More Than a Score (20 page)

As an act of conscience, we are declining the role of test administrators for the 2014 New York State Common Core Tests. We are acting in solidarity with countless public school teachers who have paved their own paths of resistance and spoken truthfully about the decay of their profession under market-based reforms. These acts of conscience have been necessary because we are accountable to the children we teach and our pedagogy, both of which are dishonored daily by current policies.

The policies of Common Core have been misguided, unworkable, and a serious failure of implementation. At no time in the history of education reform have we witnessed the ideological ambitions of policy makers result in such a profound disconnect with the experiences of parents, teachers, and children. There is a growing movement of dissatisfied parents who are refusing high-stakes Common Core testing for their children and we are acting in solidarity with those parents. Reformers in the state department of education are now making gestures to slow down implementation and reform their reforms. Their efforts represent a failure of imagination—an inability to envision an education system based on human development and democratic ideals rather than an allegiance to standardization, ranking, and sorting. State policies have placed haphazard and burdensome mandates on schools that are profoundly out of touch with what we know to be inspired teaching and learning. Although the case against market-based education reform has been thoroughly written about, we feel obliged to outline our position at length to address critics who may see our choice of action as overstepping or unwarranted. You will find a position paper attached to this letter. We are urging you, Chancellor Fariña, to articulate your own position in this critical and defining moment in the history of public education. What will you stand for? What public school legacy will we forge together?

 

Sincerely,

Colin Schumacher, Fourth/Fifth Grade Teacher, PS 364, Earth School

Emmy Matias, Fourth/Fifth Grade Teacher, PS 364, Earth School

Jia Lee, Fourth/Fifth Grade Teacher, PS 364, Earth School

ICE the ISAT

Boycotting the Test Under Mayor Rahm Emanuel's Regime

It was testing day. I had just read the directions, which instructed my students to fill in the bubble of the letter that corresponds to the best answer choice and the students had dutifully began reading passages and darkly shading bubbles with their number-two pencils. All the students had begun except for one of my eleven-year-old boys at the end of the row of desks, who had stalled and was slouched over his test booklet. I watched as he plucked out his black eyelashes one by one, agonizing over a standardized test that would determine, in part, my efficacy as teacher and contribute to the overall rating of our school. In that moment, I thought to myself,
This over-testing is child abuse
. I cannot inflict this mental and emotional harm on one more student. That's when the word “boycott” first flashed across my mind. This is the story of how an emotion became a movement in which the parents, students, and teachers of Maria Saucedo Scholastic Academy organized to reclaim the classroom and demand that students are more than a test score.

Boycotts do not just happen—they are organized. The testing boycott at my school was strategically planned with a multifaceted approach that included teacher, parent, and student support. Although the planning and implementation of this strategy occurred in a one-month span, the agitation around over-testing and employee power in the school organizational structure was built over a couple of years.

Saucedo Academy is a large public elementary school on the southwest side of Chicago, with a dense immigrant population and a high percentage of students from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds. Because Saucedo is an academy, our students must apply and are accepted through a lottery system. Saucedo is a Level 1 school with some of the highest test scores in the area. The intention of this boycott was not to remove tests that “lowered our school's level,” but was instead motivated by much larger goals.

Over the past several years, handfuls of parents across the city had already opted their students out of various assessments by writing letters and meeting with their children's principals. Chicago-based More Than a Score is one parent advocacy group spreading the “opt-out gospel,” and began by hosting forums with parents addressing the problems with high-stakes standardized assessments and explaining how to opt out one's child from a standardized test. Several colleagues and I began going to their forums to learn how to share the concept of opting out with more parents.

Previously within the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) and the social justice caucus within the union, CORE (Caucus of Rank and File Educators, union caucus), we had discussed the many ways over-testing was damaging education but hadn't spoken of concrete steps and strategies to combat these tests as teachers. We brought More Than a Score's fliers on over-testing and opt-out letter templates to CORE's monthly meeting. CORE's testing committee also created a boycott checklist/timeline that included the steps necessary to lead to a successful boycott and massive opt-out of a test (see the checklist/timeline on the following page). During this CORE meeting, the members of the CORE testing committee presented a strategy to spread the opt-out movement to schools throughout the city. We explained that for a school to organize for a teacher boycott, they must simultaneously organize a schoolwide student opt-out campaign. CORE members brought thousands of letters to their own schools and nearby schools that had a growing testing resistance movement.

