More Than a Score

by Jesse Hagopian

  Looking back at over fifty years of personal experience with standardized testing, I have come to the following conclusions: The tests are still extremely biased in favor of upper-middle-class white males (I’m not even sure what “middle-class” means nowadays, but it certainly isn’t the working-class and poor children who overwhelmingly populate Chicago Public Schools). The use and misuse of standardized testing to measure what students know is still a farce, and that America’s obsession with numbers, data, and the like will continue a practice that has so little merit is almost laughable. The more mind-numbing the curriculum becomes in order to satisfy the insatiable god of numbers, the more the children who should have joy in learning will come to hate school. And that is the worst possible outcome I could ever imagine. The members of the Chicago Teachers Union will continue to work to change the political and economic landscape that allows the devastation of public education to happen. This fight is not nearly over and it will take us standing side by side in solidarity with our students, their families, communities, and other folks who are on the educational frontlines across this country to win. A movement starts with one small step. Let’s join together and take the leap.

  Defending Young Children

  I entered the field of education at an exciting time. It was 1972 when I started graduate school, just after the extraordinary social change and unrest of the 1960s, a time in history when many young people like me were so hopeful about the dawning of a better world. Through the Great Society’s War on Poverty, families were receiving employment and welfare supports and the child poverty rate was declining. There were intensive investments in under-resourced schools as legislators took steps toward achieving their national goal: equal educational opportunity for all children. Words like equity, poverty, segregation, and equal educational opportunity filled the air—spoken by movement leaders, political leaders, and the media. It was at this time that many young people, myself included, went into education because we thought this was a career path that would allow us to help create a better, more just society.

  I threw myself into my education studies, devouring readings in educational philosophy, history, and pedagogy. I learned about children—their development, how they learn, how to create classrooms to foster genuine understanding through active engagement. I was fascinated by how the dynamic interaction between children and their world was at the root of learning. It was wonderful to find a calling in life I loved this much.

  Now, it’s forty years later. And I am struggling to come to terms with how much things have changed in these few decades. When politicians and policy makers talk about education today, they no longer use words like equity, poverty, and equal educational opportunity. What we hear instead are these words: accountability, evaluation, data, measurement, competition, choice, “race to the top.” The direction I thought we were taking as a nation to give all children an equal chance for a great education morphed in three decades into a cold-hearted call for measuring outcomes while at the same time ignoring the inequalities that children are born into and that shape their lives.

  And here I am, after decades of working as a teacher educator, looking at these education reform policies. They are not based in the research or science of the education field; they are driven by opinion or politics—by the views of people: policy makers, politicians, philanthropists, most of whom aren’t in education and never were. Education reform policies, of course, should be based in the research and theory of the field; they should address the underlying inequalities in the school system such as the root causes of the achievement gap.

  The focus of my work in teacher preparation has been in early childhood education. In recent years, I have watched the testing fixation and the pressure to teach academic standards pushed down to younger and younger children, even to kindergarten and pre-K, increasing the direct instruction children receive and reducing their opportunities for imaginative, engaged, and developmentally appropriate learning.

  How Do Young Children Learn Best?

  Young children learn actively through hands-on experiences in the real world. They need to engage in active, playful learning, to explore and question and solve real problems. As children do this, they build concepts that create the foundation for later academic success. And perhaps even more importantly, through active, play-based, experiential learning, children develop a whole range of capabilities that will contribute to success in school and life: problem-solving skills, thinking for themselves, using imagination, inventing new ideas, learning social, emotional, and self-regulation skills. None of these capabilities can be tested, but they are life-shaping attributes that are ready to develop in the early years.

  There has been a consensus in the early childhood field for a long time that testing young children is not valid or reliable and often causes children undue stress. Young kids develop concepts and skills over time through a long, slow process that’s often not linear and can’t be quantified. The best way to assess young children’s learning is through observation, done by experienced teachers who know what to look for and how to interpret children’s activities and behavior. Assessments are really for teachers—to help them understand children and help them learn.

  In recent years, I have sat in classrooms where four-year-olds, who should be actively engaged in play-based, hands-on learning, are sitting in chairs parroting back answers to teachers who are using a scripted curriculum that is aligned with tests. I have seen principals who enter kindergarten classrooms unannounced to make sure the teacher is teaching from the exact page of the curriculum at the exact right moment. In one kindergarten classroom I visited, a place barren of materials and without activity centers, the teacher was testing a little boy at the computer while the other children sat in imposed silence copying from the board: “Sit in your seat. No talking.” One little boy was crying. When I looked at his paper, I realized he wasn’t ready to write letters. Many kindergarten children are not yet ready to read or write conventional print and it’s wrong and damaging to ask this of them. There is no research showing that learning to read and write in kindergarten has any long-term benefit.

