More Than a Score Read online

  On the day of the “test or else” decree, Seattle’s superintendent came to Garfield with two other district officials to meet for a second and final time with the five of us on the steering committee. Kris McBride served as point person for this meeting and began by welcoming Mr. Banda to Garfield and thanking him for his time. I was truly awed by Kris’s composure. She was responsible for administering the MAP at Garfield—and likely the most vulnerable to district charges of insubordination—and yet she looked these officials squarely in the eye, shook their hands, and spoke with an evenness that belied any uncertainties she may have had.

  After a quick exchange of pleasantries, we got down to business. The superintendent told us his visit to our school represented a good-faith effort to start a dialogue with teachers. He told us that many teachers in Seattle used the MAP test and found it useful. He explained that in schools where the teachers took the test seriously, the kids did too, and the results were therefore more beneficial. He also told us that the best way to handle this situation was for teachers to participate in a newly formed district task force that would evaluate the MAP test and release a recommendation in the spring. Until then, he recommended we continue administering the MAP and revisit the question in the spring.

  When he finished, our team of highly trained educators used our pedagogical expertise in an attempt to explain why the MAP test was an inappropriate instrument for assessing our students. We knew Superintendent Banda was not responsible for selecting or purchasing the MAP test for Seattle, and as the new leader of our school district, we understood he probably was not fully aware of the sordid history and many shortcomings of this exam. We truly hoped our lesson plan for that meeting would help scaffold an understanding of why he should “scrap the MAP,” as our rally chant went.

  Jessica Griffin began our lesson by explaining how the MAP was not aligned to her curriculum and tested students on concepts she had not taught because they were beyond the scope of the course. Utilizing her mathematical expertise, Jessica then explained what it meant that the MAP had a higher margin of error than expected gains at the high school level: it rendered the test statistically invalid. She then checked for understanding by asking what the superintendent’s team thought of her criticisms of the test. There was no response. Mallory, whose PhD in education focused on the literacy of urban youth, explained the value of the formative reading skills assessment she used instead of the MAP. She voiced the critical insight that even if MAP data were a useful diagnostic tool, teachers do not receive any more resources to help the students who demonstrate deficiencies.

  Mr. Banda diligently inscribed our objections to the test on his yellow legal pad, yet neither he nor the two district officials flanking him had a single direct response to any of our critiques. At this point, I realized our visitors were not really engaging with the “lesson” we had prepared on quality assessment, and if this class period were going to be salvaged, our only hope was to employ an old teacher trick: the attention grabber. “Respectfully, you are at a critical moment in your career,” I said.

  You are new to this district and the decision you make in the next twenty-four hours will have a profound effect on your legacy in this school district. If you decide to carry out your plan to require administrators to remove students from our classrooms and take them to the computer lab, you will have made your choice to side with the corporate education reformers, some of the wealthiest people the world has ever known. They want the public schools to use standardized testing to evaluate teachers. Or you can cancel that plan and decide to stand with the unanimous vote of the teachers of Garfield High School, the unanimous vote of the student body government of Garfield High School, and the unanimous vote of the PTSA of Garfield High School.

  I noticed as I spoke that Superintendent Banda rolled his pen back and forth between his thumb and pointer finger with an increasing pressure that slowed its revolution, no doubt a technique he employed to decelerate his rising temper. Under normal circumstances I am opposed to extrinsic motivators in education and I am a very strong proponent of fostering intrinsic motivation, but at that moment I got desperate and made this offer: “If you side with us, when CNN comes to interview us for our national day of action in support of the boycott, we would be proud to say that we have a real educational leader here in Seattle.” Those words brought the meeting to a quick close as Mr. Banda thanked us for our time and moved to principal Ted Howard’s office for a closed-door meeting.

  From the beginning, the Garfield High School faculty had been impressed with Principal Howard’s thoughtful approach to the boycott and his true understanding of our concerns. We also knew that he and other administrators were under immense pressure from the school district to make the boycott end. We hoped that behind that door plans were not being made to sanction any of us, but our true fear was that the school district had found the Achilles’ heel of our effort and would successfully circumvent our boycott. If the MAP were successfully given to students by the administration, the lesson people would draw around the country would be that you can attempt to boycott a test, but in the end the test-pushers are too powerful.

  At this point, if the boycott were to succeed, students—with the support of their parents—would have to go beyond a vote of support and become active participants. It was then that our social movement really caught fire. I had only read and taught about these moments in history, but I’d never experienced one myself. My parents had talked about their involvement in protesting the US war in Vietnam, the civil rights movement, and working to end apartheid in South Africa, but I had often wondered if I would be limited to teaching about mass struggles rather than participating in one.

