More Than a Score (43 page)

As I sat and listened to the state senator brazenly proclaim that the newer, harder, longer, more expensive test was coming whether the educators approved or not, I decided to do something rash. I still lose sleep over what I've done from time to time. After the “Alamo Letter” hit Facebook, a friend said, “That might not have been the best thing you could've done for your career.” I nodded. “You may be right,” I said. But maybe it was the best thing I could've done for my kids.

I was soon gratified to learn that I was not alone. A school board member had started a movement called “Make Education a Priority” months before I took my stand. A group of superintendents would unveil a resolution opposing over-testing, which would be adopted by almost nine hundred school districts in Texas and would spawn a similar national resolution. And a group of Lone Star moms would unite to form the organization Texans Advocating for Meaningful Student Assessment—better known as Mothers Against Drunk Testing—dedicated to the elimination of “over-testing and under-investing in Texas students.”

We would have something of a victory in Texas. The fifteen STAAR tests required for graduation would be reduced to five during the next legislative session. The state's speaker of the House would begin the session by declaring “To parents and educators concerned about excessive testing, the Texas House has heard you.” Pearson lobbyists would be prohibited by law from serving on the committees that designed accountability. Legislation would be passed to reduce elementary testing and to permit a group of school districts the freedom to use an educator-developed alternative accountability system, though the governor would veto it. During the process, some of the staunchest advocates for more and more testing would be forced to confront the truth—they had lost the support of the people.

When I said what I said, and when I wrote what I wrote—when I did what I thought was right regardless of the consequences—I wasn't sure how it would turn out for me. (To be honest, I'm still not sure.) Superintendents don't tend to last very long in their roles anyway—it's probably not smart for us to go around poking at hornets' nests. But for a moment, I let emotion and passion trump rational self-interest. And I'm glad I did. I discovered a whole army of people in my home state who, like me, had seen the corrosive effects of over-testing and our nation's now conventional hyper-punitive education policy, and who were already doing something about it. I wouldn't have known they were even there if I hadn't spoken up.

In the end, the senator whose casual dismissiveness sparked my fire was wrong. Standardized testing in Texas was negotiable; in fact, it was highly negotiable. Powerful people wanted to set the rules, but the rest of us suddenly stopped agreeing to play by those rules. In Texas between 2011 and 2013, the “little people”—parents, teachers, and students—marched, spoke, wrote, resolved, organized, tweeted, testified, advocated, agitated, and drafted model legislation. Most importantly of all, they—we—changed the game!

Building the Movement Against
High-Stakes Testing

In spring 2013, parents, students, educators, community activists, and local elected officials across the nation rose in opposition to the overuse and misuse of standardized tests. This public eruption shows every sign of growing in intensity and reach. My organization, the National Center for Fair & Open Testing (FairTest), has joined with other groups to launch a “Testing Resistance and Reform Spring” initiative to advance this movement.

FairTest has been fighting
against
high-stakes testing and
for
educationally beneficial assessments for nearly thirty years. While growing numbers of colleges have adopted test-score-optional admissions policies, standardized exams and test preparation have metastasized and taken over public school classrooms. In this environment, teachers increasingly say they can no longer provide students with a meaningful or engaging education. The growing resistance could produce a social movement to reverse this damage. It is still embryonic, however, with far to go before it can win the changes our children and our society need.

The Testing Explosion

I started working with FairTest in 1987. Among my initial tasks was to collaborate on a report,
Fallout from the Testing Explosion:
How 100 Million Standardized Exams Undermine Equity and Excellence in America's Public Schools
, which explored the expansion of standardized testing. In particular, the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) mandated testing children in Title I programs with norm-referenced tests (NRT) in reading and math, a practice many schools applied to all students. Back then, sixteen states, mostly those with large percentages of African American and Latino children, imposed high school graduation exams. IQ tests were misused to place students in classes for the “educable mentally retarded” and achievement tests were misused for tracking and occasionally for grade promotion (particularly in large cities with many students of color).
Fallout
examined a range of harmful consequences, including racial and class discrimination. It also looked at educational damage to curriculum and instruction when states, districts, and schools used tests to make important educational decisions. FairTest's goal was then—and remains today—to roll back the amount of testing and end high-stakes uses, as well as to promote fair, educationally beneficial student assessment.

By the mid-1990s, our goal seemed increasingly in sight. A 1994 federal revision of ESEA dropped the NRT requirement and instead required states to test children in reading and math just once in each of three grade spans. While schools were supposed to demonstrate progress, the law contained no specific targets or sanctions. After another group of states briefly adopted graduation exams early in the 1990s, that tide receded from a high of nearly twenty-five states back to sixteen. Perhaps most significantly, the public conversation and some classroom practice shifted to authentic assessments such as portfolios, performance tasks, projects, and observations. For a few years, reformers were ascendant, diminishing the extent and importance of standardized tests and advancing high-quality assessment that could enrich learning.

