JH: Ugh. Same old tired, racist narratives being reinforced.
MCR: “—It’s not wild, mom. Wild means there’s no meaning to it and the shawl dance has meaning.”
JH: Wow. Good for her for saying that!
MCR: I mean, you can imagine this mom, Jesse. On the one hand, her heart is breaking that her daughter’s culture is being challenged, and on the other hand, her heart is totally warmed that her daughter has been absorbing all that is good about powwows to be able to know that what she was being told was wrong.
JH: These are the stories of resistance to tests that need to be told.
MCR: And so she named a few incidents in this passage that bothered her and the mom let me know, and I said, you have to file a complaint with the state of Minnesota. And the district started getting all freaked out because the mom had put something on Facebook that, “Oh no, we’re breaching test security.” But get this, the district had a choice to make at this moment. They could have decided to use a lens of racial equity and look through the lens of equity and side with the child, and protecting the child at all costs, and instead they chose to protect the test at all costs.
JH: Great point. So how did you handle it?
MCR: Well, to make this very long story short, the commissioner of education for the state of Minnesota personally called my friend and let her know that she was going to have a culture of bias review. She had said all these things had been bias-checked, but you know, “I’m really sorry your daughter had this experience and it’ll go through another bias review.” And my friend was happy with that answer, at least the commissioner of education was taking it seriously when the district was not friendly or accommodating to her daughter at all. We don’t hear anything, don’t hear anything, don’t hear anything. I call the commissioner in August and ask, “Whatever happened to that bias review?” and she says, “Oh, we decided after talking about it that I would remove that section from the test because she had this Native American expert look at it and the person did say that yes, you could see those things could be offensive to the Native American community, so . . .” And I said, “Well, can I tell the mom and daughter—are you going to?” Like, someone should let her know. She just won!
JH: Amazing. What a powerful story!
MCR: Maybe it’s a small victory, but in some respects it’s a huge victory!
JH: Yes it is.
MCR: So that is some of my experience with standardized tests that really led me to this point of trying to rein them in.
JH: I’m glad you shared that. When we spoke before, I was absolutely fascinated by your approach to preparing for the current contract negotiations you are in. Can you lay out how you engaged your membership and the wider community in the struggle for the campaign you called “The Schools St. Paul Children Deserve”?
MCR: Yes, so to give you an idea of why we prepared for bargaining this way, if we go back to the year 2009, across the river in Minneapolis we saw that there were a bunch of parents taking advantage of the state’s open meetings law to attend teacher negotiations and they were live-blogging from the negotiations, and they were not friendly—at all. St. Paul is just across the river from Minneapolis; we assumed that sooner or later we would have parents wanting to do this in St. Paul as well. And so, we started training all of our members who wanted to be contract action team members—those are the folks trained to be in negotiations, although anyone could come—we wanted members who were actually trained to understand it so that way they could talk to folks in the audience about, well, here’s X language, here’s what a memorandum of understanding means, you know, it helps demystify the process for people in the audience. And at our very first open bargaining session we had eight people observing us, which is a modest start. At our largest open negotiating session, we had over a hundred people observing. And at the end of negotiating when we had settled our contract and we had won enforceable class-size language, we won enforceable case load limits for our special ed teachers, we won improved teaching quality language in our peer assistance and review portion of our contract, which we call teaching and learning for career educators.
So fast-forward to 2012 as we began getting ready for the 2013–15 round of negotiating. And I had become familiar with Barnett Berry’s work Teaching 2030 and I was really intrigued with the idea of him taking this group of accomplished teachers across the country and having them incubate ideas about the future of teaching. And I had become more familiar with and more of a fan of José Vilson’s thinking and attitude toward teaching, and I saw that he was one of the people who had worked on Teaching 2030. And we were so close to Chicago, I actually sent one of my organizers down for the whole week to go help them out—
JH: During their strike, you mean?
MCR: Yeah, and then another local leader and I went down for two days and just helped. Whatever grunt work they needed, handing out fliers, copying and collating things, whatever they needed, and so I became familiar with their message, “the schools Chicago students deserve.” And so it was the fall of 2012 when I went into one of my organizer’s offices and said, Here’s what I want to do: I want to have these study groups or book clubs made up of teachers who aren’t negotiating, rank-and-file teachers, and I want parents, I want community members. And I want to ask them what they want in our contract and rather than have this blank slate, let’s use a couple touchstone texts to help spur some of their thinking. And so before I even picked a bargaining team for the 2013–15 contract, we put out a call for anyone interested, using connections we had to invite people to be a part of two study groups, one focusing on the teachers St. Paul students deserve and the other focusing on the schools St. Paul students deserve.
We kicked it all off in November 2012, we actually brought Barnett Berry in to lead these study groups. There were ten or twelve people in each study group, made up of equal number of SPPS [St. Paul Public Schools] team members and parents and community members; and one group had the book Teaching 2030 and the other group had the book by Alfie Kohn, The Schools Our Children Deserve. And they were encouraged and invited to bring in any additional material they had, an interesting story in Newsweek magazine or a letter to editor in the Pioneer Press, or some legislation coming up in the Minnesota legislature.
