As the test date grew closer, and more opt-out letters came in, teachers began to think about what we could do as educators to stand up against this test. A handful of teachers had already stated their intention to refuse to give it, and the idea was catching on. While we stood firmly against the test, we were also nervous and afraid. After all, refusing to give a test is an act of insubordination that could carry significant consequences. The opt-out movement was growing around us, and it certainly gave us strength, but the movement was still in its beginning stages. We felt very much like we would be out on a limb and on our own.
We also understood that as a school, we were in a better position than most to take action. The turnover rate in most New York City public schools is high, but our school has a staff of almost all veteran teachers and only three teachers who did not yet have tenure. That meant we were uniquely positioned to speak up, as tenure provides the necessary protection we would need from undue punishment or unfair treatment. Our administration is wonderfully supportive of teachers, truly trusting that we know what is best for our students, which is sadly rare. And what’s more, they stand firmly against the high-stakes testing reforms that are dismantling public education. Most teachers do not enjoy these circumstances. Because of that, we felt that we were in a better position than most to bring attention to what was happening to English language learners all over the city. It was our time to stand up for what we knew as educators was right for both our profession and our students.
Another factor worth mentioning is that the staff had experienced collectively standing up for what they believe. The year before, the school had created a scholarship fund for undocumented students. The scholarship fund provides money to students who can’t access state and federal financial aid due to their immigration status, and, as a result, often can’t go to college. In addition to the personal relationships that teachers have at the school, there is also a foundation of politics and organizing.
In the two weeks before the test, we had lunch conversations and phone conversations and after-school conversations and morning conversations, and more conversations! So many questions that could determine the outcome of our boycott were raised at these meetings. Not all of our parents opted their students out, so did that mean that we shouldn’t stand up against the test? Would that position us against some of our parents? What if every teacher didn’t want to refuse to give the test? How would we make sure people wouldn’t feel pressured to act? But how would we make sure people would feel empowered to act at the same time? What about our untenured teachers? We wanted to protect them, but wouldn’t want them to feel excluded or isolated. Would we go public with our action? Would that give us more protection or make us more vulnerable? What would be the consequences? Would the UFT (United Federation of Teachers) stand behind us? And the big one . . . how would we tell our administrators?
The questions just kept coming. Slowly though, we began to work through them. But organizing among teachers isn’t easy, because we’re all so busy! Finding a lunch period that we were all willing to give up instead of planning or working with kids was not a small task. So we found other ways. Our staff is divided into teams. We assigned one person on each team to be the point person. It was that person’s job to gather the thoughts and questions from their team, then as many of us would come together as we could to share what we learned. In retrospect, this resulted in a lot of unevenness—some people were very informed and others felt like things were moving too fast. We decided that of course we wanted to respect the wishes of all our parents, but as professionals we had an obligation to speak up about what we knew to be damaging to the young people we serve. We realized that parents and students must lead the opt-out movement as the stakeholders, but as the ones in the classrooms giving the tests we cannot just stand by and wait.
We learned that the best way to empower one another was to talk to each other, listen, and seek advice and help from the activist community around us. We drew strength and inspiration from the Seattle MAP test boycott. Reviewing their story reaffirmed our convictions about what we were doing. Jesse Hagopian graciously took time to have long conversations on the phone talking through next steps, giving advice, and offering solidarity in any way he could. Jia Lee and Colin Schumacher, New York City teachers who had refused to give an elementary test shortly before, made themselves available to help in any way we needed. On the day of the boycott, they sent us a fruit bouquet to celebrate. Those chocolate-covered strawberries and pineapples on sticks got passed around the entire school, lifting people’s spirits and building our confidence. We’d never seen people so happy about a bowl of fruit! Conversations with other activists helped us keep perspective and remember that the movement is bigger than our school. And mostly, they showed us that we may be out on a limb, but we certainly were not on our own. Following the Scrap the MAP model, we decided that publicity would give us strength and protection. In that spirit, we announced our decision not only to Chancellor Fariña but to the entire city. We scheduled a press conference for May 1, the morning of the test, and launched our website: www.standupoptout.wordpress.com.
Sadly, we also learned that our union, the UFT, did not have our backs. For the past two years, as the opt-out movement had grown and it became more and more clear that these tests cause more harm than good, the UFT had been on the wrong side of the debate. While the UFT officialdom completely abandoned us and distanced themselves from our action, other organizations embraced us, supported us, and made our action possible. MORE, the Movement of Rank and File Educators, a UFT caucus that many teachers in our school are part of, helped us tremendously and stood with us. We knew they would be there if we needed backup in any way. NYCoRE, the New York Collective of Radical Educators, built us a website and made sure that we could see every amazing message of solidarity that came through from around the country. CTS, Change the Stakes, taught us what they knew about the media and helped us navigate it. These groups and the people in them demonstrated true solidarity and made clear what a unified fighting rank and file is capable of.