Sadly, that tide quickly turned under pressure from business leaders and politicians who wanted to appear “tough on accountability.” By the late 1990s, the mantra of “assessments worth teaching to” became “this ‘new,' high-stakes standardized exam is the test worth teaching to.” States and districts began to use student scores to rate and then to punish or close schools. More states adopted high school exit exams, with tens of thousands additional students denied diplomas each year. Despite including a few open-ended questions, the exams still failed to assess most of the knowledge, skills, and traits students actually needed. Simultaneously, the nation was backing away from addressing poverty, segregation, and school underfunding, the primary causes of low test scores and graduation rates.

A joint Republican-Democrat initiative, modeled on George W. Bush's fraudulent “Texas miracle,” brought high-stakes standardized testing to the national stage with a vengeance. The federal No Child Left Behind Act—the 2001 version of ESEA—mandated testing all children in grades three to eight and once in high school with state math and reading exams. The results were to be used to punish schools that failed to make “adequate yearly progress” toward the clearly impossible goal that all students would score “proficient” by 2014. The threat of severe sanctions produced fearful compliance among all levels of educators. As FairTest and many others have documented, the “fallout” from the most recent testing explosion has been profoundly damaging, including:

• narrowing curriculum and instruction by focusing teaching on educationally inadequate tests and emphasizing test preparation;

• massively expanding the use of “benchmark,” “interim,” and assorted mini-tests to tie teaching ever more closely to high-stakes exams;

• increasing the use of grade promotion and graduation tests, which are once again found in half the states, including those where nearly 80 percent of African American and Latino students live;

• reducing professional development and educator collaboration to a focus on how teachers can more effectively boost test scores; and

• creating “zero tolerance” disciplinary pretexts to remove low-scoring children from the testing pool, bringing push outs to record highs and feeding the “school-to-prison pipeline.”

Although Barack Obama criticized over-testing in his first presidential campaign, he appointed former Chicago schools chief Arne Duncan, a proponent of test-based accountability, to head the department of education. Duncan installed a like-minded coterie from organizations such as the Gates Foundation to senior policy-making positions. Duncan acknowledged that NCLB was not working. But he did not abandon its test-and-punish approach. Instead, he used Race to the Top (RttT) economic stimulus funds and then NCLB waivers to increase testing, mainly by requiring states to use student scores to judge teachers. These policies also shifted the primary focus of sanctions from schools to teachers, except for the lowest scoring schools, which suffer both kinds of punishments.

The administration also allocated RttT funding to launch two Common Core State Standards (CCSS) testing consortia, in which most states participate. An alliance of states produced the English Language Arts and Mathematics standards with substantial federal funding plus foundation and corporate support. The federal government also bribed states to adopt Common Core standards by linking new standards to winning RttT grants and the NCLB waivers. The tests are intended to measure and, in effect, enforce the standards. This will further centralize testing's domination over curriculum and instruction. Meanwhile, use of interim tests to get students ready for high-stakes exams continues to explode. Some districts administer as many as thirty standardized tests annually in a single grade, a practice reaching down to kindergarten.

The law deemed the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading and math tests to be the primary indicator of NCLB's long-term, national success. Rather than accelerate toward 100 percent proficiency, the rate of improvement on NAEP has slowed and even stalled in all tested grades, in both reading and math, for almost all demographic groups. High-stakes testing has clearly failed by its primary measure, while causing massive collateral damage to genuine teaching and learning. Yet test proponents have used vast funding from major foundations and corporations along with extensive support from mainstream media to keep pushing for ever more testing, with ever stronger sanctions.

The Resistance

In the spring of 2013, parent, student, and teacher resistance to the overuse and misuse of standardized tests erupted on the national stage. FairTest has worked to support, promote, and strengthen this emerging movement. The resistance to high-stakes testing is growing rapidly in 2014, reaching new locales, while groups active in 2013 continue to build their capacity to advance the struggle.

Protest actions have included boycotts and “opt-outs,” demonstrations and public events, community forums, petitions, extensive use of social media, news conferences, meetings with officials, and a strong legislative push in a few states. Activists garnered community support and often sympathetic media coverage. As a result, they built a larger, stronger movement and won some significant victories.

Students walked out of schools in Seattle, Portland, Oregon, Denver, Chicago, and New York. Seattle teachers in several high schools boycotted one test, called the Measures of Academic Progress, or MAP. When district officials then tried to administer the tests at Garfield High, most students, backed by their parents and community and civil rights groups, refused to take it. In New York, an estimated twenty-five hundred students and their parents boycotted the annual, NCLB-required state exams on Long Island. So did students at forty schools in New York City and many more in upstate New York.