More Than a Score

by Jesse Hagopian

  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

  “High 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.

  Ours was also a victory for the many parents who have struggled to cope with the stress of raising children in the age of what we could call the “testocracy”—the test-and-punish corporate education reform tsars whose interests are served by the proliferation of high-stakes standardized bubble tests. The testocracy has long been manipulating our society but rose to supremacy with the bipartisan No Child Left Behind Act that was signed into law by president George W. Bush and completed its coup d’état of the education system with president Barack Obama’s Race to the Top and Common Core State Standards (CCSS) initiatives—programs designed to use standardized testing to make high-stakes decisions in education.

  NCLB made school funding dependent on state tests, demanding that schools make “adequate yearly progress” (AYP) in raising test scores, so as to reach a stated goal of 100 percent of students being proficient in grade-level math and reading by 2014. That the federal government did not increase resources to the schools—and in reality cut funds to schools that did not achieve AYP—reveals the organized effort to ensure this stated goal would never be reached, and, in fact, not a single state achieved it.

  Race to the Top (RttT) provided $4.35 billion for a US Department of Education contest created to pit states and school districts against one another in a desperate struggle for scarce funds. States were awarded points, in a Hunger Games–like strategy, for tying teacher evaluations to test scores, implementing merit pay schemes based on test results, adopting the CCSS, and lifting caps on charter schools. While the amount of time diverted from learning and squandered on high-stakes testing varies among school districts, there can be no doubt that these federal education policies have turned schoolhouses into test-prep centers across the county. The American Federation of Teachers (AFT, the second largest teacher’s union in the nation) conducted a 2013 study based on an analysis of two mid-size urban school districts that found the time students spent taking standardized tests claimed up to 50 hours per year. In addition, the study found that students spent from 60 to more than 110 hours per year directly engaged in test preparation activities.2 When I was in Chicago in the spring of 2013 speaking about the MAP test boycott, a parent corroborated these findings, reporting her kindergartener had taken fourteen standardized tests that year.

  Who are these testocrats who would replace teaching with testing? The testocracy, in my view, does not only refer to the testing conglomerates—most notably the multibillion-dollar Pearson testing and textbook corporation—that directly profit from the sale of standardized exams. The testocracy is also the elite stratum of society that finances and promotes competition and privatization in public education rather than collaboration, critical thinking, and the public good. Not dissimilar to a theocracy, under our current testocracy, a deity—in this case the exulted norm-referenced bubble exam—is officially recognized as the civil ruler of education whose policy is governed by officials that regard test results as divine. The testocratic elite are committed to reducing the intellectual and emotional process of teaching and learning to a single number—a score they subsequently use to sacrifice education on the altar devoted to high-stakes testing by denying students promotion or graduation, firing teachers, converting schools into privatized charters, or closing schools altogether. You’ve heard of this program; the testocracy refers to it as “education reform.”

  Among the most prominent members of the testocracy are some of the wealthiest people the world has ever known. Its tsars include billionaires Bill Gates, Eli Broad, and members of the Walton family (the owners of Walmart), who have used their wealth to circumvent democratic processes and impose test-and-punish policies in public education. They fund a myriad of organizations—such as Michelle Rhee’s StudentsFirst,3 Teach for America, and Stand for Children—that serve as shock troops to enforce the implantation of high-stakes testing and corporate education reform in states and cities across the nation. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan serves to help coordinate and funnel government money to the various initiatives of the testocracy. The plan to profit from public schools was expressed by billionaire media executive Rupert Murdoch, wh
en he said in a November 2010 press release: “When it comes to K through 12 education, we see a $500 billion sector in the U.S. alone that is waiting desperately to be transformed by big breakthroughs that extend the reach of great teaching.”4