  Resisting Bad Practices

  When I first began seeing these alarming practices in early education, I tried to find colleagues to talk with about them. But comrades were hard to find. It has taken a long time for the early childhood community as a whole to wake up to what is happening. It is not easy to build a strong, unified voice among early childhood educators. It’s an eclectic community—one that includes public school teachers, day care teachers, Head Start teachers, family child care providers, private preschool teachers, and teacher educators. Each of these groups has different experiences, needs, and perspectives. Many early childhood teachers receive low wages and have no union, while others have decent salaries and more secure jobs. Some are almost untouched by policy mandates and others, mostly in those programs receiving public funding, are under great pressure to comply with them.

  We also have great diversity in the education and training of early childhood teachers. There are those with graduate degrees in early childhood education and others who have had little or limited access to education themselves. Most of the voices resisting education reform policies today are of early childhood educators who have strong backgrounds in the field and know the harm that comes from pushing academics and testing on young kids. But the less prepared teachers follow the mandates more willingly. Often they don’t know how inappropriate and destructive they are or what alternatives a teacher could offer instead. When I read in the paper how a Teach for America teacher raised test scores in a classroom of young children, I shudder. I know just how he or she did it.

  When the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) came out, many of us in early childhood were alarmed. There had not been one K–3 classroom teacher or early childhood professional on the committees that wrote and reviewed the CCSS. We could see that the standards conflicted with the research in cognitive science, neuroscience, and chi
ld development that tell us what and how young children learn and how best to teach them. Ed Miller of the Alliance for Childhood spearheaded a petition drive to oppose the K–3 Common Core State Standards. More than five hundred early childhood professionals signed it. The petition stated that the K–3 standards would lead to long hours of direct instruction, push active play-based learning out the window, and intensify the demand for more standardized testing. Of course, all this has come to pass. But the petition was not even acknowledged by the writers of CCSS (it was hand-delivered to them), nor was it mentioned in the summary of “public feedback” posted on the Core Standards website.

  Many of us in early childhood education continued to be aghast as the steamroller of CCSS kept driving over us. The standards were written to begin in kindergarten, but federal policy began reaching into even pre-K. The US Department of Education announced its Race to the Top grant competition, the “Early Learning Challenge.” The competition rewarded states agreeing to implement standards for pre-K that aligned with the Common Core Kindergarten standards and comprehensive systems of assessments aligned with the standards. This quickly led to a dramatic increase in didactic instruction and testing. The pressure on young children to learn specific facts or skills increased, even though these expectations are unrealistic, inappropriate, and not based in research or principles of child development.

  Slowly some of us in early childhood education began to organize. We started a project called Defending the Early Years (DEY, www.deyproject.org). Our goal was to mobilize the early childhood education community to speak out against the education reform mandates negatively affecting young children. Our ongoing online survey has helped us stay connected to early childhood teachers across the country and to what is happening in their settings. We’ve organized early childhood teachers at conferences and through social media. Three of us from DEY wrote the early childhood platform for Save Our Schools and we collaborated with United Opt Out in writing a brochure to help parents advocate for young children who are just starting school. We write position papers and op-eds in which we call for new K–2 guidelines based on principles of child development to replace the CCSS; we advocate for policies that will address the problem of child poverty. Currently, we are developing an early childhood activist toolkit that will be accessible through our website and will contain fact sheets on corporate education reform and child poverty, videos of model classrooms, a PowerPoint presentation illustrating good practice, a guide for school principals to know what to look for in visiting early childhood classrooms, and many other resources for the activist teacher. We’ve accomplished a lot with our shoestring budget and limited time, but that’s partly because so many early childhood educators are worried about what is happening to young children and are looking for support and strength through unity.

  When I started my graduate studies in education in 1972, I moved with my two little boys into a one-story apartment next door to two extraordinary people who would become lifelong, beloved friends: Rosalyn and Howard Zinn. Having Howard as a close friend and political mentor for thirty-five years is one of the greatest gifts of my life. Howard had complete faith in the power of ordinary people to create social change. In fact, he believed that was the only force that could move the world toward greater justice. Time and time again over the years, Howard told me that as a historian he could say with confidence that change comes from the bottom up. Not from politicians, but from people. The politicians follow. Howard refused to get discouraged and he urged others to stay hopeful.

  I think we are at a point now where our hopes are beginning to be realized. The tide is turning. People are waking up to what is happening in education in this country. There are rumblings—from parents, teachers, principals, and students who are not willing to accept a top-down system of test-based, standards-driven schooling or relinquish public education to the private sector. Increasingly, the media, so slow to catch on, are beginning to cover education in a way that starts to reveal the deeper issues.