JH: That’s brilliant.
MCR: Yeah, and it ends up being really, really interesting. We also hired a facilitator so that they would be talking to a community leader who’s facilitating it and not an SPPS leader, because we didn’t want them to have the feeling that, you know, that Mary Cathryn, the president of the St. Paul Federation of Teachers, was push-pulling them to give the answers she wanted to hear them give.
JH: Right.
MCR: So I stayed out of these book clubs and we hired a community leader named Dr. Roz Carroll, who was a retired professor at Hamline University. She is also a lawyer, trained in racial equity conversations and racial equity work. And then because the book clubs were obviously small, ’cause you can’t have a large book club, we actually had two different listening sessions where the members of the book club invited other parents, teachers, and community members and students in to wrestle with the same questions. And so we did one on December 10, 2012, that attracted—and of course the weather was horrible—but it still attracted forty people, which we were pretty excited about.
JH: I wish I could have been there to hear the conversations.
MCR: And then we held another one, I think it was March 2, 2013, and what we told folks in the book club was that they were going to put together a series of recommendations of what they wanted, sort of contract language that they wanted to see for “the schools St. Paul children deserve.” They would present it to us in April and then our executive board would discuss with them, maybe debate it. If our executive board adopted it, they would then direct our bargaining team to negotiate based on these priorities.
And so the book clubs asked three big questions of the hundred or so people total at the listening session
and they were: What are the schools St. Paul children deserve? Who are the teachers St. Paul children deserve? And then, therefore, what is the profession those teachers deserve?
All of that got incubated and put together; we had a researcher working with them so when they would ask if there was any research that supported their ideas there would be support for that and that’s how we created the document you saw, “The Schools St. Paul Students Deserve.” It is essentially the booklet form of the priorities that were presented to us as an executive board by the study group book club participants at our April executive board meeting. Our executive board adopted their priorities as our priorities for negotiating then, and our bargaining teams were invited to the executive board meetings so that they could hear them too, and then May 2, when we officially opened the negotiations, we launched it with the contract language that supported the priorities in “The Schools St. Paul Children Deserve.”
JH: That’s great, an amazing process. Can you tell us what those priorities are? What they came up with, and then also, have you ever heard of this being done before or is this something that you guys kind of just came up with?
MCR: I had not heard it being done before. If it has been done before, then I probably subconsciously adopted the idea from someone. This really just came from one of those furtive nights where you’re trying to ruminate on how do I connect the dots between the different things our schools need.
We had seven priorities: educating the whole child, family engagement, smaller classes, culturally relevant education, high-quality professional development, access to preschool, and teaching, not test-taking.
JH: That brings us to the current contract negotiation you’re involved in, which you’re helping to lead the St. Paul Federation of Teachers in, and I think it’s one of the most important struggles of teachers taking a stand against the abuses of standardized testing anywhere in the country. It is an incredible example of the Education Spring, of this new uprising of people saying that teaching has got to be about much more than just testing. Could you give us the highlights of the contract battle, and tell us about how you decided to defy Minnesota law in doing what’s best for the kids in St. Paul.
MCR: We launched contract negotiations on May 2, and the district ended up with a situation where their human resources director left for another job, and they were without a lead negotiator. So, they ended up really faltering at the beginning of contract negotiations even though we had amended some things, the way we did them last time in 2011–2013 to help accommodate them. For instance, they said it was too hard for them to ready every week to negotiate, they didn’t have enough time to prepare responses. So we said fine, we’ll go every other week. And then they said it was too hard to get our issues as we were talking about them, they wanted all of our issues up front, and then they wanted the summer to dive into the issues. So we said fine. We would meet every other week instead, we would give them all of our proposals up front, so they would have all summer to research them and come up with their counterproposals, and then we could hit it hard again in August. So we did that, but then they lost their chief negotiator. Now instead of appointing their very experienced assistant human resources director as chief negotiator, or instead of appointing their very experienced labor relations manager, who also has a masters in industrial relations, as chief negotiator, they hired a lawyer from outside the district, who is essentially a mercenary, to be their chief negotiator. She has no history, and she acts like it. She punches in her time clock, sits down and does her work, punches out. And she, even though state law allows open negotiations, was incredibly uncomfortable with open negotiations. She was incredibly uncomfortable with talking in front of an audience. So she immediately started changing the tone, by asking for caucus meetings, so she wouldn’t have to talk in front of the audience. Asking to start changing the location of the negotiations in order to disorient people. She started all these shenanigans to try to suppress community involvement in our negotiations. In the end, she got so frustrated that she finally petitioned for mediation. The only person who has the right to close negotiations in the state of Minnesota is the state mediator. That was her last resort. So they ended up closing negotiations because they did not want to have these conversations with the community, they did not want to have them publicly.