  Testing companies got the memo and are working diligently to define great teaching as preparing students for norm-referenced exams—available to districts across the country if the price is right. The textbook and testing industry generates between $20 billion and $30 billion dollars per year. Pearson, a multinational corporation based in Britain, brings in more than $9 billion annually, and is the world’s largest education company and book publisher.5 But it’s not the only big testing company poised to profit from the testocracy. Former president George W. Bush’s brother Neil and his parents founded a company called Ignite! Learning to sell test products after the passage of No Child Left Behind.6

  The movement to liberate education from the testocracy has been gaining momentum for some time. Numerous teachers over the years have refused to administer a standardized test, including Carl Chew in Seattle, who was suspended for two weeks in 2008 for his act of civil disobedience. In 2011 hundreds of New York State principals signed a letter protesting the use of students’ test scores to evaluate teachers and principals. That same year the Occupy Wall Street movement and its offshoot, Occupy Education, erupted and helped thousands of educators in cities around the country find their voice and chant, “We teach the 99 percent.” In 2012, the Texas education commissioner Robert Scott called high-stakes exams a “perversion,” inspiring 875 Texas school boards to pass resolutions declaring these tests were “strangling education.” The victorious Chicago Teachers Union strike in 2012 slowed standardized testing in the Windy City and fanned the embers of resistance to corporate education reform around the nation. Also in 2012, Maryland’s Montgomery County superintendent Joshua Starr announced a three-year moratorium on standardized testing in his district, implying secession from the testocracy was possible at the district level. All of these flashpoints and others signaled an increasing willingness by public school advocates to redefine education so it meets the needs of students instead of enriching the testocracy. But some of biggest acts of collective struggle against standardized, high-stakes testing were yet to come.

  In 2000, Alfie Kohn wrote The Case Against Standardized Testing, in which he presciently invited readers to

  imagine, for example, that a teacher at any given school in your area—you for example—quietly approached each person on the staff in turn and asked: “If __ percent of the teachers at this school pledged to boycott the next round of testing, would you join them?” (The specific percentage would depend on what seemed realistic and yet signified sufficient participation to offer some protection for those involved.) Then, if the designated number was reached, each teacher would be invited to take part in what would be a powerful act of civil disobedience. Press coverage would likely be substantial, and despairing-but-cowed teachers in other schools might be encouraged to follow suit.7

  As my colleague Mallory Clarke and I describe in the next two chapters, this is an uncanny description of what happened when Garfield High School teachers launched the MAP test boycott in the winter of 2013, garnered international support, and signaled a new phase in the movement. In the ensuing months, increasing numbers of parents opted their children out of tests, students led walkouts of high-stakes exams, and teachers held protests around the nation in an uprising that commentators dubbed the “Education Spring.”

  There were many inspired moments of resistance during this first spring of the national education uprising that created a self-conscious movement of what we can call test-defiers—those who bear witness, make public declarations, and organize resistance to high-stakes, standardized bubble testing. As student test-defier Alexia Garcia relates in chapter 14 of this book, students in Portland, Oregon, organized a successful walkout of the Oregon Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (OAKS) test only days after the MAP boycott began. As superintendent John Kuhn describes in chapter 23, nearly ten thousand students, parents, and educators in Texas in February 2013 marched on the capital against the fifteen standardized tests then required for high school graduation. In chapter 12, student organizers Cauldierre McKay, Aaron Regunberg, and Tim Shea reveal their supernatural organizing power in Providence, Rhode Island, where they led high school students in a “zombie protest” against high-stakes testing, marching to the state department of education and chanting “No education, no life.” As parent activist Jeannette Deutermann of Long Island explains in her essay for this book (chapter 18), she created a test resistance Facebook page for New York parents and attracted four thousand friends pledging to opt out their children from tests during those first weeks of the Education Spring.

  As thousands of students, parents, and teachers around the country signed petitions supporting Seattle’s MAP test boycott, staff at Garfield realized that what had started as our boycott of a single standardized test had begun to crystallize national resistance to massive indiscriminate and punitive testing in general. As messages of solidarity from Austin to Boston and from Japan to England flooded our school mailboxes and email inboxes at Garfield, we came to appreciate that our resistance was not an isolated action by a local faculty but a signal for others across the globe who believed education cannot be reduced to data points in need of high-stakes punishments.

