More Than a Score

by Jesse Hagopian

  If people hear a lot about the Philadelphia movement, it’s partly because we’re producing a lot of media through outlets like the Media Mobilizing Project. We’ve been able to push out videos and publications and really spend a lot of time humanizing the story of Philadelphia so it just doesn’t become full of statistics: “seven thousand children,” “thirty public schools to close,” “four thousand staff gone,” “$93 million debt.” I mean, your eyes can just glaze over as these numbers get bigger and bigger, and it can feel paralyzing. And the counterbalance to that for us, and a lesson and a strategy that we employ, is the need to humanize every situation. So when thousands of teachers were laid off, a group called Teacher Action Group Philadelphia started a website called Faces of the Layoff and told the stories of all these staff people who had spent their lives within the Philadelphia schools who were being laid off.

  JH: That’s brilliant.

  HG: Philly people have created a ton of independent videos so that the student walkouts [against budget cuts] could be documented and deepened not just for that action but as political history and storytelling that we continue to use. It is really important to find the space for people to be able to educate one another on the politics and history as we go through this so that even among ourselves we don’t get too beaten down, or as we are being beaten down, at least we remember that this has been a long fight and why we continue on.

  JH: That’s a great point. If we don’t know our history and if our movement is constantly having to reinvent itself at every attack, we don’t stand a chance. That’s also a really important lesson about independent media that I hadn’t fully realized—that you have had such a focus on alternative media in building the movement. I think besides the alternative media something that has been effective in Philadelphia has been direct action in terms of the walkouts of students, but I think I also remember that you went inside the mayor’s office and commandeered his podium? Is that right?

  HG: Yeah. And you may see more of that, hopefully! During the state takeover one of the strongest actions we did was taking over the board of education building during a real showdown about whether the state would completely take over and wipe out local control entirely. We had a real impact—it ended up being a city-state hybrid-run school board. We’ve had a number of actions at the mayor’s office and at City Hall and in Harrisburg where Philadelphians just finished a five-day sit-in at the state capitol.

  Mass action is great, but probably the most important thing we’ve been able to do is convert mass action to political power. Our governor is a first-term governor and his election is right around the corner. He’s double-digit points down in the polls, and for the first time ever, the reason is public education has become a top voter issue in the state and in our city. That’s the key: to convert mass action to political power to see a change in not just our power structure but in a new societally driven moral agenda for our communities.

  JH: That’s great. Without that kind of fight our schools will be lost. Did you see comedian Louis C. K.’s interview on [the Late Show with David] Letterman the other day?

  HG: I did not.

  JH: You should check it out. They are talking about Louis’s kids in school and Letterman asks Louis, “So what happens if your kids don’t pass these standardized tests?” And Louis says, “Well, my understanding is they just burn the schools down.”

  HG: [Laughs]

  JH: And he’s hilarious, but he’s actually not that far off.

  HG: —And kind of hitting way too close to home.

  JH: Can you talk now more specifically about how high-stakes testing has impacted the Philadelphia public schools?

  HG: High-stakes testing in Philadelphia has charted probably the same trajectory [as the rest of the corporate education reform movement]. After the state took over the city of Philadelphia, they needed to prove that the state takeover was worth it. And so the only way they felt they could possibly define progress in Philadelphia was through more frequent use of and increasing test score data. After all, if test scores rose, the takeover must have been successful, right? So as the state takeover proceeded and as the struggle of families here increased . . . test scores became the vehicle through which to silence critics and to force through an agenda that justified all manner of experimentation and abuse within schools. There was enormous pressure within Philadelphia to have constantly increasing test scores. We were seeing double-digit gains among students all across the board at certain schools that ought to make even a layperson skeptical. Philadelphia, as most people know by now, was investigated for cheating. The pressure on teachers and on principals and the demand that test scores increase were extraordinary. The idea that test scores were the only measure by which progress could be defined in Philadelphia led to abusive situations happening in schools and to children.

  During the school closings process, test score data was brought out to justify the closing of a number of schools. This was clearly a very serious issue in part because the school closings were initiated by a private for-profit company called the Boston Consulting Group that was contracted with and paid for by a local foundation that solicited individual donors for the contract—some of whom, for example, were real estate developers and charter school investors. In our opinion they used their access to the city and district officials to press their agenda, and to this day, that list of sixty school closings has never been made public. But the more sinister part was that when the school district did come into these various school communities they would bring up the issue of test scores as one of the number of reasons to close a public school. But that was never part of [the original] explanation of why children were supposed to take these tests.

  A normal person would think testing was about informing you to become a better teacher, a better student, a better school system. . . . But that was not the case. It’s not like a school that did well on tests or schools that showed some measure of gain were rewarded; they were just subjected to more testing—and fewer resources. And then of course the schools that struggled the most, the ones that couldn’t demonstrate “achievement,” were then punished as resources continued to be stripped away . . .

