More Than a Score

by Jesse Hagopian

  JH: That’s right—unfortunately we see that test-and-track policy all over the country.

  CB: Now, in our school, we don’t believe tracking—that’s not our philosophy, so for example, any kid who wants to take International Baccalaureate (IB), or any kid who wants to take science research, we let them take it. We are not interested in sorting kids. At this point we have almost no sorting left; we have almost complete heterogeneous grouping. As of next year, there will only be levels left in twelfth-grade math and social students and even that will be by student choice. We have never been a test-score-driven school, that’s not what we have been about. We do not give any standardized tests. We do have in the year course exams, the Regents exam, which is a curriculum-based test, and the International Baccalaureate exams, which are curriculum-based tests, but we don’t have any of the standardized norm-reference tests that compare one student to another. In our district, although we’ve given the [grade] three to eight tests, we’ve never used them to sort children in any way. So the idea of sorting teachers into categories, in part by student test scores, was something that troubled me deeply. I do not believe it is valid or reliable in any way, and I just don’t believe in the philosophy that a number on a test should be used to make big decisions for the lives of kids.

  JH: Do you remember a time when you realized that these tests were being used to rank and sort rather than enrich education; was there something that happened in your own life?

  CB: When it first started it appeared innocuous, with NCLB, and it was only in the fourth and eighth grades. It was not used for teacher evaluations, it was used for school accountability. In the very beginning, if you remember, it was pretty easy to make AYP [adequate yearly progress] and we used it primarily to identify kids who needed help and the tests were transparent. We could see the tests so that, for example, “Look at this, all of the kids got the poetry questions wrong, we need to put more poetry in our curriculum,” and you know that wasn’t a bad thing, Jesse, it was actually a good thing. So in the beginning when these tests first came out they were used to inform instruction, they were used to modify curriculum, and they were used to identify the kids who really needed help. But what’s happened since then, because of Race to the Top, is everything has gotten far more intense. First the state started adding other grade levels from third to eighth grade.

  Then all of a sudden what started to happen in 2011 is that the testing time zoomed up so that the fifth grade test, for example, was 227 percent longer than it had been prior. There were more testing days and they started adding more high-stakes consequences: high-stakes consequences for the teachers, evaluating them by the test scores; for principals, evaluating them by the kids’ test scores. The Common Core tests became a lot more difficult, and they raised the cut score at the same time, which made them even more of a toxic mix.

  JH: Well let me just ask you then about Common Core. I think teachers have widely criticized No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top as education policy that’s just based on a test-and-punish model. Most educators are very displeased with those education policies. I think it’s more mixed around Common Core. Some educators have held out hope that Common Core will help them improve education and I know your own thinking has evolved on this at well, and I was wondering if you could share your ideas about that.

  CB: At first blush, the idea of making all kids college- and career-ready is one that I’ve embraced; we built a high school around the idea. We have all the kids in IB English—it took them a long time, we gave them a lot of support, but they do it. However, the more closely I looked at the Common Core, the more concerned I became. A lot of the concern that I had was when teachers started bringing in work that their kids in elementary school were doing. I started getting reports from my teachers—it is a young faculty and they have young kids. They told me about their kids crying, their kids becoming school-phobic, their kids saying they don’t want to go to school anymore. They’d bring in this work from Common Core math, which supposedly is trying to get kids to develop a deeper understanding of mathematics. However, they’re accelerating what it is kids should be able to do in younger grades. I’m not so sure they’ve really taken a whole lot out, even though they claim they did, and they’re also teaching kids so many multiple methods that it’s become very confusing for children. For example, they’re learning that the number fourteen isn’t the number fourteen anymore, it’s one-ten-four. They’re relying a lot on kids doing manipulations in their heads, which for a lot of kids, special ed kids and special needs kids, is very, very difficult. Rather than teaching them just the standard algorithm for multiplication, they’re insisting that kids solve the problem in far more complicated ways. If kids are trying to learn all these different methods for solutions, what’s happening is that they’re going on overload. I think they’re doing it too much, I think they’re doing it too quickly, and I think that they’re actually making math more confusing, not less confusing.

  In English there is an overemphasis on informational text, with less literature. Literature matters. In literature you learn to dream. Readers identify with characters, their strengths and their flaws and their heroes. Perhaps you encounter a character who has a dysfunctional family, and your family is dysfunctional . . . all of a sudden you don’t feel so alone anymore. Kids really learn so much from that. Yet the “modules” for ninth-grade ELA in New York suggest that rather than reading all of Romeo and Juliet students read excerpts of Romeo and Juliet. They then substitute informational such as readings on the life of Bernie Madoff, the swindler on Wall Street. You know what? I’m just not seeing the value in that.