  The 2013–14 school year saw a continuation of the Education Spring that began the previous year. High-stakes testing boycotts by teachers, while still understandably infrequent because of the potential for disciplinary action or even termination, had nonetheless spread across the country. As Sarah Chambers vividly relates in chapter 10, teachers at Chicago’s Saucedo Academy and Drummond elementary schools propelled the Education Spring forward when they launched a boycott of the Illinois Standards Achievement Test (ISAT) in the spring of 2014. Not long after, as Jia Lee describes in chapter 9, teachers at the Earth School in New York City announced their intention to never administer a Common Core test. Next, teachers at International High School, as retold by Rosie Frascella and Emily Giles in chapter 11, refused to administer a linguistically and culturally inappropriate test to their English language learners. In May 2014, educators in the Chicago Teachers Union passed a resolution in opposition to the CCSS saying, in part, that “instructional and curricular decisions should be in the hands of classroom professionals who understand the context and interest of their students,” and “the assessment practices that accompany Common Core State Standards—including the political manipulation of test scores—are used as justification to label and close schools, fail students and evaluate educators.”8

  And it is the parent movement to opt their children out of testing that has truly reached new heights. The Pennsylvania Department of Education reported a 52 percent increase in opt-outs from the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment, totaling at least 498 students, as of April 2014. More than one thousand opted out in Chicago, across Colorado more than fourteen hundred boycotted, and in New York State more than sixty thousand students opted out of state tests that same spring. According to a 2014 PDK/Gallup Poll, 61 percent of Americans reject using student test scores to evaluate teachers and 54 percent say, in general, standardized tests are not helpful. In fact, as I write, we are experiencing the largest ongoing revolt against high-stakes standardized testing in US history. While this movement is still in its early stages, and certainly has a long way to go before it has a decisive effect on federal education policy, it is important to recognize that never have there been so many test-defiers actively participating in collective efforts to reclaim public education from the testocracy.9

  During the MAP boycott, I was asked many times why I thought Garfield’s unprecedented resistance to a standardized test began when it did. I usually pointed to the experienced, dedicated staff, willing to risk their jobs by refusing to administer this flawed exam, and there can be no doubt that the MAP boycott was the result of
the courage and dedication to the highest level of pedagogy in the hearts of educators who took up the boycott. However, I believe the explanation of why the MAP boycott and so many other inspiring actions of resistance to these tests erupted when they did requires more analysis. We need to examine the conditions of public education and the effects of education reform that would drive hundreds of educators in Seattle—and then across the country—to risk their jobs to oppose a flawed test. Why would thousands of parents throughout the nation refuse to allow their children to take these tests even when it could mean that their schools are labeled failures? What would possess students in cities around the country, whose graduation may depend on a passing score, to walk out of their schools in defiance of these tests? In short, what are the roots of this new civil rights movement to demand that students and teachers are more than a score?

  “An Invalid Measure”: The Fundamental Flaws of Standardized Testing

  The swelling number of test-defiers is rooted in the increase of profoundly flawed standardized exams. Often, these tests don’t reflect the concepts emphasized in the students’ classes and, just as often, the results are not available until after the student has already left the teacher’s classroom, rendering the test score useless as a tool for informing instruction. Yet the problem of standardized bubble tests’ usefulness for educators extends well beyond the lag time (which can be addressed by computerized tests that immediately calculate results). A standardized bubble test does not help teachers understand how a student arrived at answer choice “C.” The student may have selected the right answer but not known why it was right, or conversely, may have chosen the wrong answer but had sophisticated reasoning that shows a deeper understanding of the concept than someone else who randomly guessed correctly. Beyond the lack of utility of standardized testing in facilitating learning there is a more fundamental flaw. A norm-referenced, standardized test compares each individual student to everyone else taking the test, and the score is then usually reported as a percentile. Alfie Kohn describes the inherent treachery of the norm-referenced test: