More Than a Score

by Jesse Hagopian

  Then, I call on you my legislators in the name of liberty, of patriotism and everything dear to the American character, to come to our aid, with all dispatch. The enemy of public schools is declaring that spending on a shiny new high-stakes testing system is “non-negotiable”; that, in essence, we must save the test but not the teachers. The enemy of public schools is saying that Texas lawmakers won’t raise 1 penny in taxes in order to save our schools.

  If this call is neglected, I am determined to sustain myself as long as possible and fight for the kids in these classrooms like an educator who never forgets what is due to his own honor and that of his community. Make education a priority!

  With all due respect and urgency,

  John Kuhn

  The letter spread like wildfire across Texas and even nationally. I was invited to give a speech at a North Texas college alongside reformer principal Steve Perry. I was then asked to read my letter at the first-ever Save Texas Schools rally later that spring. When I accepted this invitation, I didn’t know how many people would be there to listen. I expected a small crowd of five hundred or seven hundred and fifty people. I was nervous: I would be standing on the steps of the state capitol and criticizing the powerful men and women inside. But I had already cast my lot. There was no turning back.

  When my family and I showed up at a shaded park in Austin where the Save Texas Schools march would begin, I realized that this was a bigger deal than I had appreciated. Someone had done a masterful job of organizing. It probably helped that Texas teachers and public school parents statewide were in a panic; the talk from politicians and think tanks had been decidedly grim and antagonistic toward the very concept of public education. A distant bullhorn announced that it was time to march to the capitol building, and we filled the street. When I say “filled the street,” I mean that both sidewalks and a four-lane city street were completely packed with a crush of people, and the crush stretched for who-knew-how-many blocks. I couldn’t see where the crowd began or ended; the surging throng snaked through the city and the voices of the multitude—strangely joyous—bounced off the buildings. I had never heard or seen anything like it. Teachers and parents pushed their strollers side by side. Dozens of groups wore matching shirts emblazoned with the names of their schools. Everyone who counted on public schools had a dog in this fight—Republicans, Democrats, Independents. The bipartisan chorus chanted together and held their signs aloft, pleading for support in any way they knew how.

  On that beautiful spring day, public education was the greatest unifier in Texas. I thought about standing in front of them all, standing behind that microphone and speaking. The biggest crowd I had ever addressed before was a campus faculty meeting, and it wasn’t even a big campus. My heart began to pound. I kissed my wife goodbye, wondering if I wasn’t maybe kissing my career goodbye as well, and I scaled the capitol steps. My middle child, six at the time, went with me up onto the stage. We sat in the ardent sun and I looked out at a sea of people. More than thirteen thousand public education supporters would listen to me read the letter and also a barnburner of a speech that I would reprise in July at the Save Our Schools National March and Call to Action in Washington, DC. Since then, I have written dozens of commentaries for Texas newspapers, education blogs at Education Week and the Washington Post, and websites like CNN.com. I’ve spoken at three Save Texas Schools rallies now, and I’ve participated in events from Missouri to Washington, DC.

  I got involved in the movement against over-testing and testing misuse because I felt that I had a moral obligation to oppose a seemingly relentless onslaught of underfunding and testing and punishing, an approach to education born in Texas some three decades before, that, until recently, showed no sign of letting up. This approach to education was built on a lie, a “Texas Miracle” built on fudged numbers that had been thoroughly debunked. Miraculously, though, even though everyone everywhere knew the “Texas Miracle” never really happened, the policy prescriptions touted as its causal agents had stuck and spread nationwide. We were addicted, nationally, to a cocktail with harsh side effects that had never actually cured any disease.

  As I sat and listened to the state senator brazenly proclaim that the newer, harder, longer, more expensive test was coming whether the educators approved or not, I decided to do something rash. I still lose sleep over what I’ve done from time to time. After the “Alamo Letter” hit Facebook, a friend said, “That might not have been the best thing you could’ve done for your career.” I nodded. “You may be right,” I said. But maybe it was the best thing I could’ve done for my kids.

  I was soon gratified to learn that I was not alone. A school board member had started a movement called “Make Education a Priority” months before I took my stand. A group of superintendents would unveil a resolution opposing over-testing, which would be adopted by almost nine hundred school districts in Texas and would spawn a similar national resolution. And a group of Lone Star moms would unite to form the organization Texans Advocating for Meaningful Student Assessment—better known as Mothers Against Drunk Testing—dedicated to the elimination of “over-testing and under-investing in Texas students.”

  We would have something of a victory in Texas. The fifteen STAAR tests required for graduation would be reduced to five during the next legislative session. The state’s speaker of the House would begin the session by declaring “To parents and educators concerned about excessive testing, the Texas House has heard you.” Pearson lobbyists would be prohibited by law from serving on the committees that designed accountability. Legislation would be passed to reduce elementary testing and to permit a group of school districts the freedom to use an educator-developed alternative accountability system, though the governor would veto it. During the process, some of the staunchest advocates for more and more testing would be forced to confront the truth—they had lost the support of the people.