  I feel though what they’re really trying to do by having all of these short bursts of reading instead of full texts is to prepare kids more for tests rather than for the kind of reading that they’re actually going to do in college. You go into your college English class that first day and what do you hear? “Here are the six novels we’re reading.” Students are not reading excerpts in college. I just think that they’re doing kids a disservice. In English at my high school we will not read excerpts—we are going to continue to read all of Romeo and Juliet, thank you very much—

  JH: Resistance! I love it!

  CB: —Math resistance is harder. Math is far more content-driven. I think in math we’re going to have a lot of kids who are very confused. Our first round of Common Core testing was last year. It was very difficult. In ELA, the Common Core wants kids to read deeply, you know, to look for evidence. Yet there was too much to read on the test, kids had to race and they couldn’t finish. And then on top of that, the State Education Department yanked up the cut scores . . . it was just a mess.

  JH: Wow. Well, I want to ask you about how you moved from understanding into action, because your launching the petition campaign and the open letter against high-stakes testing provisions that were designed to have your state compete for Race to the Top funding really helped inspire people around the country, including teachers at Garfield who launched the MAP test boycott. When we saw that principals were standing up it was part of our inspiration.

  CB: It started with the letter, the Annual Professional Performance Review—APPR—open letter against using test scores to evaluate teachers. First, the idea of even putting a number on a teacher we believe is professionally insulting and not productive. The union [officials] have their reasons why they think it is a good idea, but—you know, the principals who signed the letter (more than a third of all in the state), did not. I found the whole APPR system, when I looked at it, and looked at it closely, to be appalling. Even though student achievement is only 40 percent of the model, the way they constructed it was bizarre. For example, if a teacher was found to be ineffective on test scores, they would have to be found ineffective overall. That, we felt, was just wrong. We kind of get why teachers want something objective in there. I understand why with a high-stakes evaluation teachers want a system that’s more than just a principal’s opinion, especially if you coul
d lose your job. Frankly, I was just fine with the way everything was, I didn’t feel like I had to run around this building firing teachers. Besides, teachers with issues, you work with them, work through the issues, or eventually they, with some push, decide most of the time to go.

  When I looked at APPR, I recognized the problems. I said, “What are they doing? There are going to be so many unintended consequences of doing this!” We talked about it in the letter, where teachers would start to feel as though the kids in their class were almost a threat to their job if they didn’t perform. I had no faith and still have no faith in value-added measures and we’re delighted that Randi Weingarten in the AFT has just come out against them. We felt that the science behind that was terribly, terribly flawed. We were really worried that it would ruin the collegiality that we had built in our schools, where teachers might see themselves as rivals rather than working together for the benefit of kids. And we were just appalled at the whole APPR system, which by the way, principals had no voice in, no voice at all. When they created the APPR, that was the legislature, it was NYSUT, it was NYSED, and it was the governor’s office. They never even said, “Gee, what do you guys say? Do principals think this is a good idea?”

  Anyway, we wrote the letter—Sean [Feeney] and I drafted it. Basically we did that because the commissioner was coming to town and I wanted to organize a protest, and Sean wisely said, “Carol, let’s try something more productive on this.” We wrote the letter and we were amazed by how many principals on Long Island felt the same way that we did. I think in the end over 80 percent of the Long Island principals actually signed the letter. Then we started blasting it around the state and we had people all over New York sign on. We thought, “My goodness, people are going to listen to us! They’re going to listen because we’re principals, and a lot of us are good principals at excellent schools.” I thought, “I’m sixty years old, what do I have to lose?” We thought that that would make our voice powerful. What we got, essentially, was the hand. The commissioner never responded to us, ever. The Board of Regents never responded to it. We sent it to the governor’s office. The governor was furious with what we were doing, and he actually accelerated the APPR process. It was unbelievable. We got to a point where we had over a third of all the principals signing that particular letter. We would have had many more, except that an extremely large number of principals are in New York City and it was still the Bloomberg days. They were afraid.

  JH: Were you worried about consequences?

  CB: Did I feel any fear?

  JH: Yeah, were you worried when you guys sat down to draft the letter that there might be consequences against you for launching this campaign?

  CB: I think some were, but I didn’t care. It was right—it was the right thing to do, and I felt at the time, even if something happened to me and I had to leave my job, I was prepared to do that.

  JH: Wow.

  CB: And I would have gone into early retirement. I figured out it would have cost me about $25,000 a year if I had to leave early on my pension, but it was worth it. There comes a point when you just have to stand up for what’s right and I still feel that way. I have often said that if the law required that I tell what a teacher’s score was to a parent, I would not do it. I would be brought up on charges first and let them take my license. As it turned out my district decided that it would be the district that would reveal the score, and interestingly enough—this is so interesting, Jesse—not one parent in our district has requested a teacher’s score.

  JH: I bet that’s right . . . your resistance is making the hair stand up on the back of my neck because it sounds just like the place that the teachers at Garfield reached, where every threat that was leveled against us only emboldened us more because we knew what we were doing was right, and we weren’t alone and others felt the same. Right on. That brings me to the fact that your protest was described by the New York Times as the first principal revolt in history and I wonder what you think the role of administrators should be in this growing national movement against high-stakes, standardized testing?