  JH: That’s terrible. . . . What has the resistance to high-stakes testing looked like?

  HG: This past spring the district targeted two schools that they defined as being failures based on these new school report cards—which were based primarily on test data. In April, the district came in and told these two school communities that they had two options: one, they could either choose to remain with the School District of Philadelphia but they would receive zero resources, or two, they could vote for their school to be converted to a charter school. And they gave the parents in the schools one month’s notice before their vote.

  JH: Wow.

  HG: One of the things we found was that the district would assume costs of up to $4,000 a student because of the charter contract. But if a school voted to stay within the school district, they would get no additional resources.

  JH: That’s exactly how they use testing to push this charter privatization agenda.

  HG: One of the schools they targeted was the last public school standing in a predominantly African American neighborhood that had a long-time, stable community. This school had had three principals in over thirty years. Their current principal had been there for eight years. You don’t see that level of stability in the district anymore. They had a teacher there who had taught for over twenty-seven years in the lower grades, and they had a significant number of staff people who had seen children through a whole generation at this school. And the perspective from the community was extraordinary. They completely rejected the narrative of failure and shame, which was really what the test score narrative is all about. It’s about blaming and shaming communities into silence and accepting anything, literally anything, as a better option.

  JH: Right.

  HG: We had a month-long process as communities got organized and educated arou
nd this issue. We talked about schools as community anchors. We talked about stability and shared values of respect and culture. On May 1, parents voted by a margin of greater than two to one to stay within the district—plus to demand more resources!

  JH: That’s an incredible story of resistance that holds a lot of lessons for parents around the nation about the need to demand more for our kids. I just have one last question. You have three kids in the public schools and I wonder what you hope their education would be, you know, if our movement was to grow large enough to defeat the corporate education reformers and put in place your vision for the public schools—what would that look like to you?

  HG: Education is fundamentally about creating these child-centered institutions that embrace all aspects of children. And I think that in some ways the narrow focus on testing has made crystal clear to a lot of communities how much testing and the corporate reform agenda disregard the life of a child. It’s all about the test scores. It’s all about reductive remedial math and reading. It has nothing to do with the arts or music. It has nothing to do with the needs of students, including counseling services, wraparound services, nursing and health care and the understanding that our schools are bigger than even the education of the child, that they are really responsible for the whole growth of a young person in the most vulnerable years of their lives.

  And if we were to “win this battle,” it would be about teaching and learning institutions focused on the whole growth of a child and really strong community school institutions that affirm the culture, dignity, and value of our families and our neighborhoods. And this is just the opposite of what I think exists right now, where we have abdicated a collective societal obligation toward public education in favor of hyper-individualized, transactional approaches to learning, where children and families are thrown to market-based forces. My colleague Stan Karp says it so beautifully: we’re treating parents like customers in search of services rather than citizens deserving of their rights. I don’t believe in “going back” to some old-fashioned idea of schooling, though. I’m thinking about a new vision in this time, a community-centered, community-driven vision of schools. . . . I think this incredible power of a community-driven vision is the moral agenda for our society.

  The Word That Made Me an Activist

  I will not name the state senator who addressed the assembled school administrators at a hotel conference room in Austin that cold February morning. Having been a teacher once upon a time, she was considered an education expert by her colleagues in the statehouse. She had spent her political career advancing numerous education policies; most had either grown the standardized-testing culture in Texas public schools or fortified a blatantly inequitable school funding system.

  During the legislative session that was under way then—when I sat alongside several hundred other Texas administrators listening to the senator’s address—she had been at the forefront of pushing bills that promised drastic cuts in education spending as well as bills that thrust a new testing regime upon Texas’s schoolchildren. STAAR—the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness—was the name of the newly proposed test, and her pride in its rigor and technocratic brilliance was evident. Students in high school would be required to pass no fewer than fifteen (fifteen!) standardized tests in order to graduate. STAAR would be much harder than any previous test; it would eat up more class time than any previous test; and, at $90 million per year to develop and deliver, it would cost the state far more than any other test, ever. If no one else was happy about it, Pearson certainly was.