Finally, organizing is hard work and everyone moves at his or her own pace. The decision to boycott the test had to come from each individual. A little over a week before the test, our chapter leader sent an e-mail to the chapter. He laid out what he believed to be the possible consequences, including loss of employment and denial of tenure. Then, he explained that, being fully aware of the consequences, he planned to sign his name to the letter refusing to give the test. At that point, there were about seven teachers who planned to refuse to give the test. Over the next week we discussed what it would mean for only a portion of the staff to sign. We learned that everyone has unique circumstances, and some of us are in better positions to stick our necks out than others. Standing in solidarity means understanding that, trusting in each other’s decisions, and giving people space to participate in whatever way they are comfortable. For us, this meant that not every teacher signed the letter refusing to give the test. As a staff, we made a decision to keep our untenured teachers’ names off the letter, but they stood with us publicly at the press conference—a brave and bold act. In the end, finding that true sense of solidarity—one not based in righteousness or moralism but rooted in our collective decision to act in whatever way each of us could—made our action possible. During the few days before the test, people signed on one by one. At the end of the day Monday we had about ten signatures, and then Tuesday it snowballed with every teacher signing but four. During that same staff meeting we voted to go public with our action and to hold a press conference on Thursday morning.
On Wednesday, April 30, we sent our letter of refusal to Chancellor Fariña and notified the media of our press conference the following morning. As hard as it was to get to that moment, it was really the next twenty-four hours that were the most trying and, at the same time, the most affirming. We were confronted with a request from the DOE to call off our press conference. Our administration worried that we were pub
licly making enemies of a new city administration that wanted to be our ally. More urgently, they also worried that our action would destroy our chances of getting into the consortium, something we all believed in and wanted. These worries were valid. Our administrators did not threaten us with disciplinary action; instead they were honest about their fears. And the reality was those fears were also our own, but we weighed our options and chose to act in spite of them. It was in those moments when we were forced to articulate our thinking about the test—what it did to our kids and its political significance in the bigger picture of education reform—that we finally overcame our fear and felt absolutely confident in our decision to boycott and go public. Because what we realized was that while the new DOE was our ally in a way that Bloomberg’s never was, as teachers we were in a position to take a stand that they would not. If we didn’t say enough is enough and draw the line in the sand, it just wouldn’t happen. The forces on the other side are too strong and constantly pushing. Someone had to push back. And in that moment, that someone was us!
On the morning of May 1, we got to school very early. By 7 a.m., press vans were already lined up outside. We gathered our handmade posters, press releases, chant sheets, and Prospect Heights T-shirts and headed outside. We were excited, really nervous, and shy of the cameras and reporters. Thankfully, supporters from NYCoRE, CTS, and MORE were there to buoy our energy and confidence. We started with a chorus of “We’re fired up! Won’t test no more!” And then we read our letter to the press. After all the work that went into that moment, it went by so fast! We walked back into the school and started our teaching day, but it felt like we had this really exciting secret that wasn’t a secret at all. Solidarity messages started pouring in immediately. We ate lunch together, projected statements of solidarity on the Smart board and shared our fruit basket. We were giddy and really proud of the stand we had taken.
That day the students of the International High School at Prospect Heights had a full day of learning. They collaborated and discussed. They read books together and practiced their writing. They worked hard in math class as usual. They laughed and had fun with their teachers. They did not spend three hours of their day staring at a meaningless test. They did not feel like failures or cry over text that was too difficult for them. And that was a victory.
We have yet to receive an official response from the chancellor or the department of education, and we don’t expect one. The same day of our boycott, the city and the UFT released news of a settled contract after years of failed negotiations. With the desire to sell the proposed contract as teacher-friendly, the DOE was positioning itself as being on the side of teachers. Reprimanding a group of teachers for boycotting a test that even the DOE admits is ill-suited to our group of students was not high on their list of to-dos. What’s more, the outpouring of support showed that we were not alone. If we were disciplined, it wouldn’t stay quiet.
At the end of the school year, we got great news. Our school, along with every other International school in the city, has been granted a waiver from some of the Regents exams. This waiver is not the same as the consortium’s; it is better. It acknowledges that students who are learning English have different learning needs and therefore require different assessments. It is a step in the right direction, but there’s a long way to go. It is clear that the testing regime is meeting resistance even from high-ranking officials like our chancellor, but we can’t leave it to them to dismantle the web of privatization and high-stakes testing that has taken over our schools.