At Saucedo Academy, we hosted our own information sessions for parents on high-stakes testing and how to opt their children out before passing out the opt-out information. The parents were shocked by the number of tests and by the amount of instructional time lost, which most schools rarely publicize. Parents asked many questions and were disturbed to learn the spring 2014 Illinois Standards Achievement Test (ISAT), which would take away one to two weeks of instruction time, was already being phased out and was no longer even tied to the same high stakes of promotion and school leveling for which it had been originally created. Families quickly embraced the idea of opting out of this exam.

The most effective strategy for educating parents on an issue is to have other parents, rather than teachers, discuss with them. Parents place the greatest trust in other parents, especially parent leaders, because they know that they have the same interests in mind. At our information session, we identified a number of parent leaders who were especially eager to take on the ISAT. Before long, these parents were leading their own information sessions. Soon, students began to lead meetings as well, educating their parents and peers about high-stakes testing and the opt-out process. We continued to have these sessions four to five times at various locations before and during the boycott. These sessions not only helped build toward the boycott but also continued through the boycott itself, helping to correct misinformation.

In addition to group information sessions, one-on-one meetings were important for building support around the idea of a boycott with faculty. During these meetings, I spoke with teachers before and after school, during lunch and in passing about the opt-out movement nationally and locally, as well as the “big picture implications” of over-testing, such as the firing/layoffs of quality experienced teachers, public school closures, and the agenda to privatize our school system. Sprinkled in these discussions was the word “boycott.” Up to this point, it was still too early to fully discuss a boycott of a test, but I wanted to plant the seed in people's minds, especially among some of the most respected teacher-leaders in the school. Through our staffwide personal email listserv, I sent articles on over-testing and issues with the Common Core State Standards and dates of informational sessions and panels led by organizations, such as More Than a Score, against excessive testing and guided parents and teachers on how to opt out children.

In Chicago, unlike every other school district but one in Illinois, the board of education is appointed by our mayor instead of being democratically elected by the residents of the district. Mayor Rahm Emanuel's board of education has controlled the schools with an iron fist, laying off experienced teachers, slashing budgets, and enforcing strict discipline on teachers. Because of these conditions, I knew that we had to have a tight strategy to opt out as many students as possible in a short period of time if we were going to be able to challenge the mayor's education policy. Two weeks before the ISAT was supposed to be administered, I prepared a union meeting at Saucedo to launch a massive opt-out campaign. We made copies of the opt-out flyer and template for each Saucedo student from third through eighth grade. I knew the stakes were high for this effort—if CPS got wind of such a massive opt-out operation, they would try to swiftly shut down all opt outs at our school and across the city.

At the union meeting, we had a discussion about the implications and logistics of a massive schoolwide opt-out of the ISAT exam. One of the major obstacles to disseminating information about opting out is political. We took precautions to ensure that no teacher was passing out “political materials” while on the clock. We were all to pass out the opt-out fliers and templates before or after school by picking up our class five minutes early or dropping them off five minutes late. The teachers told their students to return the opt-out letters to their homeroom teachers rather than to the administration so that the administration wouldn't catch wind of the campaign. With the signed letters in their hands, teachers could make copies and turn them all in on the same day. This also protected the student in case the letter happened to be “lost” by administration.

Once the students received the letter templates, opting out spread like wildfire. Almost the entire student body did not want to take this tedious standardized test, so they urged their parents to opt them out. Within a week, we had around 50 percent of the students at our own school opting out of the ISAT exam. We set a date to turn all the opt-out letters in to the counselors. By then, the administration at Saucedo already knew about it. At that point, they were not opposed to students opting out because the CPS central office hadn't threatened their careers and force-fed them lies about loss of school funding.

A week before the test, over half of our students were opted out of the ISAT. This was a great start, but at this point the other half of the school was still officially required to take the test. The missing opt-out forms were unsigned in part because many parents working multiple jobs couldn't attend an informational session and, therefore, were probably wary of signing the opt-out papers for a test that their children had taken for years. Because these students did not have signed forms to opt out of the ISAT, teacher leaders and I began to talk to teams more seriously about boycotting the administration of the exam so that not a single student at our school would be subjected to the test. In our professional opinions, the ISAT would provide us with no information that would inform our instruction, robbed our students of two weeks of instructional time, and belittled the intellects of our students, whose multifaceted skills cannot be measured by the process of eliminating wrong-answer choices. We also believed that beyond Saucedo, the test was not useful for students at any school and we knew that without the attention to the abuses of high-stakes testing that a teacher boycott would generate, the opt-out movement would fail to spread to other schools. The only way to launch this dialogue against over-testing and to strike a blow against the privatization agenda was to boycott the test. And that is exactly what we did.