledge, Vygotsky developed the concept of the “zone of proximal development,” the difference between what a learner can do without help and what he or she can do with assistance. In other words, the zone of proximal development describes the area where the child cannot solve a problem alone but can solve it successfully in collaboration with a more advanced peer or with guidance from an adult. Thus, for Vygotsky, social interaction is vital in developing the cognitive ability of the student.

High-stakes, standardized testing, by focusing solely on what a student can do as an individual (absent the peers and educators who have made the learning process possible), completely rejects the importance of assessing a student's zone of proximal development. High-stakes testing structures our education system and our society so as to deny the collective nature of learning—the ways in which ideas and understanding are developed in cooperation with others—by separating students out and labeling them with individual scores, subsequently punishing students who had the greatest barriers (such as poverty, racism, higher class sizes) to the social acquisition of learning.

In its insatiable quest to quantify intellect, the testocracy has created a profound absurdity: by inundating the schools with standardized testing they are actually doing away with assessment altogether. Instead of a tool to assist teachers in assessing the thought processes of students, so as to help them expand their comprehension and zone of proximal development, high-stakes, standardized tests have become an end in and of themselves. When a test becomes the goal of education, rather than one tool in service of it, meaningful learning ceases to exist, and education is replaced by what we could call a “testucation.”

A testucation has many advantages over an education from the perspective of the testocracy. An education invites students to question and critique, which can lead to a populace that asks dangerous questions, such as, “Why is the testocracy is in control of education?” A testucation allows politicians, rather than educators, to set the exam “cut score”—the arbitrary number that determines who passes and who fails. A testucation polices what is acceptable knowledge, leaving elites to determine the available answer choices. Systematically training children to believe that wisdom is the ability to choose a right answer from a prescribed list of options allows the testocracy to set the parameters for what are acceptable choices and what the right answer should be. Whether it is a question posed by a testing company about a reading passage (think of the now famous nonsensical “Hare and Pineapple” question from a New York State test), or a question posed by a politician about which is the correct war to start next, often the question being asked is not the most important question, the list of possible questions is incomplete, and so the “correct” answer is necessarily flawed.
34

Education Reform or Revolution?

We face major crises in our world today. The Great Recession of 2008 has ushered in a new era of massive wealth inequality; the disastrous “war on drugs” has propelled mass incarceration, especially of African Americans and other people of color, making the United States the biggest jailer in world history; the United States remains in a seemingly perpetual state of war in the Middle East; and perhaps most frightening of all, scientists agree that continuing the current trajectory of carbon emissions into the earth's atmosphere will result in horrific climate disasters and ultimately make life for human beings impossible on our planet.

None of these social, economic, political, and ecological disasters can be solved with A, B, C, or D thinking. Our nation has sunk hundreds of millions of dollars into organizing education around the idea that the highest form of knowledge is the ability to eliminate wrong answer choices. Yet the major societal problems we face require reorganizing education so that, above all else, it encourages problem-solving, critical thinking, collaboration, leadership, imagination, creativity, empathy, and civic courage. As Richard Shaull explains in the foreword to Paulo Freire's masterwork,
Pedagogy of the Oppressed
, “Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.”
35

Parents, students, educators, labor leaders, and activists will need to inspire an education revolution if we are going to defeat corporate education reform. We will need to “dream bigger,” as Saint Paul Federation of Teachers president Mary Cathryn Ricker explains in chapter 8. I hope the insightful—at times breathtaking—stories of the ongoing resistance contained in this volume inspire you to join this movement or persist in your efforts.

So sign the opt-out form and accompany your kid's class on a field trip. Walk out of the test and tell the adults to take it instead. Invite legislators and school board members to come take the tests and publish their scores. Teach your students about the civil rights movement and scrap the preparation for the test. As the Education Spring blooms, so too will the testocracy wither.

 

Jesse Hagopian

Seattle

August 2014

 

 

Our Destination Is Not on the MAP

This test isn't right for students, so Garfield refuses to give it.

—Kris McBride, testing coordinator and academic dean, Garfield High School

The students aren't going to take it. Not in the literal sense. Not in the figurative sense.

—Obadiah Terry, Garfield High School student body president

We want people to know that parents stand firm with the teachers on this issue. We really don't believe the time of the kids and the teachers should be wasted on a test that really isn't helping anyone.

—Phil Sherburne, Garfield High School PTSA president

I cannot remember ever feeling so nervous.

On January 10, 2013, the teachers at Garfield High School called a press conference in Adam Gish's second-floor language arts classroom to make our announcement. We knew there were several possible outcomes of our efforts that day: the press might not show up. They could show up, but we would fail to convey our message. Or our announcement could help gather our community to stand at the barricades of the nation's school reform debate.

My advocacy up until then for research-based policies to improve our public schools had been a slow but steady effort. Over the last couple of years, there have been times when I felt lonely in my debates with some of the most prominent of the corporate education reformers. I had debated secretary of education Arne Duncan on charter schools in a closed-door session with a few other educators when he came to the Seattle area in 2010. I had risen from the audience to debate
Waiting for Superman
film director Davis Guggenheim at the conclusion of a special showing in Seattle of his union-bashing film. I had been arrested at the Washington State Capitol when I attempted a citizen's arrest of the legislature for failing their constitutional duty to fully fund education. Now my colleagues at Garfield High School and I were preparing to engage in a collective act of resistance that had the potential to transcend these more symbolic acts—but also had the potential to end in calamity.

Nathan Simoneaux (then a student teacher) was correcting papers in the back corner of the classroom. A few of us were setting up chairs and putting finishing touches on the press packets. Slowly, reporters began filing in. One TV camera crew, then another. My initial fear that the press would ignore our story gave way to a new terror: Was I about to aid an effort that would result in my colleagues losing their jobs?

As a history teacher, I was not in one of the MAP-tested subjects of math or language arts in which we were required to administer the test. My greatest agony was not that I would be reprimanded, but rather that my agitation could contribute to the dismissal of one of my coworkers. I knew of cases where the Seattle School District acted punitively toward people who prominently expressed disagreement with their policy, but more than that I feared if we failed in our endeavor, teachers everywhere might not be so bold in their defense of public education next time. So there I was, making last-minute edits to my forthcoming statement, filled both with the excitement of a scientist on the verge of a great discovery and with dread that the experiment could go terribly wrong.

A couple of teachers utilized the last of the masking tape roll to secure the microphones of the major news outlets in the area to the conductor's podium we had borrowed from the choir room. A group of teachers representing the various academic departments assembled in the front of the room. They were joined by Associated Student Body Government president Obadiah Terry (also the past president of the Black Student Union), there to announce that the ASB had voted unanimously to support the teachers in their proposed actions.