More Than a Score Read online

  Yet it was not all victories, and some battles were lost in the over-testing war. Due to the scare tactics of CPS and the administration, some teachers overturned their decision to boycott the test. Every day leading up to the test, we utilized our phone tree to let teachers voice their concerns, support them with expressions of solidarity, and gauge their levels of support for the boycott. During these calls, we ranked boycotters from low to moderate to strong levels of support for the boycott. We split the list of low-to-moderate boycotters among union officers and leaders to call for one-on-one conversations. Many had long discussions with teachers, calming their concerns and expressing the significance of their actions.

  The day before the ISAT was to be administered, we held a final boycott count by calling each teacher to ask them directly if they still chose to teach rather than give the test. A number of teachers dropped out, but twenty-five stayed strong. A group of non-tenure teachers—the most vulnerable educators among us, who could be terminated without cause—met with administration and stated that they refused to give the test to students who had opted out but would give the test to non-opt-out students. The administration agreed to their demands. This was a moment of extreme bravery for our non-tenure teachers because they could be “non-renewed” with the click of a button and risked losing their jobs the following year.

  Our movement received the joyous news the week before the ISATs that another school, Drummond Thomas Montessori School, had announced their own boycott of the ISAT. They had a handful of boycotting teachers and a large percentage of students opted out of the ISAT. It’s important to note that CPS’s oppressive tactics to opt in students at my school were not applied at Drummond. Drummond has a large percentage of white, middle- to upper-class families. CPS’s opt-in campaigns were only utilized in schools with high populations of brown or black students. We had seen these racist attacks occur in the past when 90 percent of the school closings and actions were in schools with a majority black population.

  Although Drummond students were not harassed to opt back in to take the ISAT, CPS had other severe and reactionary actions for Drummond. CPS sent legal investigators to Drummond to interrogate children as young as eight years old to manipulate them into “telling on” their teachers so CPS could discipline them in the future. Enraged Drummond parents, many of them lawyers themselves, stormed the school’s office to stop the investigations, declaring the illegality of interrogating their children without parental consent.

  After hearing about Drummond’s interrogations in the media, the Saucedo staff prepared for interrogations. The minute we found out that interrogations of students and teachers were taking place at our own school, we contacted parents by phone, mass text, and email. Parents flooded the phone lines and stormed the office, demanding that the school not interrogate their children. Student interrogations ended as quickly as they had begun, but intensive teacher interrogations continued for the rest of the day. The interrogators tried to scare teachers into naming other teachers leading the opt-out movement. They asked one of my colleagues, “Was this led by a Ms. Lambers [meaning Ms. Chambers, my name]?” They used this strategy to get teachers to correct the absurd name they created, and say that “Ms. Chambers” led the campaign. This malicious treatment of staff continued during ISAT week and was more than we could have ever anticipated. Walking into Saucedo on the first day of testing reminded me of the scenes from Little Rock, Arkansas, during integration battles. There was security everywhere and unknown individuals from CPS central and network offices. They were extremely rude to teachers, students, and administration, often yelling at them and slamming doors.

  During the ISAT days, teachers were given a sheet with rooms listed as opt-out rooms and testing rooms with teachers’ or staff members’ names attached to a room number. Many of the boycotting teachers did not have their names attached to any room and were not given directions about what their duties were supposed to be. Many of the boycotting teachers had a majority or 100 percent of their students opted out, yet CPS did not allow them to teach their own students during testing time. CPS staffers monitored many of the opt-out rooms and had the students sit silently for hours, not providing any instruction. CPS wanted to further demoralize boycotters and send a message that students who do not take the test cannot receive more instruction.

  On the first day of testing, CPS even refused to give breakfast to many of the students in opt-out rooms. After a media blitz on this inhumane treatment, they provided breakfast to the students, but some students did not have utensils and had to eat with their hands. Other students were packed in rooms with between fifty to sixty other students and were forced to eat on the floor due to the lack of chairs and desks.

  This abuse was not only forced upon general education students but also on students with disabilities. I am a special education teacher and all of my students opted out. I was only allowed to be with two of my students with cognitive delays; the rest of my students were placed in large classrooms with teachers without special education certification. After a couple days, they scheduled one of my Spanish-speaking students with a cognitive delay to be relocated to a room with a teacher who was not certified to provide specialized services and did not speak any Spanish. Furious, I buzzed the office and blurted out, “My student is not with me and has pullout special education minutes. He is currently not being provided his pullout minutes, which are in his legal individualized education plan. His mother will not be happy when she hears this. I strongly recommend you return him to my classroom immediately.” Within minutes, he was returned to my classroom, where I was able to teach him for the entirety of the testing weeks. In my own classroom, during the boycott, I immediately felt a sense of freedom in my instruction and curriculum. I felt like I could fully teach in a way that I was passionate about. My shackles were off. They had already threatened to remove my teaching license, what more could they do to me?

