A Progressive, Dual-Language Option
During our original search for pre-K, the progressive public school Central Park East One (CPE1) was our first choice, but it’s a small school that is highly sought after and we were not able to gain admission for Quyen. So when we learned that Principal Julie was leaving CPE1 to found another school in Washington Heights that would be dual language (English/Spanish) and progressive, we were thrilled. Quyen would be going to a school with a mission to provide a high-quality education that is project based and infused with art and music, promotes hands-on learning—and where staff, children, teachers, and families would work together to nourish and support the children’s development.
So, getting news of an impending mandatory, standardized, multiple-choice test was like getting a brisk slap. We had managed to get Quyen into a nurturing and challenging school, where the principal and tightly knit staff knew every single child and most of their grownups by first name, and yet we still could not escape the distorted clang of the school “reform” bell. By this time Quyen had gone through a remarkable first year at Castle Bridge. She was learning by doing about a range of topics—life cycles through chicken egg incubation and caring for chicks, balance, math, physics, and problem solving in block work, expressing herself in drawing and writing, as well as having time each day to explore projects of her choosing. She was a “natural” at math, was learning to love music and singing in a choir, developing her socio-emotional self, had learned how to read and write in English, and was starting to do the same in Spanish.
Bubbles Are for Blowing, Not Filling In
It turns out Castle Bridge (as a new school) was among the thirty-some schools in the city that were mandated to give these tests to the littlest students because we did not have students in third through eighth grades who would take the New York State exams. A few of us parents met with Jane Hirschmann from Time Out from Testing to discuss these mysterious tests. We then formed a committee to investigate further.
We put ourselves in our kids’ shoes and imagined coming to school—a school we loved, with caring teachers and a supportive environment—and being suddenly thrust into the standardized testing environment: We usually spend time playing and learning how to take care of ourselves and our friends. But one day, our teacher sits us down and puts a test booklet put in front of us. It has, say, twenty-seven multiple-choice, bubble-in math problems, from which she will read aloud and ask us to “fill in the bubble for the right answer.”
Never mind that some of us haven’t yet had much experience holding a pencil. Never mind that some of us haven’t yet learned how to read. Never mind that we may not recognize numbers yet. To help us locate which question we are to answer, our teacher will prompt us to find the image of the cat, or the key, or the eye. But she can’t help us if we are confused, and we can’t work together as we are usually encouraged to do. How odd!
Oh, and if we don’t speak or understand much English—too bad. If we have learning challenges or disabilities—too bad. We’ll actually “get” more time to sit in front of the test and get more frustrated, more stressed, more upset. All this to do what? To help our teacher understand what we know and are able to do with math? No. To make sure we get needed services and support? No.
If supporting our children’s learning had been the actual purpose of the Measures of Student Learning (MOSL) tests and they were developed by educators, I and other parents might not have been so up in arms. As it turns out, these tests were not about our children’s learning at all. They were in fact about ranking and sorting their teachers.
Our political “leaders,” both Republicans and Democrats, from President Obama and Arne Duncan to Governor “1%” Cuomo and New York State education commissioner John King, have ignored what’s important to parents and instead listened to powerful and wealthy education deformers. These officials don’t even send their children to public schools. They are failing our children, yet they push for our children’s teachers to be accountable based on children’s test data. All while they opt for their own children to go to schools that don’t take these tests, that have small class sizes and project-based, hands-on, arts-infused learning—that’s what we want for our children!
From Opting Out to Mass Refusal
By this point, a handful of us had decided that we would opt out our own children from these MOSLs since, as Diana Zavala, a parent activist and educator affiliated with Change the Stakes (CTS, a citywide parent group), put it, “They can’t fire parents.” But we worried about the rest of the children at our wonderful school and hundreds more at the other targeted schools. It was also clear that this test, if unchallenged, would be used to normalize testing kids in younger grades, something that had been off the table for years. We thought, Why not make this a collective stand? After all, we felt sure that other parents, if they knew about these tests and why they were being given, would want to refuse as well.
Elexis Loubriel-Pujols (PTA co-chair with me) and I knew it would be crucial to get the parent body and families informed and mobilized. We and other parents gathered what little info we could, revised an information sheet and sample opt-out letter that we grabbed from the CTS website, and presented at the next PTA meeting. We had a lively discussion about what we understood the test to look like and why it seemed wrong to grade our children’s teachers based on our kids’ test scores. One Spanish-language-dominant parent brought up his own negative and painful experiences with test anxiety, another talked about transferring his child to Castle Bridge especially to avoid the widespread focus on excessive high-stakes testing in public schools, and yet another of her decision to enroll at the school because of its focus on developing the whole child. There was a question about whether there was any possible benefit to the tests, and we could not see any.