  Students, on their own initiative, produced a flyer that declared their right to refuse to take the test. Juniors and seniors—even those with the well-documented and seriously debilitating disease known as “senioritis”—got to school early and distributed the broadside to their younger classmates as they arrived. The PTSA simultaneously notified parents of their right to opt children out of the test. Emails were sent, phone calls were made, and the very day after our meeting with the superintendent, dozens of parents sent opt-out letters in opposition to the misuse and overuse of standardized testing.

  Coerced administrators, however reluctantly, entered classrooms to read off lists of students who were to accompany them to the library to take the MAP, some for the second time this year (the third round of testing was scheduled for spring). Many students refused to leave their seats. They were enacting a sit-in in their own classrooms, exercising the right to refuse to be reduced to a test score. Other students marched off to the computer lab, only to express their creative defiance by repeatedly hitting the “A” key, completing the test in mere seconds and thus rendering their test scores invalid.

  Suspend the Test, Not the Teachers

  In the midst of this collective defiance we organized a national day of action to support Seattle’s MAP test boycott on February 6, 2013. We were overwhelmed by the show of solidarity. The Seattle NAACP held a press conference in solidarity with the MAP boycott, and James Bible, then the Seattle/King County president of the NAACP, joined rallying Garfield teachers to proclaim that the MAP test was part of exacerbating racial disparities because of its use as the gatekeeper to the advanced placement program that enrolled white students disproportionately as compared with students of color. Teachers at Berkeley High School in California held a lunchtime rally to support the MAP boycott and to speak out against the abuses of standardized testing. In Chicago, a parent organization called More Than a Score marked the day of action by petitioning parents at some thirty different schools to opt their children out of standardized tests. The student unions of Portland held a press conference to express their solidarity with the MAP boycott and assert the right of students to refuse to take standardized exams. Letters of solidarity and pictures of teachers who had assembled with “Scrap the MAP” signs came flooding in from around the nation.
The presidents of the nation’s two major teachers’ unions, Denis Van Rokel of the National Education Association and Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers, sent letters in support of our boycott. I never felt so proud to be a union member. In concert with our day of action, we organized a mass email and phone call campaign to demand the Seattle School District “suspend the test, not the teachers”—and the superintendent’s office was so flooded with calls that the greeting message for the district had to be changed to direct people to a newly created voicemail account for those callers with “questions about MAP testing.”

  Education Spring

  After successfully boycotting the MAP test in the winter, we had to gear up for another boycott during the third round of testing in the spring. If the district sensed the movement was petering out, the threat of consequences would become all the more real. We redoubled our efforts.

  The district’s task force to review the MAP got under way with little representation by actual educators. Meanwhile, a “shadow” MAP review organization was formed, led by two great Seattle teachers, Gerardine Carroll and Liza Campbell. Their Teacher Work Group on Assessment included more than twenty teachers who developed guidelines called “Markers of Quality Assessment.” These markers defined authentic assessments as those that reflect actual student knowledge and learning, not just test-taking skills; are educational in and of themselves; are free of gender, class, and racial bias; are differentiated to meet students’ needs; allow students opportunities to go back and improve; and undergo regular evaluation and revision by educators. The Teacher Work Group on Assessment concluded, “Quality assessments, at their base, must integrate with classroom curriculum, measure student growth toward standards achievement, and take the form of performance tasks. These tasks, taken as a whole, should replace the MAP because they grow from classroom work, are rigorously evaluated and respect true learning.”

  Later that spring, in celebration of May Day, International Worker’s Day, the Scrap the MAP citywide coalition called for an international day of solidarity with the boycott. We received correspondences of support from parents, students, teachers, and labor unions from around the world, including Japan, Australia, Canada, Mexico, the United Kingdom, and communities across the United States.

  We were emboldened as reports from around the country rolled in of people taking independent actions in opposition to their own standardized tests. We read of students walking out against the tests in Chicago. We learned of a parent Facebook page for Long Island, New York, that quickly garnered some eight thousand members, helping ignite an opt-out movement in that region. We heard about more than ten thousand parents, students, and educators in Texas marching in opposition to the then fifteen state-required standardized tests their students needed to graduate.

  Even though I was thoroughly sleep deprived with a newborn baby at home, it was honestly a pleasure to get up early in the morning, check the education news headlines from around the country, and get to work to talk to my coworkers about our latest plans and the newest acts of resistance from around the country. Moreover, I had never been so engrossed in my lesson plans as I was that spring. As my AP US history class lessons engaged the 1950s and the era of the civil rights movement, the students approached the days’ lessons with an uncommon urgency. Our reenactment of a debate between various constituencies of the Black population in Montgomery, Alabama, about whether to go through with the boycott of the segregated bus system took on an entirely new meaning from any civil rights lesson I had taught before. The passion and detail of the students’ plea to their 1950s classmates to refuse to ride on those buses was something that just cannot be faked. My students were participating in their own boycott in a struggle for social justice, and this hands-on education brought to life for them struggles I was trying to teach them about from the past.