  As awareness grows, more citizens will awaken to the reality that No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top have failed to improve the quality of US public education and are in fact threatening its existence. More parents will opt out of standardized testing. More teachers will refuse to give tests. More principals will sign petitions and speak out. More early childhood teachers will stand up for young kids. More citizens will vote to reclaim a thriving and just public education system. Howard Zinn said it so wisely and well: “We don’t have to engage in grand, heroic actions to participate in the process of change. Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world.” I am lifted up by the many small acts I see each day, taken by more and more people who care about children and who long to live in a nation where children are loved and respected, and where not just some but all are given an equal opportunity for a great education.

  “Dream Bigger”

  This interview was conducted on January 4, 2014, and has been edited and condensed.

  Jesse Hagopian: I thought we’d begin with your own history with standardized testing, either as a student or a teacher, that helped shape your views on standardized testing.

  Mary Cathryn Ricker: Yeah! It’s funny you ask that question because in the last year or so as I have gotten more fed up with standardized tests and fought back, but I personally was a fabulous test-taker. I was! I loved running home with all my school scores from the Iowa Test of Basic Skills and showing them. I had no fear of taking the PSAT in high school and it was probably around the time I took the GRE, started studying for that, when I started to question in the back of my mind, “Why am I studying all this vocabulary—how is that measuring the aptitude I have for graduate school?”

  JH: Right, I was a bad test-taker, but I remember those SAT prep classes improving my score just enough to get into college.

  MCR: There are all sorts of places that teach you how to game the system, you can take Sylvan classes, or you can take GRE classes, or you can buy books.

  And I’d say in the last year my thinking has evolved about standardized testing—and I really have to give credit to you guys in Seattle with the MAP test boycott. I had already noticed that no one came into parent-teacher conferences asking me how their child could get a better standardized test score. They did want information, either they did have questions about “How can my child be a better writer?” or “How can my child get a better grade in your class?” but never—I would have one parent in thirteen years ask me—what do you think my child can do to get a better standardized test score?

  JH: Right, smart parents.

  MCR: Yeah, exactly. And then it was after, really, this national discussion started, kind of waking us all up saying, yeah, we can. I remember hearing Alfie Kohn once, oh gosh, this was probably in 1998 or something, when he was talking about standardized tests, where he says, “Don’t give the standardized test, teachers! Don’t break the shrink wrap!” And at the time I’m a younger teacher thinking, I can’t do that, oh my gosh! But then starting to see people stand up and object, that’s what started connecting with me as I started reading everything about why people were objecting. The research was backing up their objections too, which I felt was really compelling. That’s when I started reading more about the cultural and racial bias historic in standardized testing and that kind of became my Jean-Paul Sartre nausea moment, when I realized that participating in standardized tests was participating in modern-day eugenics.

  JH: That’s powerful—I’m so glad you know that history. Not enough educators know that the idea of standardized testing in schools, which they are telling us are the key to “closing the gap,” actually originated from proud white supremacists.

  MCR: I realized I was playing the role they wanted me to play in establishing and reestablishing white supremacy. And then I started thinking, well, no wonder I did well on those tests as little second-grade Mary Cathryn and fourth-grade Mary Cathryn and fifth-grade Mary Cathryn. They were w
ritten for me! You know, they were written to reflect my culture, my lifestyle, you know, my values, whatever. And so then last spring we had an incident that drove this point home.

  JH: Can you explain?

  MCR: Last spring we had this incident in Minnesota with a mom and a daughter here in St. Paul that just sealed it for me. If I had any lingering doubts about the value of standardized tests or lack thereof, or of these tests reinforcing dominant cultural norms, they were all put to rest. A friend of mine is Native American, has been dancing in powwows for years, and she’s also been taking her daughter for years, so they’re both incredibly well versed in the culture of powwow and the meaning behind all the dances. One day her daughter comes home, she’s a fifth grader. It was after one of these standardized tests, the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment [MCA], and they’re having dinner and her daughter says, “Mom, I was really bothered by one of the test sections today.” And you know, her mom’s hair stood upon the back of her neck. She said, “What do you mean?” Her daughter said, “There was a section on powwow.” And at first her mom’s like, wow, who would have thought they would ever pay attention to a Native American powwow in a standardized test; this is interesting. Mom said, “Well, what bothered you?” and she said, “Well, some of the things they said were just not true.” So her mom stopped what she was doing and she sat down across from her daughter and she said, “what do you mean?” and so her daughter gave a few examples. “They called the regalia that they wear at powwows costume. Mom, we don’t wear costumes!” She said, “A costume is what you wear at Halloween.” And her mom responds, “No, absolutely. That’s our regalia honey; that’s not a costume,” and it bothered her that they called it a costume. Then the daughter said, “And then they called the shawl dance”—which is one of the dances this mom happens to do—she said, “They called the shawl dance a wild dance!”