At roughly the same time, a Daily News article about the wrongness of bubble testing kindergarteners came out, confirming some of what we knew.1 Reporter Rachel Monahan had contacted me for that article and I told her that a handful of us had committed to refusing for our kids to take the tests—and that there was a potential larger boycott brewing. Our reasons? There was no educative reason for the tests. We checked with several of our school’s teachers and found that they agreed the tests would be no help in their knowing more about our children’s development and would potentially be harmful because of the lost class time and focus they would require.
We found overwhelming support among families and the more letters we collected, the more confident other parents became to join the refusal. Of course, it helped immensely that we had the principal’s support from the beginning and we were building a community where parents, teachers, students, and staff work as a team for our kids’ benefit. We really felt like our voices as parents were valued and thus were able to speak out strongly. We also did some very specific follow-up. Elexis and I pored over lists of who had submitted opt-out letters and went around to try to speak to everyone who hadn’t. We emailed, called, and met face to face with people to find out if they planned to opt out, and did not hear from any parents who wanted their child to take the test.
Opposition to the test really took off once parents saw what the math assessment (the first of the tests to be administered) actually looked like. I mentioned earlier that the test implicitly acknowledged that the young test-takers might not yet recognize numerals by placing images next to questions to indicate where a child should look. The test is also given only in English regardless of whether a child has fluency or not. Now, I’m not opposed to assessments per se. I do want to know if my child can understand how numbers work or if she can read. But I’ve got a pretty solid, if perhaps old-fashioned, way of knowing that—by just asking her! Or asking her teachers, who, after all, spend the majority of the day with her, explaining, exploring, supporting, and observing. I don’t think that Pearson Inc. or Discovery Education™ can have more insight into her learning than her teachers. Especially when their way of doing that entails asking four
- and five-year-olds to, say, count the number of stars printed on a page (talk about abstraction!) and then fill in the bubble for the correct answer next to the word seven—remember that upon entering kindergarten few kids know how to count abstractly (without manipulating concrete objects) or read yet. Or when their way shows an image of an older brother marking the top of his younger brother’s head on a wall, asking if children could determine what the older boy was measuring: his younger brother’s weight, height, or age. Of course, it probably never crossed the minds of the test developers that measuring children against a wall is not a universal practice and could just seem absurd or naughty—why is that big boy drawing on the little boy’s head or the wall? Getting kids to learn to count or read by making them take a high-stakes test is as effective as getting a baby to learn to walk by pushing her down the stairs.
We did the only thing we felt we could do to protect our kids and their teachers—we organized a schoolwide boycott of the MOSL test. A second Daily News article that focused on our actions appeared and was a key milestone.2 Having our story presented positively in a mainstream newspaper did a lot to cohere our existing committee and galvanized our school community. We began hearing from other parents and teachers around the city so relieved to see a group take an uncompromising stand. In swift succession, we were featured in a video episode of the Real News Network, Julie wrote an op-ed that was published on WNYC’s blog Schoolbook, Quyen’s teacher Andrea Fonseca’s piece “Should First Grade Take a Test?” (riffing off the title of Miriam Cohen’s excellent picture book on testing young children) appeared both on the MORE (Movement of Rank and File Educators, the United Federation of Teachers’ social justice caucus) blog and in Labor Notes magazine, a roundup piece on opting out including our story appeared at Nation.com, and an inside account was written up by one of our organizers, Don Lash.3 We had already reached 80 percent refusal, yet the letters continued to come in as more parents wanted to make known their intention to refuse the test formally. I remember upon taking a tally of submitted forms Elexis and I did a little dance of joy. In the end, all but three or four families formally refused to have their kids take it. And, if you do that math, our resistance made the potential results “statistically invalid.” We effectively “cancelled” the test and Julie announced it to the press. We forced the state government to back down on giving these destructive and developmentally inappropriate exams. It was a sweeping indictment of the wrongness of these assessments and ringing endorsement of our refusal to have our children subjected to pointless testing and to have their teachers evaluated this way.
In the weeks that followed, the state education department (already on the defensive because of the Common Core content, rollout, and implementation and Commissioner King’s tone-deaf responses to parent outrage) came out definitively agreeing that multiple-choice tests for K–2 children were inappropriate. Sadly, we heard that most targeted schools administered the test anyway because families could not make an informed choice, administrators were confused about whether it was mandated, and we didn’t manage to get in touch with them to join the boycott. The tests became a hot potato that neither the state nor the city wanted to be seen as responsible for requiring. It remains to be seen what officials will mandate be used in their place, but the biggest takeaway for me was that it showed the effectiveness of just one small school being loud together. Imagine what we could do with several schools and hundreds, if not thousands, speaking out against these kinds of tests and the very high stakes attached to them.
“Opting Out of the Corporate Conversation”
This interview was conducted on May 30, 2014, and has been edited and condensed.
Jesse Hagopian: Peggy, can you tell me about how you came to education and also how you became politically conscious?
Peggy Robertson: Well, my mom was a music teacher and so I grew up around educators. My grandfather was a teacher as well and I actually tried my darnedest to avoid being a teacher. I changed my major five times. I finally just realized okay, this is it, so—
JH: That sounds similar to me in that my mom was sure I was going to be a teacher so that meant I was sure I wasn’t going to be one.
PR: Exactly, I know, and I also saw how hard it was and I was like, oh my gosh, you don’t make any money, it’s so hard. My whole life I taught a little bit of piano. I taught swimming and I just always loved teaching, and so I finally had to quit denying. I was raised in Missouri so I started teaching in Missouri.
I eventually got my masters in English as a second language and made my way west across Kansas to Colorado where I am now, and I’m in my seventeenth year of teaching. So that’s how I came to teaching, but the political piece of it is just something I’m kind of really coming to grips with now. What’s interesting is my dad was a writer; he was a reporter and he mainly did political writing. I was around this my whole life but didn’t really realize that I was political. Because I was surrounded by it I think it just was something that became a part of me.
I was teaching here in Colorado during No Child Left Behind and I was in a district that decided to adopt a basal, the open-court basal, which of course was one of the favorites of Bush and everyone during that time and I was the literacy coordinator for the entire district. So when it happened I came to work one day and they said, “You know, we’ve adopted this Basal, and I said, oh my God, I can’t do this. I hate this Basal. It won’t even work for our population of students. I can’t do this. And they said, “Well, you can never say that again, ever.”
JH: Describe the basal. It’s a reading assessment?
PG: Yes. It was the McGraw-Hill basal. It’s a horrific reading program and I was used to having a lot of autonomy. In all the elementary schools where I worked we had what I call a resource room, just tons of books of all different topics. You name it, you can pick and choose, and so teachers had a lot of autonomy to determine, based on student interests and challenges of a book—they could pull from these resource rooms.
So what this district did is they said, We’re going to go to this basal, and I mean the “on the same page every day” kind of system that No Child Left Behind was notorious for. I had several jobs during this time, but I guess for about three years I worked with the Learning Network all over Colorado in different schools. You would have these schools that would be lockstep on the same page every grade level, every day, you know, it didn’t matter what the kids needed. So, long story short, when they said we were going to purchase this basal I knew I was done because I couldn’t work under those conditions—so I quit.
JH: Wow.
PH: I had my second son and stayed home for six years. I mean this is so funny to me now, Jesse, but I swore I would never go back to teaching and I was going to open a pizza restaurant, that was my goal.
JH: [Laughs] That’s great. I bet you would have made a great pie, but I’m glad we have you in the opt-out movement.
PR: In my mind it really required little thinking. It was just open a restaurant, work hard, and let’s forget all of this. . . . That was my goal when my son was older. I was going to do that because I had friends who had done it and had been very successful.
JH: So No Child Left Behind drove you out of the classroom with the scripted curriculum?
PR: Oh, completely, yes.
JH: Were you scared to leave teaching right when you were having kids, needing the income?
PR: No. . . . I had reached my limit because I felt like my hands were tied and at that point I hadn’t done a lot of research on what was going on, so for me it was just like I was in this small world where there was no escape. I didn’t realize at that point that I could be empowered by doing my research and being an activist and advocating for what was right. All I could think was I can’t do this; these are my boundaries so I have to leave. I think it’s interesting because I think a lot of teachers, this is just my opinion, who are leaving right now are leaving because they feel that those boundaries . . . they can’t get past those bo
undaries.
JH: Right. These policies of corporate education reform have pushed out so many great teachers from the classroom over the years.
PR: So I left.
JH: How did you decide to come back and try it again?
PR: Well, what happened was I stayed home and of course being an educator and a learner I started researching. I couldn’t keep away from it. You know I was doing my stay-at-home mom thing and having a great time, but during my son’s naps and in the evenings I was reading, reading, reading and realized what was going on. And once I realized what was going on, there was no stopping me after that. I had this knowledge. I knew that there had to be ways to stop it and my brain was just going 24/7 thinking through this. And around that time I started writing again. I just saw a lot of interesting things around politicians and writing and how strategy worked and things like that. I’ve been a writer my whole life, but I had quit there for a while and I started writing more as an activist. I wrote a letter to President Obama, and I had been following Anthony Cody online, and I thought you know what—I’m just going to send this little piece to Anthony and see what happens. Anthony wrote me back and said, “Oh my God, this is amazing; I want to post it on Living in Dialogue.”
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