  CB: I think that they need to be stronger. I think that the principals were admirable in the stand that they took. However, I think that there’s a lot more that more people can do. I think that superintendents could stand taller. You find a lot of people who in private will tell you that all of these things are so wrong, so very wrong, but publicly they won’t say it. I’m very proud of my superintendent, who has been terrific and who has been a real leader with this and who respects the parents’ right to have their children refuse the test. He doesn’t encourage it, but if a parent makes that decision, he respects that right, as opposed to some of his colleagues who are very punitive. We have superintendents in New York, for example, who are not allowing children who refuse the test to be on the honor roll.

  JH: Wow. I wonder, from the superintendent on up to Arne Duncan, to Bill Gates, why are they attacking us so much in public education? What’s your view on why all this test-and-punish legislation is coming down on us?

  CB: I think that a lot of what motivates Arne Duncan is that there is a group of people, the Democrats for Educational Reform, who were very generous to Barack Obama during the election. He was part of that group and I think that philosophically he believes this is the right thing to do. They think that kids are for the most part victims of poor teaching. They will not acknowledge the role that poverty plays, nor do they acknowledge the role that student motivation plays. We don’t talk about this anymore, right? The kid who just says, “I’m not doing it.” That kid is out there—he is in every school. I believe reformer see students as the victims of their teachers, and they believe that if they punish schools enough and they punish teachers enough, that that will change. I think they’re wrong and I think that thinking is foolish and destructive. I don’t think that Mr. Duncan has an adequate background and understanding in education to really have the right perspective, nor do I believe he should even be in the position he is. I don’t think that he’s qualified for that position. I don’t think running the Chicago Public Schools for a couple of years as CEO (and not a particularly effective one) qualifies you for that position. He does not have a teaching license. He doesn’t even have a masters degree. I think that he views this more from a political perspective. The statement that he made that white suburban moms oppose the Common Core because they think that their children are geniuses was outrageous, outrageous.

  JH: It shows a clear lack of understanding of the educational process.

  CB: I think Bill Gates may be well-meaning, but he does not understand all of the issues in education, even though he believes that he does. He wants to have his will, his research, and his vision transform education in the United States. He has all the money, and I really wish he would focus his reform on something else, maybe a more effective traffic light system. You don’t want him messing in health care because that can have dire consequences. I don’t think his support for these reforms is helpful at all. It is one thing to give the research community money to answer questions. It is quite another to push an agenda. That is ego.

  JH: I wanted to get at the bigger question of what you think the role of education should be in our society and what type of assessments do you think would help us meet that vision for the purpose of education.

  CB: Well, I think that, for one thing, we need to put our focus not on worrying about the test outcomes, what we commonly refer to as the “achievement gap,” and start to focus on the “opportunity gap.” There was a wonderful book that was edited by my friend Kevin Welner and his colleague Prudence Carter; you can find it online at the National Education Policy Center. If we worry about closing those opportunity gaps, I think the scores are going to follow.

  We have to understand, this is slow and difficult work. Education doesn’t get transformed over night. The transformations that we’ve made in my high school, which is a far better place than it was twenty years ago, took time. It’s been a slow, deliberate
process of working hard, of getting kids support, of looking at what it is that we do to maintain progress, and then moving forward. We managed to de-track our high school—if you know anything about tracking and de-tracking, you know de-tracking is one of the hardest reforms you can do. There has to be an acknowledgment that what we do, it’s not going to be a miracle overnight, which is what they’re hoping to do.

  The kinds of assessments that we need for kids are child-centered assessments: assessments that inform curriculum, that identify places where kids still need to learn and grow, and that also give an accurate reading of what it is that the child is able to do. When we start to move away from those child-centered purposes of assessment and instead start to focus on the other purposes—closing schools, evaluating teachers—we lose our focus. Those grades four and eight tests, when they first came out, teachers could see the test. (Up until about 2010 in New York we could see the tests.) That was so helpful. We could really understand what kids were not understanding. Now that everything is hidden and closed and you can’t see the tests, those assessments have lost their instructional power. We have to get back to the idea of why we assess kids to begin with and that that purpose is to help the child grow and to make us better teachers. This is not doing it. It’s not.

  I love the assessments of the International Baccalaureate. We use them. They exist not to figure out what a kid doesn’t know but to let a kid show what they do know. Many of them are scored by the teachers. The IB has good checks to make sure that they’re being assessed fairly and with validity. They are interspersed throughout the curriculum. They’re a natural part of the teaching and learning process. For example, there are papers that kids write over the course of two years. There are oral presentations that are part of it. There’s a portfolio in art, with kids reflecting on their work. They really are model assessments, and if we had assessments like that and we did not use them for high-stakes purposes, we would just be in such a better place.