You can see on our Facebook page pictures where they were walking out of negotiations literally two minutes after they started on September 19, and then filing for mediation the next day. They said it was unproductive to have people testify, can you imagine that? It’s unproductive to have people talk about the things they care about at the negotiations table. So yeah, in many respects you roll with it. I’m an experienced negotiator with a very experienced team. Here is what it is: we are going to continue to negotiate as publicly as we can. That is when we started these videos, so we could share firsthand the kind of testimonies we would be having at the negotiations table with anyone who would watch the videos. We started having online and physical petitions, we went door-knocking, asking people to sign on to the “Schools St. Paul Children Deserve” priorities, and we did that online as well. We collected more than four thousand signatures and delivered them to the school board in November. And at the December mediated negotiations meeting meetings they said, “All right, fine, we’ll negotiate some of these things,” which they had previously refused.
JH: So how did you all decide to try to negotiate a contract without the use of the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment test in teachers’ evaluations? How is that struggle going?
MCR: One of the reasons we decided to oppose the MCA was that we had to get this balance back between teacher grading and student learning. And the obsession with standardized testing was not helping at all. We knew we had to do something provocative to get the conversation back on student learning and not “achievement,” right? “Achievement” is just a code word for a scale score.
We had this experience with MCAs and the things that were off with them, like all the math tests being scored wrong one year and other incidents like the piece on Native American powwows being written in a culturally irresponsible way. We decided that at the end of the day we would get back weeks and weeks of teaching and learning if we stopped administering the MCAs. And we would save money. So we know we started with a provocative conversation, but no one is having this conversation. Everyone is blindly assuming that, “Well, if they tell us we need standardized tests, I guess we need to,” and what we are seeing is more and more people across the country who are actually saying, “You know what, I am starting to think that the emperor has no clothes either, I’m starting to think that I have a voice and a say in this.” Like Jerry Brown in California, we have Joshua Starr in Montgomery County, we have Don Coon in Texas. And the latest example that warmed my heart is a superintendent in Kentucky who wants to go to portfolio assessments for her students. Instead of having a finger waved back at her, saying, “Shame on you, you’re breaking the rules,” she has the state commissioner of education who says, “Yeah, I want to find out how we get out from under this federal mandate because you’re doing something creative for kids.” It warms my heart, on the one hand, but it also makes me disappointed at the incredible, profound lack of vision of the education leaders in our state, when my superintendent’s only answer when we wanted to opt out of the MCA tests was, “But we have to do them.” There is no dreaming there. There is no dreaming of a life after standardized tests. There is no dreaming of a balance coming back, which is so disappointing because there is a lot of energy in Minnesota to rebalance our approach to standardized testing, and they are not taking advantage of that. They think they have gone far enough—we finally got rid of the grad rule, which was a big victory.
Last year in Minnesota legislature there was this test that you had to pass, a math test, in order to graduate. It didn’t matter what your grades were for the four years, you had to get a passing score on a test. And of course the test cut score that they picked
was completely arbitrary. It was just like, “Let’s put it here.” So despite kids getting passing grades, kids weren’t graduating because of this one grad test. Finally we got that grad test taken out of the student expectations, and a student no longer has to pass it in order to graduate. We do have this energy, we have people starting to think sensibly and starting to move in really sensible directions. We are very clear with our school district that we want to make progress on this language. We don’t necessarily expect them to walk into negotiations one day and say, “All right, we’ll take your language on testing wholesale and let’s just be done with negotiating.” We expect them to come back with something that helps us make progress, like what good argument could we make—only testing in fifth and eighth grades. for example, and starting to put some parameters on the amount of time our children lose to standardized testing.
JH: Instead of working with you and seeing the new discussion both in Minnesota and around the country over testing, didn’t they just walk out of negotiations when you proposed not administering the test?
MCR: Right, well, on September 19 they walked out because it was unproductive to have people at the negotiating table testify about why they cared about issues, including testing.
JH: OK, so testing was part of it. So what do you say to people who say, “What you are advocating for in refusing the MCAs in your evaluation is illegal, and so, how can you do that?”
MCR: It’s the school district that is saying that, but they’re not dreaming. All through history we’ve seen really bad laws changed by people who have decided to take illegal action. Because they couldn’t act on a law as it was.
JH: Who are you inspired by in history?
MCR: My most immediate inspiration is Local 28, my union. In 1946 there was women’s union and a men’s union. The women’s union was Local 28 and the men’s was Local 43. The women’s union went on strike and the men’s union decided to join them in November 1946. And it was illegal to strike back then. They did on November 26, which was not the warmest time to be walking a picket line in Minnesota. They called it “the Strike for Better Schools.” Do you know what they were fighting for? They were fighting for modern textbooks, they were fighting for kids to not have to have classes in the boiler room, they were fighting for a way for the district to provide shoes for kids who came to school shoeless. I look back at the things they were fighting for, and they were fighting for the same things we are fighting for now, schools our children deserve.
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