  On the afternoon of May 13, at 2:06 pm, I was entering an assignment into my computer during the final period when a ping rang out from my computer, informing me of an incoming email. I spied a letter from the superintendent. I clicked it open and scanned the message. More platitudes about doing what’s best for kids. But then, buried in the middle of the email there was one short sentence that caught my eye: “MAP will be optional for high schools for the 2013–2014 school year.” I stood to my feet and yelled out, right there in front of the students, pumping my fist in the air, “We won! We scrapped the MAP!” I did nothing to attempt to regain order in the classroom for the last minutes of class. Students began whooping and spontaneous celebrations broke out as the news traveled that we had scored a historic victory over an illegitimate test. The only thing that tempered our exuberance was the knowledge that middle and elementary schools would still have to struggle to eliminate the test.

  Our collective action not only produced a victory for the boycott of the MAP, it also transformed the culture of our school. Students and parents came to view teachers not as the maligned villains in the corporate drama about education quality so often portrayed in the media but as heroes willing to risk their jobs to improve education. Teachers could see in practice that students were not simply naïve youth who whose minds needed filling with our knowledge but powerful allies with ideas, convictions, and formidable capacities of their own. Teachers, too, saw each other anew, as they were now regularly escaping the usual isolation of their own classrooms and conversing about everything from the boycott to public education policy and advice about an upcoming unit. In my three years teaching at Garfield and during my four years as a Garfield student, I had never felt the school so alive with purpose.

  Possibilities

  After I was done stammering through my introduction to the media at our January 9, 2013, press conference, others began sharing their stories. Kris McBride explained how the MAP did not align with the state standards, stating that when ninth-grade algebra students at Garfield take the math test, “It’s filled with geometry, it’s filled with probability and statistics, and other things that aren’t part of the curriculum at all.” My confidence in our action grew as Kris spoke, because, I thought, if the testing coordinator herself is spearheading this test boycott, we just might be able to pull this off. Next, Kit McCormick told how she was not allowed to see what’s on the test, so she could not prepare the students to do their best. I winced when Kit said she was supposed to take her students for MAP testing the previous Wednesday, but she had already refused. I worried that her words could allow the district to single her out as a teacher who had already been insubordinate, discipline her, and then use her as an example to prevent the unity of our staff. My mind drifted from her address as I began to fixate on the numerous ways our staff could be vulnerable to attack and disquiet seized my nerves again. As cameras flashed, I tuned back into Kit’s remarks as she continued, “I just see no use for it at all. And so I’m not going to do it. But I’d be happy to have my students evaluated in a way that would be meaningful for both them and me.” Kit’s self-assurance caught me off guard. I knew we had all voted to reject this test, but there was no way I could have known the staff would rise with such poise and determination.

  Then, Mario Shaunette rose and approached the podium. He began speaking, deliberately pronouncing each impassioned word. “I work hard to try to build up the confidence of my students that they can be good at math.” His unhurried pace then slowed to a full stop when his emotions swelled, disrupted his composure, and he fought to hold back tears. He then continued,

  Three times a year we have tests set up that make students feel dumb. And then we have to undo that. They feel like they should have known the answer. And they feel stupid. . . . Because the MAP tests students on things not in the curriculum. And then we have to undo that. It’s not an accurate measure of what they can do, so they don’t put in the effort. Absolutely we believe our students should be tested. We’re all for that, and we do testing on a daily basis. But, if I don’t step up now, and say this is a harmful test, who will? I’m teaching them by my ex
ample: I’m taking charge of what I do here.

  Leaning into the microphone, as if to communicate to the assembled media not to lose these words in the editing room, Mario said of his students, “I’m teaching them that when there are things like that that are going on that are improper, that are incorrect. . . ” He paused, looked down, shook his head and then, lifting his chin and looking directly into the eyes of one reporter, continued with his statement, “you have to step up and say something about it. . . . I hope everybody that has to administer a flawed test refuses.”

  Dear Brandon: An Open Letter to a Student on What the MAP Boycott Meant to Me

  Dear Brandon,

  I’m writing to let you know about the huge thing that happened to us at your alma mater, Garfield High, and to tell you about the role you played in making it happen. But first I want to start with an apology. I did something to you that I regret. You’ll remember you were a senior in my reading class. It was the first year of the district’s Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) test, and I was required to escort you to the computer lab so you could spend hours in front of a screen punching buttons in answer to test questions. I suspected the exercise was a waste of time. I knew I didn’t need the test results and wouldn’t be using them. As you know, you were tested daily in my classroom. Still, I was cowardly and allowed the district to decide how those precious hours of yours would be spent. Your senior year was your last chance to become a proficient reader before heading off to college, and brilliant as you are, it was taking you more time than the average student to finish the reading program.