  Where teachers had opt-out classrooms, they told me, they taught wonderful lessons of other resisters and activists in history, such as Gandhi and Rosa Parks. The students related these activists’ civil disobedience to our act of civil disobedience in boycotting the test. These students were engaged in learning instead of stressing over a standardized exam.

  During this time, the support from around the country also kept our spirits high. For multiple days throughout the boycott, we received lunch and desserts with letters of support from across the city—from parents, teachers and others in solidarity with our boycott. Each boycotting teacher received a vase with a note thanking us and telling us to stay strong. Every single day, for weeks, we received letters, union resolutions, blog posts, and media support from all over the world, including a letter from Diane Ravitch, an all-staff picture from Garfield High School (that had led a successful boycott of their own against the MAP test) holding a sign that read “Ice the ISAT!,” and a resolution of support by the entire Chicago Federation of Labor. This ubiquitous support kept us strong until the end.

  Largely because of the overwhelming solidarity, no disciplinary measures have been taken against any of the boycotting teachers. Yet while we stayed strong, CPS’s threats prevented more schools from joining the ISAT boycott. Our act of civil disobedience did not spread to schools other than Drummond, but through our organizing efforts and press conferences, our message spread throughout the nation, our story even reaching National Public Radio and the Wall Street Journal. Our actions have spurred a significant number of discussions around Chicago and the nation about the detrimental effects of over-testing our students.

  These boycotts and the opt-out movement will only spread in the coming years. To all the teachers reading this, you won’t truly feel free as an educator until you stand up unconditionally for your students. This year, I did not have to see a student pull out his eyelashes, anguished with the burden of a high-stakes exam. This is the first year that a student did not cry in my class from the stress of standardized testing. Brothers and sisters, lose your
shackles. Boycott the test!

  The International [High School]:

  Arise Ye Over-tested Teachers

  On May 1, 2014, in a small high school in Brooklyn, twenty-seven teachers and five support staff refused to administer the New York State English Language Arts exam. It was the first time that New York City high school teachers had organized a boycott of a state standardized test. So many factors came together to make the boycott possible that, looking back, it feels like an organizer’s dream. But it wasn’t a dream or a miracle. It was the result of patient organizing; the anger, frustration, and resentment built up over years of then New York City mayor Bloomberg’s testing regime; and a test that just didn’t make an ounce of sense for our students. These pieces came together and the result was an urgent desire to act. Teachers at the International High School at Prospect Heights had bemoaned the havoc wreaked by standardized tests on their students’ confidence and learning and their classrooms for years, but this test pushed them over the edge.

  Our opt-out story really begins in October 2013. Bloomberg had one foot out the door, and his department of education would soon be replaced. A progressive Democrat, Bill de Blasio, was poised to win the mayoral race and all signs pointed to the appointment of a chancellor of education who actually liked teachers and students. You could feel the entire school system—teachers, students, and parents—ready to breathe a sigh of relief.

  Our school is the kind of school where people come to stay. It’s a small school that most of us consider a second home, a tight-knit family. Our student community is made up of predominantly English language learners, many of whom have missed several years of school (often due to trauma) prior to arriving in New York City. Students feel at home in our hallways. Often, the school is one of the first places they feel comfortable and at ease in a new country. Both the students and the school staff work collaboratively to do classwork and make school decisions. Teachers are passionate about their students’ rights as learners and as citizens, and put valuable time into building relationships with students and their families.

  After negotiations between the city and the teachers union over a new teacher evaluation system failed in 2013, the state imposed an evaluation system for teachers based on test scores and observations. The evaluation system mandates that 40 percent of teachers’ ratings be determined by test scores. The other 60 percent is determined by observations based on a rubric of teaching and learning. With the birth of a new evaluation system came the creation of new exams—the misnamed Measures of Student Learning, or MOSLs. The sole purpose of these tests is to evaluate the teachers. The tests are not connected to what we are teaching. For students, the tests don’t count for anything.

  That fall, schools around the city worked to understand and implement the new teacher evaluation system. In practice, at our school, the collaborative staff portfolio process was overrun by the need to comply with the new regulations. A team of teachers and administrators was selected to sift through a menu of tests that could be used. The menu provided the illusion of choice—in reality, the “options” were between one bad test and another bad test. Many teachers would be evaluated based on the scores of students they had never taught; others, on subjects they didn’t teach. As a staff we considered our options and ultimately decided that it was most important to stand united against what we all agreed was a punitive, divisive, and ineffective evaluation system. We chose the “solidarity” option, which meant everyone would be evaluated on the same exams whenever possible.

