More Than a Score

by Jesse Hagopian

  A Brief History of Test-defying

  The United States has a long history of using standardized testing for the purposes of ranking and sorting youth into different strata of society. In fact, standardized tests originally entered the public schools with the eugenics movement, a white-supremacist ideology cloaked in the shabby garments of fraudulent science that became fashionable in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As Rethinking Schools editorialized,

  The United States has a long history of using intelligence tests to support white supremacy and class stratification. Standardized tests first entered the public schools in the 1920s, pushed by eugenicists whose pseudoscience promoted the “natural superiority” of wealthy, white, U.S.-born males. High-stakes standardized tests have disguised class and race privilege as merit ever since. The consistent use of test scores to demonstrate first a “mental ability” gap and now an “achievement” gap exposes the intrinsic nature of these tests: They are built to maintain inequality, not to serve as an antidote to educational disparities.25

  When the first “common schools” began in the late 1800s, industrialists quickly recognized an opportunity to shape the schools in the image of their factories. These early “education reformers” recognized the value of using standardized tests—first developed in the form of IQ tests used to sort military recruits for World War I—to evaluate the efficiency of the teacher workforce in producing the “student-product.” Proud eugenicist and Princeton University professor Carl Brigham left his school during World War I to implement IQ testing as an army psychologist. Upon returning to Princeton, Brigham developed the SAT exam as the admissions gatekeeper to Princeton, and the test confirmed in his mind that whites born in the United States were the most intelligent of all peoples.26 As Alan Stoskopf wrote, “By the early 1920s, more than 2 million American school children were being tested primarily for academic tracking purposes. At least some of the decisions to allocate resources and select students for academic or vocational courses were influenced by eugenic notions of student worth.”27

  Resistance to these exams surely began the first time a student bubbled in every “A” on the page in defiance of the entire testing process. Yet, beyond these individual forms of protest, an active minority of educators, journalists, labor groups, and parents resisted these early notions of using testing to rank intelligence. Some of the most important early voices in opposition to intelligence testing—especially in service of ranking the races—came from leading African American scholars such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Horace Mann Bond, and Howard Long. Du Bois recalled in 1940, “It was not until I was long out of school and indeed after the [First] World War that there came the hurried use of the new technique of psychological tests, which were quickly adjusted so as to put black folk absolutely beyond the possibility of civilization.”28 In a statement that is quite apparently lost on today’s testocracy, Horace Mann Bond, in his work “Intelligence Tests and Propaganda,” wrote:

  But so long as any group of men attempts to use these tests as funds of information for the approximation of crude and inaccurate generalizations, so long must we continue to cry, “Hold!” To compare the crowded millions of New York’s East Side with the children of Morningside Heights [an upper-class neighborhood at the time] indeed involves a great contradiction; and to claim that the results of the tests given to such diverse groups, drawn from such varying strata of the social complex, are in any wise accurate, is to expose a fatuous sense of unfairness and lack of appreciation of the great environmental factors of modern urban life.29

  This history of test-defiers was largely buried until the mass uprisings of the civil rights and Black Power movements of the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s transformed public education. In the course of these broad mass movements, parents, students, teachers, and activists fought to integrate the schools, budget for equitable funding, institute ethnic studies programs, and even to redefine the purpose of school.

  In the Jim Crow–segregated South, literacy was inherently political and employed as a barrier to prevent African Americans from exercising their right to vote. The great activist and educator Myles Horton was a founder of the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee that would go on to help organize the Citizenship Schools of the mid-1950s and 1960s. The Citizenship Schools’ mission was to create literacy programs to help disenfranchised Southern blacks achieve access to the voting booth. Hundreds of thousands of African Americans attended the Citizenship Schools, which launched one of the most important educational programs of the civil rights movement, redefining the purpose of education and the assessment of educational outcomes. Horton described one of the Citizenship Schools he helped to organize, saying, “It was not a literacy class. It was a community organization. . . . They were talking about using their citizenship to do something, and they named it a Citizenship School, not a literacy school. That helped with the motivation.” By the end of the class more than 80 percent of those students passed the final examination, which was to go down to the courthouse and register to vote!30

  Testucation and the End of Assessment

  The great civil rights movements of the past have reimagined education as a means to creating a more just society. The testocracy, too, has a vision for reimagining the education system and it is flat-out chilling. The testocracy is relentlessly working on new methods to reduce students to data points that can be used to rank, punish, and manipulate. Like something out of a dystopian sci-fi film, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation spent $1.4 million to develop biometric bracelets designed to send a small current across the skin to measure changes in electrical charges as the sympathetic nervous system responds to stimuli. These “Q Sensors” would then be used to monitor a student’s “excitement, stress, fear, engagement, boredom and relaxation through the skin.”31 Presumably, then, VAM assessments could be extended to evaluate teachers based on this biometric data. As Diane Ravitch explained to Reuters when the story broke in the spring of 2012, “They should devote more time to improving the substance of what is being taught . . . and give up all this measurement mania.”32

  But the testocracy remains relentless in its quest to give up on teaching and devote itself to data collection. In a 2011 TIME magazine feature on the future of education, readers are asked to “imagine walking into a classroom and seeing no one in the front of the classroom. Instead you’re led to a computer terminal at a desk and told this will be your teacher for the course. The only adults around are a facilitator to make sure that you stay on task and to fix any tech problems that may arise.” TIME goes on to point out, “For some Florida students, computer-led instruction is a reality. Within the Miami-Dade County Public School district alone, 7,000 students are receiving this form of education, including six middle and K–8 schools, according to the New York Times.”33 This approach to schooling is known as “e-learning labs,” and from the perspective of the testocracy, if education is about getting a high score, then one hardly needs nurturing, mentorship, or human contact to succeed. Computers can be used to add value—the value of rote memorization, discipline, and basic literacy skills—to otherwise relatively worthless students. Here, then, is a primary objective of an education system run by the testocracy: replace the compassionate hand of the educator with the cold, invisible, all-thumbs hand of the free market.

  Perhaps the most menacing aspect of high-stakes testing is the way it disfigures our society by training people to live in fear of making mistakes. Misunderstandings should be great opportunities for breakthroughs in comprehension. Yet American education policy treats miscalculations as perverse transgressions. The great playwright Oscar Wilde made a magnificent observation in his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray when he wrote, in words he ascribed to the fictional character of Lord Henry, “Most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one’s mistakes.” Oscar Wilde understood that without mistakes there is no creativity, and that without creativity lif
e lacks meaning.

  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 colle
agues 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.