More Than a Score Read online

  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.

  The network had no official name, although I briefly considered Standardized Testing Undermines the Process of Intellectual Development just because I liked the acronym. I sent out periodic missives to urge the creation of listservs, phone trees, and rallies. I supported and exhorted, shared background materials, and begged for news. At some point the challenge of finding time to coordinate all these coordinators—and to keep recruiting new volunteers to replace those who dropped out—came to be overwhelming. I eventually folded what was left of the network into a similar initiative being undertaken by FairTest, which at least had a copy machine.

  The important point is that all of us were sufficiently outraged to invest a considerable amount of time in this effort. We promoted actions that ranged from polite letters to the editor to civil disobedience. And this, remember, was more than fifteen years ago—before NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top, or Common Core, before most states had annual tests and high school exit exams, before the push for privatization had really gathered momentum. Back then, we thought things were really bad. And we were right. We just had no idea how much worse they could get.

  In the early 2000s there were scattered examples of disciplined noncooperation. Teachers such as Don Perl in Colorado and Jim Bougas in Massachusetts stood up by themselves and refused to participate in the testing. High school students in Northern California, Chicago, and Massachusetts boycotted their states’ exams. Parents opted their kids out of testing at, among other places, an inner-city elementary school in Tucson, Arizona, and a middle school in wealthy Scarsdale, New York (where two-thirds of the town’s eighth graders were shuttled to the public library on test day so they might spend those hours actually learning something).

  The standardistos, as Susan Ohanian calls them, were not pleased. When people in poor communities and communities of color resisted having their schools turned into test-prep factories, their objections were dismissed as sour grapes: Well, sure, they don’t like testing because their scores are so low. But when people in affluent, high-scoring communities spoke out, they were accused of being too selfish to realize that test-based instruction is necessary for poor kids. An ad hoc—and ad hominem—reason was created to deflect each constituency’s concerns so no one’s had to be taken seriously.

  The standards-and-testing apparatus was constructed by politicians and corporate executives—not by educators, a fact that explains a great deal about how things have played out. At some point these authorities appeared to realize that even if they lacked logic or research to justify all the testing—or the numbingly specific standards that the tests were being used to enforce—they did have one thing going for them. They had the power. They could insert a provision in NCLB to punish any school in which more than 5 percent of the students declined to take the tests. They could pressure superintendents and principals into becoming their accomplices. On the basis of a single test score, they could force a child to repeat third grade or refuse to issue a diploma to a high school student irrespective of his or her broader academic record. They could say what powerful people always say when they can’t defend a dictate on its merits: “Like it or not, this is reality now, and we will hurt you if you don’t comply.” That’s what’s known as “holding students or teachers accountable.”

  And most people did comply, all along the food chain of American education, from state school boards down to classroom teachers. Almost all the wildfires of resistance were snuffed out for a time as the heavy-handed authority of state governments—and, under both George Bush and Barack Obama, the federal government—ratcheted up the specificity and uniformity of the standards, the pervasiveness and impact of the testing. People followed orders—even people who knew those orders made no sense and were doing considerable harm.

  Back in the early 1960s, Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram began a series of studies “intended to measure the willingness of a participant to obey an authority” whose instructions “may conflict with the participant’s personal conscience.” Fascinated by the possibility that ordinary people who just did what they were told could commit heinous crimes Milgram convinced volunteers to deliver what they believed were painful electric shocks to anonymous individuals. In 2007, the ABC news-magazine show Primetime Live broadcast a replication of the study. One subject they recruited was a seventh-grade teacher. After the experiment, when the setup had been explained to her, she was asked about her willingness to inflict pain on a stranger, even after she heard that stranger crying out, “My heart hurts!”

  Reporter: Just having the guy in the lab coat say, “Keep going; it’s fine; I’m telling you it’s fine” somewhat divorced you from your own decision-making power?

  Teacher: Oh sure. It’s just like when I’m told to administer the state tests for hours on end.

  Reporter: You’re doing your job?

  Teacher: I’m doing my job.

  My point here isn’t that teachers who administer these tests, or who sacrifice meaningful learning opportunities in order to raise scores on those tests, are comparable to Nazis. My point is that, even if one has grave doub
ts about what one has been told to do, it can take courage to refuse to do it, particularly if there are risks to disobeying orders, as there often are. Yet we are now witnessing another such wave of disobedience, as evidenced by the heartening accounts contained in this book.

  The examples you’ll find are varied and often inventive: administering student tests to successful adults in Providence and asking them to share their impressions, creating a clever (musical) holiday-themed protest in Portland, putting up lawn signs and bumper stickers in New York, staging a “play-in” at the Chicago Board of Education, holding a rally in Texas. You’ll read about individual acts of conscience and organized mass actions.

  One recurrent theme is that many people who already oppose the standards-and-testing juggernaut seem to be waiting for someone else to take the lead and give them permission (or the necessary courage) to stand up. When South Minneapolis teachers merely informed parents they had the right not to have their children tested, 40 percent of those parents promptly took advantage of that reminder. Garfield High School teachers in Seattle, with their dramatic and widely publicized test boycott, had a similar experience: The expressions of support and solidarity they received make it clear that many others shared their frustrations, and what these teachers did helped to transform widespread potential energy into kinetic energy. An awful lot of people have felt alone. It can be liberating to learn otherwise, to see that countless others share that anger about what is being done to our children and our schools, and they may be persuaded to do something about it at last.

  In contrast, if we persist in following orders, in teaching the inappropriate and generic standards devised by distant authorities, in ignoring our students’ interests so as to ready them for bad tests, then we become part of the “they” that others invoke to justify the impossibility of making change. As Carol Burris says, by way of explaining her decision to mobilize opposition among New York principals, “There comes a point where you just have to stand up for what’s right.” Likewise Texas educator John Kuhn: “What may not have been the best thing . . . for my career” may nevertheless have been the best thing he could have done for his students. In 1846, when Thoreau was imprisoned for refusing to pay war taxes, the jail in Concord, Massachusetts, faced the street. One day, the story goes, his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson was walking by and said, “Henry! What are you doing in there?” To which Thoreau was said to have replied, “The question is what are you doing out there?”