More Than a Score (2 page)

The network had no official name, although I briefly considered Standardized Testing Undermines the Process of Intellectual Development just because I liked the acronym. I sent out periodic missives to urge the creation of listservs, phone trees, and rallies. I supported and exhorted, shared background materials, and begged for news. At some point the challenge of finding time to coordinate all these coordinators—and to keep recruiting new volunteers to replace those who dropped out—came to be overwhelming. I eventually folded what was left of the network into a similar initiative being undertaken by FairTest, which at least had a copy machine.

The important point is that all of us were sufficiently outraged to invest a considerable amount of time in this effort. We promoted actions that ranged from polite letters to the editor to civil disobedience. And this, remember, was more than fifteen years ago—before NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top, or Common Core, before most states had
annual
tests and high school exit exams, before the push for privatization had really gathered momentum. Back then, we thought things were really bad. And we were right. We just had no idea how much worse they could get.

In the early 2000s there were scattered examples of disciplined noncooperation. Teachers such as Don Perl in Colorado and Jim Bougas in Massachusetts stood up by themselves and refused to participate in the testing. High school students in Northern California, Chicago, and Massachusetts boycotted their states' exams. Parents opted their kids out of testing at, among other places, an inner-city elementary school in Tucson, Arizona, and a middle school in wealthy Scarsdale, New York (where two-thirds of the town's eighth graders were shuttled to the public library on test day so they might spend those hours actually learning something).

The
standardistos
, as Susan Ohanian calls them, were not pleased. When people in poor communities and communities of color resisted having their schools turned into test-prep factories, their objections were dismissed as sour grapes: Well, sure,
they
don't like testing because their scores are so low. But when people in affluent, high-scoring communities spoke out, they were accused of being too selfish to realize that test-based instruction is necessary for poor kids. An ad hoc—and ad hominem—reason was created to deflect each constituency's concerns so no one's had to be taken seriously.

The standards-and-testing apparatus was constructed by politicians and corporate executives—not by educators, a fact that explains a great deal about how things have played out. At some point these authorities appeared to realize that even if they lacked logic or research to justify all the testing—or the numbingly specific standards that the tests were being used to enforce—they did have one thing going for them. They had the power. They could insert a provision in NCLB to punish any school in which more than 5 percent of the students declined to take the tests. They could pressure superintendents and principals into becoming their accomplices. On the basis of a single test score, they could force a child to repeat third grade or refuse to issue a diploma to a high school student irrespective of his or her broader academic record. They could say what powerful people always say when they can't defend a dictate on its merits: “Like it or not, this is reality now, and we will hurt you if you don't comply.” That's what's known as “holding students or teachers accountable.”

And most people did comply, all along the food chain of American education, from state school boards down to classroom teachers. Almost all the wildfires of resistance were snuffed out for a time as the heavy-handed authority of state governments—and, under both George Bush and Barack Obama, the federal government—ratcheted up the specificity and uniformity of the standards, the pervasiveness and impact of the testing. People followed orders—even people who knew those orders made no sense and were doing considerable harm.

Back in the early 1960s, Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram began a series of studies “intended to measure the willingness of a participant to obey an authority” whose instructions “may conflict with the participant's personal conscience.” Fascinated by the possibility that ordinary people who just did what they were told could commit heinous crimes Milgram convinced volunteers to deliver what they believed were painful electric shocks to anonymous individuals. In 2007, the ABC news-magazine show
Primetime Live
broadcast a replication of the study. One subject they recruited was a seventh-grade teacher. After the experiment, when the setup had been explained to her, she was asked about her willingness to inflict pain on a stranger, even after she heard that stranger crying out, “My heart hurts!”

Reporter: Just having the guy in the lab coat say, “Keep going; it's fine; I'm telling you it's fine” somewhat divorced you from your own decision-making power?

Teacher: Oh sure. It's just like when I'm told to administer the state tests for hours on end.

Reporter: You're doing your job?

Teacher: I'm doing my job.

My point here isn't that teachers who administer these tests, or who sacrifice meaningful learning opportunities in order to raise scores on those tests, are comparable to Nazis. My point is that, even if one has grave doubts about what one has been told to do, it can take courage to refuse to do it, particularly if there are risks to disobeying orders, as there often are. Yet we are now witnessing another such wave of disobedience, as evidenced by the heartening accounts contained in this book.

The examples you'll find are varied and often inventive: administering student tests to successful adults in Providence and asking them to share their impressions, creating a clever (musical) holiday-themed protest in Portland, putting up lawn signs and bumper stickers in New York, staging a “play-in” at the Chicago Board of Education, holding a rally in Texas. You'll read about individual acts of conscience and organized mass actions.

