As proven by the Chicago Teachers Union strike and the boycott in Seattle, changing lives and making an impact on students can’t and shouldn’t be limited to only what we do inside a classroom. Actions such as the victorious MAP boycott and various student protests play a critical and absolutely necessary role in this fight. These moments of pushback and challenging these tests are rarely—if ever—discussed in teacher prep programs. We’re being taught to simply adapt to the new policies and standards rather than say what we all know each other to be actually thinking: these policies do nothing for student learning, and they are not what education should be.
To my fellow future teachers: Our fight begins now. If your college program fails to reveal and provide the space to discuss what is happening to our education system and to our profession—which we know deserves a hell of a lot more respect than it currently gets—then you need to make that space. If you know what you want for your future students, then you must fight against the policies and reformers who will do everything they can to prevent you from giving it to them.
It is our duty to not only create space now but later, too. We are going into this field because we believe we will have the ability to create an environment that fosters growth, creativity, and courage in our future students. Our space, our teaching, has the potential to build that space where students discover the volume of their voices, the power in their actions—that is our space, and we cannot stand by and let people who have no idea what this profession requires rip that away from us.
Student Revolution
The first standardized test I ever took was the TerraNova. I was in Ms. Racovitch’s third-grade class at Charles Campagne Elementary School in Bethpage, New York. It had been a handful of years since the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act had been put into effect by president George W. Bush. The law required states to implement tests in reading and mathematics from third to eighth grade. In order to prepare for these tests, we were forced to complete hours of reading comprehension worksheets every night for homework. We also learned countless test-taking strategies and how to correctly bubble in Scantron sheets. The process, which lasted many months, was miserable for the students. And the teachers were clearly bent out of shape.
A few months after the administration of the TerraNova, we received our scores in the mail. I remember that I did well on the mathematics section, but did fairly poorly on the reading section. I couldn’t understand how such a beautiful and elegant language was being condensed into absurd multiple-choice questions. It felt very unnatural to me. I had been someone who was a voracious reader, consistently consuming roughly a hundred books every year.
Overall, my first brush with standardized testing made me begin to think that there was something obviously irrational with the school system. I was told that these tests were for “my own good” and that “I better get used to them” since these rituals would continue every year for at least another decade.
During my experience in school, I have been used as a guinea pig by various politicians and education officials to try out their neoliberal education reform experiments without my consent. The verdict is in: they have all horribly failed.
Consider standardized testing—the latest educational fad sweeping the nation. They are the make-or-break assessment that determines a school’s status with the department of education. They are the numbers published in major newspapers across the country. They are the scores real-estate agents tout when verifying a neighborhood’s value. Corporate education reformers believe that if you make children take more futile tests and attached higher stakes to them, that somehow leads to better outcomes.
Educator Marion Brady once wrote in the Washington Post, “Even if standardized tests didn’t cost billions, even if they yielded something that teachers didn’t already know, even if they hadn’t narrowed the curriculum down to joke level, even if they weren’t the main generators of educational drivel, even if they weren’t driving the best teachers out of the profession, they should be abandoned because they measure the wrong thing.”1 No standardized, multiple-choice test can possibly assess creativity, problem-solving, imagination, critical thinking, and collaboration.
What are the ramifications for the obsession with high-stakes, standardized testing? One is the waste of nearly two billion dollars spent annually on testing that could have been better allotted to fighting poverty, for example. Another is that for the first time in decades, new research found that US creativity levels of young children have been on a sharp decline since the 1990s.2 That is almost surely because of the increase of testing in school. Test scores are also internalized by children. They begin to think of themselves as failures or successes. When so many of the most brilliant and creative people on the planet have reportedly performed poorly on tests in school, why do we, as a society, continue to have a fetish for them? It was indeed Frederick Kelly, the inventor of the multiple-choice test, who later admitted that it was a “test of lower order thinking for the lower order.” Tests in general are simply the worst way to measure learning.
