More Than a Score

by Jesse Hagopian

  JH: I am pumping my fist in the air right now!

  MCR: So I would say that is my most local example. I have a number of other examples that I sort of personally use, when I look at the relationship, the friendship that Frederick Douglass had with Susan B. Anthony. They were both suffragists, they were both abolitionists and you know they had these serious of arguments. Voting wasn’t legal for either black men or any woman. And slavery still existed when they struck up this friendship, two things that were institutionalized in our laws. These two struck up this friendship, this camaraderie, to fight them both. And I’m sure people told them that “slavery is in the law, there is nothing you can do about it,” and “Women will never have the right to vote,” and “Black men will never have the right to vote, that’s just the law.” Their friendship is one of the most intriguing relationships in American history, for me. Here were two people fighting. I don’t look at our work to fight standardized testing as monumental, perhaps, as ending slavery or for universal suffrage. Yet at the same time they inspire me because they agitated each other, they dreamed with each other, they didn’t stop, they didn’t lose hope.

  The other thing that really intrigues me is people who are far, far less famous. When I look at pictures from the civil rights movement, I am inspired by all the people whose names I don’t know, who are siting at a lunch counter getting sugar poured on their head, and getting coffee poured in their laps, and we don’t know the names of those people. But segregated lunch counters were illegal, and they decided to defy that. Sure, they had people who said, “Hey, that’s just the way the world works, don’t fight it.” Of course they did. But they had this power of dreaming, that this doesn’t have to work that way. I just think, we don’t know their names. We don’t have monuments to those folks in Washington, DC, or anything like that. But those are the folks who really did it. Those were the rank-and-file social justice advocates who really started changing hearts and minds. It was that nameless person who walked back to her community, with sugar and ketchup and mustard and pepper and coffee all spilled on her dress. Everyone in her community saw that, and they were changed by the courage that whoever she was had. I believe that “It’s the law” is one of the hollowest arguments you could make. Give me any other argument, but don’t give me one that is so lame as “It’s the law.”

  JH: That to me is so inspiring, that those are the people you look to in terms of transforming American society, and that you’re able to use the lessons of history and struggles for social justice and implement them for teachers today who have become, sort of, the “invisible man” that Ralph Ellison wrote about—not consulted at all about education, right? We are the last who are consulted . . .

  MCR: Not even acknowledged to be in the room!

  JH: . . . and billionaires, people who have never been to public schools, are the first to be consulted about what changes should take place. And students, parents, and teachers are the last. And so I really wish there were more union leaders like yourself and I wonder what you think the role, in general, of teachers unions is in the struggle against standardized testing, but also in the larger struggles for social justice.

  MCR: I actually think that in many respects we need to reclaim the roots of our union movement. The roots of our union movement were rooted in social justice work. Our fight for a fair wage was all about lifting people out of poverty, and all about decent housing, and it was about ending discrimination. It was about lifting up a whole community when people, when all work, was treated with dignity. So in many respects we need to go back to the roots of our union movement and look again. I feel very strongly that as the president of our union, I have an obligation to carry on in that spirit and that history of standing up for what is right for students and their families, and for a teaching profession that we deserve. I read stories from 1946, and I read about sugar beet workers who stood up for our teachers, and I read about how the AFL stepped in and helped support our teachers, and I just think that we understood community back then and we understood the Paul Wellstone adage that “We do better when we all do better.” I think that it’s our union’s responsibility to tap back into the social justice work that birthed the union movement. Our history in the civil rights struggle, our history in ending discrimination and understand that there is place. . . . Obviously, that is my big “warm my heart” vision that gets me out of bed in the morning.

  I will give you the most pragmatic first step I would recommend for any other union leader—that our contract is the most powerful document that we can use to get our point across. I can fill school board meetings with teachers until the cows come home, and there is power there, but it is limited power. Or it is temporary power. We might get them to swing a vote on one thing, but our contract the only place that we have enduring power. As a union leader, if I want to send a message that I think is right, for students, families, and the future of our profession, the place I send that message with a sonic boom is our contract.

  JH: That’s right.

  MCR: That is what is pragmatic for me. It’s the ability to negotiate language that improves teaching and learning.

  JH: I’ve been so inspired by the Chicago union for taking up the fight by building community but by bringing it into the contract, by your struggle, and in Portland, they are in a similar fight. There seems to be a new upsurge in rank-and-file teachers who want to reclaim the profession from the corporate education reformers. I wonder what you think the future of that rank-and-file upsurge is, because as much as I defend our unions all the time against the corporate education reformers, I also get frustrated by some union officials who are stuck in an old model that isn’t working in this current onslaught of attacks.