  In early October, ninth and tenth graders took the ELA (English Language Arts) performance-based assessment exam. This initial assessment was used to provide a baseline for our students and to place them in a peer group so that the city could evaluate the “growth” of their English teachers. On paper this seemed harmless, but in practice it was demoralizing to both the test takers and test givers. The test was more than four pages of rigorous nonfiction reading in twelve-point font and an essay prompt. The majority of the students were beginner-level English speakers and readers, and many were preliterate in their native languages. The test was simply beyond the reading level and comprehension of our students. The idea that a test so wildly inappropriate could provide any meaningful information about our students was just absurd. And to think that we would then be scored on their performance on that test was downright appalling.

  Like any students, our kids wanted to do well on the test. We did our best to explain to them that the test didn’t count and would not hurt their grades, but they wanted to succeed and feel validated. Instead they were devastated. Humiliation ran deep on both sides. Students looked at teachers with puzzled faces that seemed to say, “Why would you ask me to do something you clearly know I can’t?” One of the ninth graders was a tiny, quiet student brand new to Brooklyn and the United States. She didn’t speak a word of English, and was intensely dedicated to school and her work. She sat staring at the test. She asked one of us for help over and over in Spanish. She just looked helpless and sad.* After trying to make sense of the test, and realizing they couldn’t, many students put their heads down. Some cried. The majority of our students, even those who could read and write above a sixth-grade reading level, scored a zero on the test. When talking to one of our tenth graders about how she felt about the test, she said, “I felt really bad after. I knew I didn’t do well.” This is a young person who has managed to master English in less than two years, reads constantly in her spare time, and helps other students selflessly. She simply doesn’t deserve to feel that way.

  For many it was the first experience of testing in which they would be told that they are not good students; that they are not smart enough; that they do not have what it takes to succeed in school. Testing is a part of high school life for most public high school students in New York City. And our students, new to English, new to the testing culture, quickly learn the lessons that high-stakes tests teach: you are not the right kind of smart, you cannot do well, you will not succeed. For too many students, it is a test that keeps them from graduation year after year—not their ability to think critically, to analyze a text, or do a valid science experiment, just a test. The difference with this ELA performance exam was that it meant nothing for students—it was not a gatekeeper, not for credit or promotion, but only to measure their teachers. After it was over, several teachers vowed never to put their students through it again.

  A few months later, stories circulated of parents around the city opting their students out of high-stakes tests. “Opting out” gained prominence even in the mainstream media, with stories like that of Castle Bridge in Washington Heights making the news (see chapter 20). The numbers for opt-outs around New York State were growing as well. At our school, the buzz didn’t fall on deaf ears. The school was already deeply engaged in a conversation about how to get our students out from under the burden of the tests.

  We had been on the waiting list to become a New York Performance Standards Consortium school for years to no avail. But this year, the talk around the city was that more schools would be let in, and most likely we would be one of them. The consortium in New York City is a group of schools that have state exemption from the Regents exams—these exams are the blood and guts of most schools’ curricula, as students must pass them to graduate high school. For our students, recently arrived emergent bilinguals, the Regents exams are the major roadblock between students and graduation. Moreover, the Regents exams do not adequately measure our students’ understanding of content or their ability to think critically and creatively. As a school, we have been thinking deeply about the alternative assessments and the creativity and rigor our curricula would embody once freed from these oppressive exams.

  The fall then was shaped by two factors: 1) a punitive and absurd teacher evaluation system that had pushed people over the edge; and 2) what the consortium represented—the prospect of creating our own assessments based on the curriculum we taught and that truly prepared students to be college ready an
d provided them with practical life skills. Together, these factors created the fodder for resistance—we knew what we were against, and we knew what we wanted. Water-cooler chats of opting out became a common occurrence. As more teachers became agitated, the possibility of resisting a test became more and more a reality. An ad hoc group of educators began having more serious conversations and hosting organizing meetings among the whole staff.

  Teachers were not the only ones talking about the opt-out movement. Parents discussed testing requirements for their students in a PTA meeting. Our administration made sure they understood what each test meant for their children and what their rights were as parents. Students too joined in the discussion. The student government set up a table during parent-teacher conferences to give parents information about the tests their children take throughout high school, the stakes attached to those exams, and their rights. Parents began submitting opt-out letters for the ELA assessment exam. During parent-teacher conferences, teachers had the opportunity to talk to parents about their thoughts on the tests. One parent put it very clearly: “Why should my student spend class time on a test that doesn’t matter for her?” Another parent at first took the position that it wasn’t really that big a deal. Then as she talked, she stopped and said, “Unless it’s a bad experience for the students. I don’t want my child being put through that test if it will make him feel bad—he already feels insecure about speaking English.” Our administrators, along with Chancellor Carmen Fariña, supported all parents’ right to opt out. A week before the exam more than 50 percent of parents had opted their children out of the performance assessment.