As we celebrated the news of our waiver, we also began to think about the new challenges we will face. Common Core still looms over our heads, setting standards that do not reflect what our students need. Taking away the pressure of the tests is a good thing, but it does not address every problem in our public school system. Teachers in our school dream of classes driven by the needs and interests of our students, fully functioning science labs with a working greenhouse, and the time and space for teachers to work collaboratively with small groups of students. Without the externally imposed “standards” of the tests driving our curriculum, we will teach to much higher expectations: our own. And to meet them we need so many things—smaller classes, more space, native language support for the more than thirty languages spoken by our students, more teachers, more art, more time to plan interdisciplinary projects, more guidance counselors, and the list goes on. We teachers don’t agree on every detail of what our perfect school day would look like, but we do agree that the last thing teachers or students need is one more minute of our time spent giving, taking, grading, preparing for, or thinking about another standardized test.
* This student is one of the most independently motivated and curious learners I have worked with. She got a zero on the test in October, and her father opted her out of it in May. I will have her as a student again next year, and am so grateful to work with her again. —Emily
Testing Assumptions:
Zombies, Flunkies, and
the Providence Student Union
Passersby in downtown Providence jumped, startled, as a ghoulish-looking crowd of young people turned the corner of Kennedy Plaza. Green skin shined, sunken eyes stared, and torn, “blood”-spattered clothes dragged as they shuffled down Westminster Street. These dreadful-looking young men and women gathered at the entrance to the Rhode Island Department of Education (RIDE), where, instead of battering down the door in search of brains, these zombies showed they had plenty already. One demonstrator stepped forward, megaphone in hand. “We are here to protest the use of high-stakes standardized testing, and the zombifying effects it is having on our state’s young people,” he proclaimed. “To base our whole education, our whole future on a single test score is to take away our life—to make us undead. That’s why we’re here today, in front of the RIDE, as the zombies this policy will turn so many of us into. We’re here to say: No Education, No Life!”
Our organization, the Providence Student Union (PSU), has been organizing against high-stakes standardized testing in Rhode Island since 2012, when the state department of education began implementing a new testing-based graduation requirement. By 2014, students must score high enough on the New England Common Assessment Program, or NECAP, to receive a high school diploma, regardless of grade point average or other evidence of scholarly success. PSU members, while recognizing creativity was not an important skill for the test, nonetheless felt it might serve us in opposing the new graduation policy.
The youth-led PSU organizes around a mission “to build the collective power of students across Providence to ensure youth have a real say in the decisions affecting their education.” Students have consistently agreed with supporters of high-stakes testing that it is time to raise expectations and standards in our schools. But we were outraged at the narrow-mindedness of those who believed that simply slapping a high-stakes standardized test onto the end of our twelve years in crumbling, underfunded schools was going to magically solve the poor educational outcomes of low-income districts like Providence. For us, it is an issue of equity: this policy disproportionately puts low-income students, students of color, students learning English, and students with disabilities at high risk of being denied a diploma.
In essence, high-stakes testing punishes individuals—youth!—for systemic failures. In doing so, it makes an implicit argument that educational challenges are not the result of larger economic or political problems but rather the fault of these kids who were too dumb to pass their NECAPs, and of their teachers, who were too lazy to teach them properly. In fact, students and their teachers are currently the only people in our state being held “accountable” for our education system’s failures. Not RIDE, which is in charge of setting education policy; not our school district, which has failed to create the engaging learning communities we need; and certainly not our state’s elected officials, who have consistently underfunded our schools and social services while cutting taxes for Rhode Island’s wealthiest citizens multiple
times in the last decade. Arguably, the latter group is most responsible for the fact that forty-two thousand Rhode Island children, or about one in five of the state’s kids, live in poverty.1 Yet the logic of high-stakes testing implies that the ones to blame and to be punished for the failures of the system are the very people who are doing their best to teach and learn in difficult circumstances.
Even worse, this policy has vastly increased our schools’ obsessive focus on raising test scores, with disastrous results. The Rhode Island Department of Education has framed this as a good thing: “We’re finally giving students the extra supports they need to pass the tests,” the department has repeatedly claimed. But what this actually means is that friends of ours are getting pulled out of their classes to do “NECAP boot camp.”
Two PSU members had been talking all year about how much they loved their computer class and how useful it was. One day they came to our meeting with frowns—they had been taken out of that class and put into a test-prep class with all the other students who had scored “below proficient.” Other PSU members began arriving with more horror stories: time was being spent during history classes and gym classes to do math remediation, interesting class projects were being replaced by test-prep computer modules, and on and on. Students most in need of engaging instruction and creative learning were being squeezed into narrower, less individualized, less active classes focused on test prep and basic math skills. In short, the scope and depth of our entire education were being sacrificed for the sake of correctly answering five to eight additional questions on the standardized math exams to get students across the pass line.
Rhode Island students are familiar with this story. But the average
More Than a Score Page 16