And even when school days revolve entirely around testing, whether it be created by teachers or the state, students still perform poorly. In a talk, Cevin Soling, director of the remarkable documentary The War on Kids, put it succinctly:
Schools only test what they teach students and the remarkable thing is that despite this insanely dishonest approach, schools completely and utterly fail at what they spend all of their time doing, which is teaching children how to pass their test. To subject home schooled and unschooled children to these kinds of tests is quite absurd, because they have different objectives. Yet on the whole, they still greatly outperform compulsory schooled children. That is like beating the house in Vegas. Schools are like casinos run by imbeciles. They create the game, regulate the game, manage the game, and somehow they still lose. The incompetency of rigging a system that still fails to produce a desired outcome cannot be understated.3
Let’s add ten years to my first testing incident and arrive at my senior year at Syosset High School in Syosset, New York. At the beginning of the school year—fall 2012—the school district approved a new teacher evaluation system. Earlier that year, New York governor Andrew Cuomo, after a lengthy feud with the state teachers union, came to an agreement over a comprehensive teacher evaluation system for the state. The arrangement was made so that New York State would be eligible to receive $700 million of Race to the Top funds, a national sweepstakes spearheaded by President Obama that allocated monies to states that adopted his education policies. Under the new system known as the Annual Professional Performance Review (APPR), 40 percent of a teacher’s evaluation would be based on standardized test scores, while the remaining 60 percent would be based on subjective measurements, like classroom observations and student surveys. Then, teachers would be sorted into four categories: ineffective, developing, effective, or highly effective. However, there’s one catch. In the bill, it states: “The new rating system would prohibit a teacher or principal who is rated ineffective in the objective measures of student growth from receiving a developing score overall.” In other words, if a teacher is unable to raise their students’ test scores for two consecutive years, even if he or she is deemed highly effective on the subjective measures, the teacher could be fired.
That fall, the Student Learning Objective (SLO) exams were unleashed on all the students in my school in every subject, including art, music, and physical education. Yes, in gym class, multiple-choice exams with colorful green Scantrons were doled out. I wish I were kidding. Teachers would administer the same exam at the beginning and at the end of the school year. By means of value-added measurements and an obtuse formula, the teachers’ effectiveness would be determined. In a hilarious note, my teachers were telling students point-blank that it would be wise to fail the exam in October and then marginally improve in the exam in June. Moreover, in New York, general state aid for schools is now tied to teacher evaluations, which puts further strain on t
he most impoverished communities in our state. Naturally, I, with the reputation of being a rabble-rouser, opted out of every SLO exam.4 Each time, I put my name on the test booklet and Scantron and then handed the blank items back to my teacher. There were no consequences.
All over the state, there has been an outpouring of indignation at the APPR system. I cannot begin to describe some of the conversations I’ve had with educators, many of whom are veterans with decades of experience in this profession, who are feeling humiliated, demoralized, and beaten down by this process. Many would subscribe to Bob Seger’s lyrics, “I feel like a number. I’m not a number. I’m not a number. Dammit I’m a man. I said I’m a man.”
Two principals, Sean Feeney of the Wheatley School and Carol Burris of South Side High School, took the lead and drafted a letter protesting the evaluation system. As of January 2013, 1,535 principals as well as 6,500 parents, educators, and students have signed onto the document. In addition, in one survey, an overwhelming majority of New York principals said that the test scores are “not a very accurate reflection of teacher ability.” Some have said it would be easier to flip a coin. An analysis by the New York Times of some teacher evaluation systems in the United States discovered that almost all of the teachers were rated effective: “In Florida, 97 percent of teachers were deemed effective or highly effective in the most recent evaluations. In Tennessee, 98 percent of teachers were judged to be ‘at expectations.’ In Michigan, 98 percent of teachers were rated effective or better.”5 So much for spending millions on junk science.
If there’s one thing that is absolutely clear to me, it’s that Governor Cuomo has ignored the voices of students, teachers, principals, and parents who have grave concerns about the evaluations. He is frankly telling millions of students and teachers that their value is no more than a number in a spreadsheet. What he’s forgotten is that evaluation is best done when the purpose is not to punish and reward teachers but to lend them support, foster collaboration, and encourage self-evaluation.
What are some alternatives to testing? Many schools have introduced portfolios as a form of assessment. Students collect their best work—projects, blog posts, essays, videos, and podcasts—and present it in a professional manner to their teachers, peers, and the community at large. When they aren’t trying to constantly “prove that learning happened,” it is done for its own sake via intrinsic motivation and curiosity. Much research has found that external rewards like grades and test scores are extremely deleterious to the learning process.
Fortunately, more companies are realizing that test scores and grades are fundamentally trivial in the assessment of potential employees. Google is one of the more famous ones. Laszlo Bock, senior vice president of people operations at Google, told the New York Times, “One of the things we’ve seen from all our data crunching is that G.P.A.’s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless.”6 When hiring people for technology positions, candidates are often asked to send a link to their GitHub account or portfolio. Pathbrite, a startup based in San Francisco, allows people to showcase their work, learning, and achievements through digital portfolios.
In early April 2013, representatives from student unions and groups from around the country gathered in the basement of the St. Stephen Church in Columbia Heights in the nation’s capital at the strike of midnight. Sitting cross-legged in a circle on the cool linoleum floor, we discussed our successes and hashed out a plan moving forward. All of us in our own right were rebels with a cause, dreaming the impossible dream, and hungry to spur a movement led by young people.