  As an educator, I am not opposed to testing students. I have written and administered many tests myself over the years, some of them better than others. But standardized, high-stakes testing has at least three foundational problems that my classroom tests never had. First of all, the cut scores for standardized tests are arbitrarily set by politically appointed officials, in secret. In my classes, kids knew from the first day of the school year that a correct-answer rate of 70 percent was passing, and anything less was failing. Not so with STAAR—the percentage of Texas kids who pass would be determined when the education commissioner discreetly set the cut score, which I have come to call the “God number” of school accountability. With that single private decision, some person in Austin could make all of our students into “successes” or deem them all “failures.” This is the magic undergirding the supposed science of school accountability, and it has very little to do with what’s best for kids. Such a perverse misapplication of testing is anathema to many educators, and it is ripe for malfeasance and manipulation. A cut score really only has one use: to engineer a desired political outcome. Second, I had prompt access to the results of my classroom tests. I could hone my instruction based on the student outcomes captured by them. STAAR exams would be taken at the very end of the school year, however; results would be available the following year, when the teachers working with the assessed students no longer had them on their rolls. The tests hold no formative value. Third, with my classroom tests, there was appropriate flexibility in determining the stakes attached. I could throw out a test altogether if I decided it was a bad test. With today’s prescriptive accountability, adjustments can’t readily be made if test items are inappropriate. In fact, major multinational corporations keep their tests so incredibly secure—so that they can juice their profit margins by reusing old test items—that it’s virtually impossible for teachers, students, or parents to even identify problems with the tests so that flaws in test development can be discovered. The great Pineapple-gate controversy in New York a few years back—when the state’s education commissioner threw out several ambiguous questions from a nonsensical passage about a “pineapple with sleeves”—only came to light because students ridiculed the passage on Facebook.

  In short, the problem isn’t the tests. It’s the convoluted and wrong-headed policies that have been overlaid upon the tests by people who really don’t know what they are doing but are nonetheless eager to do it. STAAR and tests like it could conceivably become wonderful tools if they were to be “jail-broken” and entrusted to educators for the bottom-up development of appropriate uses. The tests could perhaps be saved if they were forcibly converted into instructional tools rather than being used solely for political purposes. But they are currently entirely used for political purposes.

  After empathizing about the devastating funding cuts facing local schools and explaining that it was all the economy’s fault, the senator positively gushed about her new test. Because student learning was so important, the growing cries of administrators statewide that the STAAR test be deferred would have to be ignored. Our state was so broke that we would have to lay off twenty-five thousand school employees, but it wasn’t broke enough to defer Pearson’s nearly $500 million contract. The senator looked across the roomful of administrators and said that the new test was simply “non-negotiable.”

  Non-negotiable. One word. The word that turned me into an activist.

  When the senator took questions after her address, I took the audience microphone and explained that my district was reducing its staff of sixty-something by at least nine employees.

  “How many people is Pearson laying off?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” she replied.

  “You’re saving the test but not the teachers,” I told her.

  I couldn’t hear her response over the applause of my colleagues.

  After the state senator wrapped up her remarks I returned to my hotel room and pondered the plight of public school students, teachers, and administrators. Our needs were ignored. Our cries fell on deaf ears. The senator was exactly right in her choice of verbiage, I realized. There was truly no means of negotiating for public education supporters. Teachers, administrators, trustees, and public school students and parents at that time had no voice in the halls of power. The wants of the Texas business lobby would not step aside for the needs of learners and teachers.

  So I decided I wouldn’t
negotiate. On a February night in Austin, Texas, I shifted from being a passive pushover to a fervent believer in the power of what a prominent education reformer would later derisively label “aggressive populism.” Before that night I had been mostly worried about myself and my future. I had harbored deep professional and personal qualms about the way testing was used to paint schools as “good” or “bad” while funding inequities in my state were downplayed so that lawmakers’ educational decisions were protected from public judgment, but I had held my tongue. I had been a principal at a school that was funded at several thousand dollars less per pupil than neighboring schools, and I had labored to match better-resourced schools’ academic results. I had seethed privately at the injustice done to my students, my teachers, my community, and myself by these policies. But I hesitated to raise my voice. I had three kids to take care of. I had a house payment and a car payment. Someone else would have to speak up. Maybe someone in the legislature would take up the challenge.

  But I knew they wouldn’t. I was pretty sure they didn’t even understand what their policies were doing at the local level. It was time for educators to step out on a limb and publicize what was being done to kids and communities in the name of accountability. In my angst that night, I sought a way to express myself. I looked to a letter as famous and as sacred as any ever written in the history of my state—the letter penned by Colonel William Barret Travis just before the fall of the Alamo. In it, he pleaded in vain for help from Texas’s leaders as a grave threat surrounded him on all sides.

  I wrote what has come to be known as “The Alamo Letter” and submitted it to my hometown newspaper and to Washington Post blogger Valerie Strauss. Addressed to the state senator and the four state representatives whose regions touched my school district, the letter was provocative and direct.

  Gentlemen,

  I am besieged by a hundred or more of the legislators under Rick Perry. I have sustained a continual bombardment of increased high-stakes testing and accountability-related bureaucracy and a cannonade of gross underfunding for 10 years at least and have lost several good men and women. The ruling party has demanded another round of pay cuts and furloughs, while the schoolhouse be put to the sword and our children’s lunch money be taken in order to keep taxes low for big business. I am answering the demand with a (figurative) cannon shot, and the Texas flag still waves proudly from our flagpole. I shall never surrender the fight for the children of Perrin.