  When I said what I said, and when I wrote what I wrote—when I did what I thought was right regardless of the consequences—I wasn’t sure how it would turn out for me. (To be honest, I’m still not sure.) Superintendents don’t tend to last very long in their roles anyway—it’s probably not smart for us to go around poking at hornets’ nests. But for a moment, I let emotion and passion trump rational self-interest. And I’m glad I did. I discovered a whole army of people in my home state who, like me, had seen the corrosive effects of over-testing and our nation’s now conventional hyper-punitive education policy, and who were already doing something about it. I wouldn’t have known they were even there if I hadn’t spoken up.

  In the end, the senator whose casual dismissiveness sparked my fire was wrong. Standardized testing in Texas was negotiable; in fact, it was highly negotiable. Powerful people wanted to set the rules, but the rest of us suddenly stopped agreeing to play by those rules. In Texas between 2011 and 2013, the “little people”—parents, teachers, and students—marched, spoke, wrote, resolved, organized, tweeted, testified, advocated, agitated, and drafted model legislation. Most importantly of all, they—we—changed the game!

  Building the Movement Against High-Stakes Testing

  In spring 2013, parents, students, educators, community activists, and local elected officials across the nation rose in opposition to the overuse and misuse of standardized tests. This public eruption shows every sign of growing in intensity and reach. My organization, the National Center for Fair & Open Testing (FairTest), has joined with other groups to launch a “Testing Resistance and Reform Spring” initiative to advance this movement.

  FairTest has been fighting against high-stakes testing and for educationally beneficial assessments for nearly thirty years. While growing numbers of colleges have adopted test-score-optional admissions policies, standardized exams and test preparation have metastasized and taken over public school classrooms. In this environment, teachers increasingly say they can no longer provide students with a meaningful or engaging education. The growing resistance could produce a social movement to reverse
this damage. It is still embryonic, however, with far to go before it can win the changes our children and our society need.

  The Testing Explosion

  I started working with FairTest in 1987. Among my initial tasks was to collaborate on a report, Fallout from the Testing Explosion: How 100 Million Standardized Exams Undermine Equity and Excellence in America’s Public Schools, which explored the expansion of standardized testing. In particular, the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) mandated testing children in Title I programs with norm-referenced tests (NRT) in reading and math, a practice many schools applied to all students. Back then, sixteen states, mostly those with large percentages of African American and Latino children, imposed high school graduation exams. IQ tests were misused to place students in classes for the “educable mentally retarded” and achievement tests were misused for tracking and occasionally for grade promotion (particularly in large cities with many students of color). Fallout examined a range of harmful consequences, including racial and class discrimination. It also looked at educational damage to curriculum and instruction when states, districts, and schools used tests to make important educational decisions. FairTest’s goal was then—and remains today—to roll back the amount of testing and end high-stakes uses, as well as to promote fair, educationally beneficial student assessment.

  By the mid-1990s, our goal seemed increasingly in sight. A 1994 federal revision of ESEA dropped the NRT requirement and instead required states to test children in reading and math just once in each of three grade spans. While schools were supposed to demonstrate progress, the law contained no specific targets or sanctions. After another group of states briefly adopted graduation exams early in the 1990s, that tide receded from a high of nearly twenty-five states back to sixteen. Perhaps most significantly, the public conversation and some classroom practice shifted to authentic assessments such as portfolios, performance tasks, projects, and observations. For a few years, reformers were ascendant, diminishing the extent and importance of standardized tests and advancing high-quality assessment that could enrich learning.

  Sadly, that tide quickly turned under pressure from business leaders and politicians who wanted to appear “tough on accountability.” By the late 1990s, the mantra of “assessments worth teaching to” became “this ‘new,’ high-stakes standardized exam is the test worth teaching to.” States and districts began to use student scores to rate and then to punish or close schools. More states adopted high school exit exams, with tens of thousands additional students denied diplomas each year. Despite including a few open-ended questions, the exams still failed to assess most of the knowledge, skills, and traits students actually needed. Simultaneously, the nation was backing away from addressing poverty, segregation, and school underfunding, the primary causes of low test scores and graduation rates.

  A joint Republican-Democrat initiative, modeled on George W. Bush’s fraudulent “Texas miracle,” brought high-stakes standardized testing to the national stage with a vengeance. The federal No Child Left Behind Act—the 2001 version of ESEA—mandated testing all children in grades three to eight and once in high school with state math and reading exams. The results were to be used to punish schools that failed to make “adequate yearly progress” toward the clearly impossible goal that all students would score “proficient” by 2014. The threat of severe sanctions produced fearful compliance among all levels of educators. As FairTest and many others have documented, the “fallout” from the most recent testing explosion has been profoundly damaging, including:

  • narrowing curriculum and instruction by focusing teaching on educationally inadequate tests and emphasizing test preparation;

  • massively expanding the use of “benchmark,” “interim,” and assorted mini-tests to tie teaching ever more closely to high-stakes exams;

  • increasing the use of grade promotion and graduation tests, which are once again found in half the states, including those where nearly 80 percent of African American and Latino students live;

  • reducing professional development and educator collaboration to a focus on how teachers can more effectively boost test scores; and

  • creating “zero tolerance” disciplinary pretexts to remove low-scoring children from the testing pool, bringing push outs to record highs and feeding the “school-to-prison pipeline.”