  MCR: Right, in some respects, I don’t know how this comes across, but I’ll say that I think that I am a manifestation of that insurgence. I was someone who came from a union background, and when I decided to run for president in my union in St. Paul I had no reason why I really had to. I loved my classroom, I had just finished my National Board certification, I was the district model classroom of secondary English language arts, so people were coming through all the time and I was leading great professional development. I had no reason to want to do this, except that everything I saw, back in 2004 to 2005, started crumbling around me. That was the way teachers were starting to be treated, the way the profession was seen as a starter profession, and in some respects I had every reason to want to stay, but if I don’t do this now, then I have to accept that this is what is going to happen. So I think that we need more people, and it’s not going to happen overnight for some people, but I think getting involved in your union that is already established and that already has a structure—you’re able to tap into a national network and sometimes union leaders who look more resistant to be more bold really just need more people to stand with them, because what I found is that being a local president is lonely. But being a teacher is lonely, too, only different. You don’t have a lot of peers, you don’t have a lot of time to meet with those peers, because teachers have so much time on task with our students, so it is pretty lonely.

  I can’t say that it is my leadership that has made SPFT successful, it is only because I have found people who wanted to stand alongside me and I wanted to stand alongside them that has us promoting ideas like the parent-teacher home-visit project, and ending standardized testing, and promoting culturally responsive parent-teacher conferences, and teachers of color who say, “We want a role in diversifying the profession.” In the contract discussion I talked to you about, this whole plan, I would have never have pulled that off if it wasn’t for people who wanted to do that together.

  One of those things that I would say is spend time with your union leadership to find out what you could do if you knew you could not fail. Find out what they say. If they say something crazy provocative, awesome, and off the wall, then you know you’ve got the right person. They just don’t have enough people around them to pull it off. But if they say
something like, “Well, you know, I’d like to get us a 2 percent raise and improvement in our health care,” then you know you have someone that is only interested in old-fashioned, transactional union politics. The message I would have for union leaders out there is this: don’t be afraid of leadership from the members. You don’t have to be the person at the microphone all the time, or the person in front of the camera all of the time, or the person who is coming up with all the ideas. I will tell you that so many of the successful ideas that we have had in the St. Paul Federation of Teachers have been ideas that other people have come to me saying that they want to do. Like having our own professional conference every March. That was two of our members coming to me saying that they want to do this; that was not my idea. It was a brilliant idea. I figured how much it would cost, the budget, figured out the logistics, but they ran with it. That’s awesome! Members came to me wanting to start the parent-teacher home-visit project. That was awesome and I said, “Yes, we will find the money in our budget to do that.” It’s your work, and you are the leader in this work.

  The two most important things I would say to union leaders is: 1) think of the contract as our most powerful weapon in the struggle to defend public education and push back against the testing madness, and 2) don’t be afraid of the leadership power of the members alongside you.

  Salt of the Earth School

  “They Can’t Break Us”

  This interview was conducted on May 30, 2014, and has been edited and condensed.

  Jesse Hagopian: I know that the struggle around stopping the standardized testing obsession at the Earth School started before your recent dramatic announcement of the boycott, and I wanted to get the background of what happened last year in the parent organizing effort at your school. What happened last year and how did that get organized?

  Jia Lee: It started with realizing—myself and the parents at the school—what was going on in other schools: there was suddenly a pressure, you know, that this year’s test scores would need to rise and that we needed to do some more test prep. As an insider at the Earth School—I’m both a teacher and a parent—I just started talking to parents and saying, “This is really concerning because it undermines our work of looking at children as whole beings, as different kinds of learners, you know, and makes it hard to do the kind of work that we would normally do with our students.” I found out that there were some meetings going around in the city with a group called Change the Stakes, with members who were resisting the use of field tests on their children. I went to a meeting and asked if people wanted to opt out of the actual test and not just the field test. And when that question was raised, maybe three hands went up in a room of about twenty-five or so. So I said, Let’s do this. I mean what more powerful action can we take than saying we’re going to deny the data? So the parents at three schools started organizing against the national and state tests that were coming up—and I think we only had three weeks until the ELA [English Language Arts] test.

  JH: What were the stakes for this test?

  JL: At that time it was being used for the promotion of students, and determined school grade reports, with the Annual Yearly Progress [AYP]—which then determined whether or not schools were placed on a special list. School closures were happening based on that.

  With all that information I really knew we had to act. . . . So we decided in one week we were going to have a testing forum at the Earth School, and I said, “Why don’t we just make this a citywide meeting and invite as many people as possible?” And sure enough we had this opt-out forum at my school and people came from all over the city. We had no idea it would be such a draw in such a short amount of time and that it would spark so much conversation. The forum was called “The Schools Our Children Deserve” and I think it was about a week before the test.