One recurrent theme is that many people who already oppose the standards-and-testing juggernaut seem to be waiting for someone else to take the lead and give them permission (or the necessary courage) to stand up. When South Minneapolis teachers merely informed parents they had the right not to have their children tested, 40 percent of those parents promptly took advantage of that reminder. Garfield High School teachers in Seattle, with their dramatic and widely publicized test boycott, had a similar experience: The expressions of support and solidarity they received make it clear that many others shared their frustrations, and what these teachers did helped to transform widespread potential energy into kinetic energy. An awful lot of people have felt alone. It can be liberating to learn otherwise, to see that countless others share that anger about what is being done to our children and our schools, and they may be persuaded to do something about it at last.

In contrast, if we persist in following orders, in teaching the inappropriate and generic standards devised by distant authorities, in ignoring our students' interests so as to ready them for bad tests, then we become part of the “they” that others invoke to justify the impossibility of making change. As Carol Burris says, by way of explaining her decision to mobilize opposition among New York principals, “There comes a point where you just have to stand up for what's right.” Likewise Texas educator John Kuhn: “What may not have been the best thing . . . for my career” may nevertheless have been the best thing he could have done for his students. In 1846, when Thoreau was imprisoned for refusing to pay war taxes, the jail in Concord, Massachusetts, faced the street. One day, the story goes, his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson was walking by and said, “Henry! What are you doing in there?” To which Thoreau was said to have replied, “The question is what are you doing out there?”

For anyone who accepts the arguments and insights of the contributors to this volume, the challenge is to explain why he or she is helping to perpetuate pernicious policies by taking part in the testing. The challenge is not just to applaud the eloquence and courage of the educators, parents, and students who have taken a stand but to summon one's gumption and join them.

Preface

“
H
igh schools may opt out of MAP in 2013–14.
” These words were buried deep within a meandering all-district communication blast, sent at 2:06 p.m. on Monday, May 13, 2013, by Seattle Public Schools superintendent Jose Banda. I read the words out loud, maybe just so I would believe them. “What did you say, Mr. H?” a student sitting near my desk asked. I didn't respond directly and instead leaped to my feet and blurted out the news to the entire class: “We won! We scrapped the MAP! I told you they should not have threatened teachers!” The cheer let out by the students would have convinced someone passing by that they were hearing a last-play-of-the-game touchdown at the homecoming game and not a world history class. Elation gave way to pandemonium. This was a kind of giddiness that is probably only experienced by people who have suffered though fear, found deep meaning in a common struggle, and won something very precious.

It was the culmination of a standoff launched the previous January, when some twenty teachers at Garfield High School called a press conference to announce their refusal to ever again administer the Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) test, declaring it an irreparably flawed exam that was degrading the quality of their students' education. Our superintendent soon threatened the offending teachers with a ten-day suspension without pay, but for the next several months they held to their convictions and forced the district to abandon the test at the high school level.

Yet this was not only a victory for Garfield and educators at several other schools—Orca, Chief Sealth High School, Ballard High School, Center School, Thornton Creek Elementary—that actively joined in the testing boycott. Ours was also a victory for Joey Furlong. Joey, a fourth-grader in the Bethlehem Central School District in Albany County, New York, who was diagnosed with epilepsy and a life-threatening seizure that hospitalized him in spring of 2013. As doctors studied tests and debated whether or not to perform brain surgery, Joey lay in his hospital bed with an IV dripping into the back of his hand, connected to an EEG machine that measured his heartbeat, while a pulse oximeter measured his oxygen level. But one test was missing. The state education department decided the most important measurement at that very moment was not of Joey's vital signs but rather of his academic test-taking abilities. Fearing the consequences of allowing even one child to escape being reduced to a data point, they sent a teacher-courier to deliver a state-mandated exam to bedridden Joey. In a noble act of test resistance, Joey's father prevented the teacher from administering the test. “It just floored me that somebody is sending teachers to sick kids and expecting them to take a New York State test,” Joey's mother Tami said in a subsequent interview.
1

Our test boycott in Seattle was also a victory for Rigoberto Ruelas. In a particularly vicious attempt to transform living, breathing teachers into lifeless bits of data, the
Los Angeles Times
published a 2010 article titled, “Who's Teaching L.A.'s Kids?” The report ranked some six thousand teachers according to student test data and sorted them into the categories of “most effective, more effective, average, less effective, or least effective.” One Los Angeles public school teacher described the brutality of the paper publishing her test scores, saying it made her feel “like I was on public display, like a human being on the auction block or something.” Ruelas was rated “less effective” and committed suicide after the publication of his rating. It is unlikely that suicide has a single cause, but friends reported that Ruelas had been distraught specifically because of his public shaming over the test scores of his students.