  Although Barack Obama criticized over-testing in his first presidential campaign, he appointed former Chicago schools chief Arne Duncan, a proponent of test-based accountability, to head the department of education. Duncan installed a like-minded coterie from organizations such as the Gates Foundation to senior policy-making positions. Duncan acknowledged that NCLB was not working. But he did not abandon its test-and-punish approach. Instead, he used Race to the Top (RttT) economic stimulus funds and then NCLB waivers to increase testing, mainly by requiring states to use student scores to judge teachers. These policies also shifted the primary focus of sanctions from schools to teachers, except for the lowest scoring schools, which suffer both kinds of punishments.

  The administration also allocated RttT funding to launch two Common Core State Standards (CCSS) testing consortia, in which most states participate. An alliance of states produced the English Language Arts and Mathematics standards with substantial federal funding plus foundation and corporate support. The federal government also bribed states to adopt Common Core standards by linking new standards to winning RttT grants and the NCLB waivers. The tests are intended to measure and, in effect, enforce the standards. This will further centralize testing’s domination over curriculum and instruction. Meanwhile, use of interim tests to get students ready for high-stakes exams continues to explode. Some districts administer as many as thirty standardized tests annually in a single grade, a practice reaching down to kindergarten.

  The law deemed the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading and math tests to be the primary indicator of NCLB’s long-term, national success. Rather than accelerate toward 100 percent proficiency, the rate of improvement on NAEP has slowed and even stalled in all tested grades, in both reading and math, for almost all demographic groups. High-stakes testing has clearly failed by its primary measure, while causing massive collateral damage to genuine teaching and learning. Yet test proponents have used vast funding from major foundations and corporations along with extensive support from mainstream media to keep pushing for ever more testing, with ever stronger sanctions.

  The Resistance

  In the spring of 2013, parent, student, and teacher resistance to the overuse and misuse of standardized tests erupted on the national stage. FairTest has worked to support, promote, and strengthen this emerging movement. The resistance to high-stakes testing is growing rapidly in 2014, reaching new locales, while groups active in 2013 continue to build their capacity to advance the struggle.

  Protest actions have included boycotts and “opt-outs,” demonstrations and public events, community forums, petitions, extensive use of social media, news conferences, meetings with officials, and a strong legislative push in a few states. Activists garnered community support and often sympathetic media coverage. As a result, they built a larger, stronger movement and won some significant victories.

  Students walked out of schools in Seattle, Portland, Oregon, Denver, Chicago, and New York. Seattle teachers in several high schools boycotted one test, called the Measures of Academic Progress, or MAP. When district officials then tried to administer the tests at Garfield High, most students, backed by their parents and community and civil rights groups, refused to take it. In New York, an estimated twenty-five hundred students and their parents boycotted the annual, NCLB-required state exams on Long Island. So did students at forty schools in New York City and many more in upstate New York.

  Activists’ goals varied, from demands to roll back the amount of standardized testing and end high stakes, to stopping or reducing specific exams, such as graduation tests. The Providence Student Union (PSU) opposed a loom
ing graduation requirement that would deny high school diplomas to as many as 40 percent of seniors. They staged a “zombie march,” then organized a group of prominent adults to take the state graduation test, most of whom failed it. They also asked the commissioner of education to sign a symbolic check for $500,000, the average amount of an individual’s lifetime loss of income due to not having a diploma. When the board of education would not reconsider the graduation test, students and their allies persuaded the legislature to pass a resolution calling on the board to do so. Because the board did not significantly alter the policy, the PSU, teachers unions, and other groups will seek a legislative victory in 2014. PSU also called for a very different assessment system, modeled on the New York Performance Standards Consortium.

  Another partly effective action was a “play in” at Chicago Public Schools offices to protest the dozen or more standardized tests given to kindergarten, first- and second-grade students. It was organized by More Than a Score, a parent-union alliance. In response, CPS proposed a minor reduction in testing in the early grades. Meanwhile, student walkouts led by the emerging Chicago Students Union pushed CPS to drop one high school test. Both organizations are continuing their campaigns.

  In New York, public rallies continued the momentum through the summer and fall of 2013. Fifteen hundred people rallied on Long Island in August, then twenty-five hundred in Buffalo in September. Parents, teachers, and students harshly denounced state education policies at public events organized by the New York education department itself. Some Long Island parents mailed their children’s student test scores back to the state, writing “return to sender, invalid tests” on the envelopes. Parent leaders called for one hundred thousand boycotters for spring 2014. More than 90 percent of the parents at Castle Bridge School, a K–2 public school in Manhattan opted their children out of tests whose sole purpose is to judge teachers. The supportive principal scrapped the exam. Numerous local groups created an umbrella organization, New York State Allies for Public Education (NYSAPE), to build a stronger statewide campaign.