  JH: What a great panel that was.

  JL: You came out to speak and we had Jenny Fox, who is a member of Change the Stakes, [Jane] Hirschmann from Time Out from Testing, and Brian Jones, and I moderated. And the next thing you know, at my school we had 30 percent of the kids being opted out!

  JH: Amazing.

  JL: But it was difficult to organize because we teachers had a gag order at that point. I guess they got wind of stuff going around; they said teachers are not to speak to parents about opting out. “We can’t protect you if there’s any disciplinary action, it’s insubordination.” I mean we got that e-mail and I was like—

  JH: Wait, who sent that e-mail, the union?

  JL: It was the New York State union teachers president at the time . . .

  JH: Oh, wow.

  JL: . . . who sent out that e-mail and . . . everyone was just so excited, but it kind of put a damper on other teachers talking about it. At this point though, parents had really taken it on . . . saying teachers are afraid . . . this is their jobs [on the line], so they are not going to talk about it. We as parents have to take on the task, and so I said, I don’t care. I’m out already. I’m a parent. My son was in the fourth grade and we were opting out, so we went first and then we reached 30 percent of the school opting out in just one or two weeks.

  JH: That’s awesome.

  JL: This year it went up to 60 or 70 percent.

  JH: So you started last year at around 30 percent and now this year you got up to 60 or 70 percent?

  JL: Seventy percent, yeah.

  JH: Amazing. I can’t tell you how it feels to know that the panel I was a part of played a role in helping spur this rebellion.

  JL: Yeah, it was huge. But something else significant happened, and that was that the organization Change the Stakes went from thirty-some odd people three years ago to just over three hundred last year. This year in New York City, just over a thousand students were opted out. In New York City, school communities are very divided, so we realized we really needed to lay the groundwork and establish collaboration between the schools. So like Earth School, we were open to inviting parents from other schools to come talk about opting out when in the past parents didn’t feel they had anywhere to go. They would talk to people and they would hear that someone talked with the Earth School. We heard there’s an opt-out going on, what’s that about? And the next thing you know that parent is planning something at their school.

  JH: That’s wonderful.

  JL: Brooklyn New School was amazing—they went from I think five students last year to this year having way more students than us [opting out]. I think they have something like three hundred students [opting out] in their testing grades; they went up to 87 percent opt-out this year.

  JH: That’s great. So how did you go from parents opting their students out of the test to a much more severe and bold step of teachers willing to risk their livelihoods at the Earth School to refuse to administer the tests? How did you organize the teachers there, what has been the impact of your stand to refuse to administer it, and what consequences are you facing or what gains are you making?

  JL: We had to make a stand and just stop the testing obsession and you know we’re not going to do things that are going to negatively affect our students, so we became consciousness objectors. Everything that we understand as educators about childhood development and culturally relevant teaching made us want to save the culture in our school. . . . I mean there is definitely support from almost all the teachers [for the testing boycott], but only three of us signed the letter that we then sent to Carmen Fariña, the new chancellor [of the New York Public Schools]. When we put it out there some teachers were still worried about the consequences, but we did get some staff and supporters, and ultimately three of us did not administer the test.

  JH: What was the chancellor’s response and has there been any backlash?

  JL: There hasn’t been any response. And we aren’t waiting for a response. At the Earth School we believe that education is a profession that needs autonomy, and in order to do our work with students and do right by them teachers need to have the autonomy and flexibility to work collaboratively and
to work outside of test scores, outside of very rigid standards. One size does not fit all. And in order to provide a culture of engagement rather than compliance, we have to push back against these policies that are coming down. We realized that the things our school is really all about will not be possible if we follow the mandates. I think people understand the need for a strong collaborative culture and that if we stick together with our parents and with other schools they can’t break us and force us into compliance.

  Teachers of Conscience Letter to Chancellor Carmen Fariña

  The ongoing wars, the distortions of truth we have witnessed, the widening gaps between rich and poor disturb us more than we can say; but we have had so many reminders of powerlessness that we have retreated before the challenge of bringing such issues into our classrooms. At once, we cannot but realize that one of our primary obligations is to try to provide equal opportunities for the young. And we realize full that this cannot happen if our students are not equipped with what are thought to be survival skills, not to speak of a more or less equal range of literacies. And yet the tendency to describe the young as “human resources,” with the implication that they are mainly grist for the mills of globalized business, is offensive not merely to educators, but to anyone committed to resist dehumanization of any kind.