My peers, from Portland, Seattle, and Providence to Chicago, Newark, and Philadelphia, have been walking out of school, protesting, and rallying against high-stakes testing, budget cuts, and the corporate assault on public education. Whether it is for gay rights, voting rights, civil rights, women’s rights, in every successful social movement it is young people taking charge, leading the way, and sparking outrage within us all. No longer are we willing to stay on the sidelines while our society, schools, and communities are being wrecked.
As I said at a rally in Albany, New York, in June 2013: revolutions begin in the basements of churches, in the backs of bars, in the rooms of community centers, and on Facebook and Twitter. It’s time for our stakeholders to rise up and revolt. We will walk out. We will opt out of testing. We will boycott. We will protest. And we won’t stop until our demands are met.
University of Massachusetts students rally to support Barbara Madeloni (wearing the “What would bell hooks do?” T-shirt) in the wake of her termination for supporting their stand against standardized testing. © 2012 by Rene Theberge
Sarah Chambers addresses the Saucedo elementary school community during the boycott of the Illinois Standards Achievement Test (ISAT) in March 2014.
The Portland Student Union marches against high-stakes testing in winter 2013.
Quyen, five years old, Castle Bridge/Puente del Castillo student. Photo by Dao X. Tran.
The Garfield High School faculty gather on the front steps of the school on February 6, 2013, listening to Seattle NAACP president James Bible pledge his support as part of a national day of action in solidarity with the MAP test boycott. Photo courtesy of scrapthemap.wordpress.com.
Students and teachers at Ballard High School in Seattle rally in support of the MAP test boycott, winter 2013. Photo by Noam Gundle.
Teachers at Berkeley High School in Berkeley, California (above), and at Lafayette Elementary School in Washington, DC (below), join a 2013 national day of action in solidarity with MAP-boycotting teachers in Seattle. Photos courtesy of scrapthemap.wordpress.com.
Members of the Providence Student Union lead a zombie march, graphically portraying what high-stakes testing does to students’ brains, in spring 2012. Photo by Aaron Regunberg.
Stephanie Rivera joins with parents, students, teachers, and activists in a three-day march touring the fifty-four Chicago public schools slated for closure in 2013. Photo courtesy of Stephanie Rivera.
Rally during the student walkout of the Prairie State exam in Chicago, April 2013. Top, opposite: Malcolm London joins in the Prairie State protest outside CPS headquarters. Photos by Sarah Jane Rhee, loveandstrugglephotos.com.
Educating the Gates Foundation rally in Seattle on June 26, 2014. Photos on pages 190–192 by Elliot Stoller.
Long Island Opts Out
My Story of Resistance
I would rather die than go to school. These words of despair, uttered by my then third-grade son, changed the course of my life.
As a child I was always around educators. My father was a high school physics teacher. My sister became a special education teacher, my other sister a school psychologist. I myself taught for six years at an alternative high school, for kids who were in danger of dropping out or failing to graduate. It was there that I learned firsthand what teaching to the individual child could do to turn a student (on whom most had given up) into one who took pride in completing high school and graduating with a diploma. I feel that the biggest tragedy to come out of this mess is that we ignore the educational needs of every individual child. Too many education reformers have lost sight of how important it is to treat children as individuals, and to understand that success cannot be measured in any one single way.
My decision to act was in fact brought on by witnessing firsthand the changes in my then eight-year-old son. These changes began a few months before the third-grade tests and continued until the day he was informed he would not be taking the fourth-grade exam, a little over a year later. My son has never been an emotional child. In fact, I would generally have to pry any expression of feeling out of him. He became a child who cried at night over difficult homework, had frequent stomachaches (which his doctor believed to be caused by stress and anxiety), and begged not to go to school in the mornings. On more than a few occasions he stated, “I would rather die than go to school.” This obviously caused me tremendous panic and worry. I was determined t
o get to the bottom of why he was feeling this way. I spoke with the school psychologist, the teacher, the principal, and the superintendent. All of them alluded to how there was a big change in curriculum, the tests were new as well, and that he may just be reacting to all of these changes. The final straw was hearing that my son was being offered “Academic Intervention Services” to prepare him for these new tests an hour before school, twice a week, for two months. I posed this offer to my son, and words cannot describe the anguish that came out of my unemotional, now nine-year-old child. It was at that moment that I decided I was finished with this testing madness. I did not even know I could opt him out at this point. I simply knew that my son would not be taking this test.
My research began. First, I spoke with every educator I knew. My sister was the first stop. I asked her, “What are these tests even for?” She responded, “They serve absolutely no purpose other than to evaluate teachers like me.” I asked my friend who was a third-grade teacher; same response. I asked teacher after teacher and the responses were similarly frustrated with the overuse of standardized testing in our education system today. I began to get the sense that these teachers were not only relieved to be asked the question but also that these tests had made them angry, dejected, and sad.
More Than a Score Page 21
