More Than a Score (53 page)

 

 

Mary Cathryn Ricker
is the president of the St. Paul Federation of Teachers and the executive vice president of the American Federation of Teachers. She grew up in a family of teachers on Minnesota's Iron Range and recognizes the power of labor unions to improve peoples' lives as well as the power of good teaching and strong public schools.

 

 

Stephanie Rivera
is a student at Rutgers Graduate School of Education in New Brunswick, New Jersey. She is an educational justice activist and future social studies teacher. She blogs at
Teacher Under Construction.

 

 

Kirstin Roberts
is a preschool teacher and parent of a young child in the Chicago Public Schools. She is a proud member of the Chicago Teachers Union and the Caucus of Rank and File Educators (CORE).

 

 

Peggy Robertson
serves as president of United Opt Out. She has taught various grades from kindergarten through sixth, beginning her career in Missouri and continuing in Kansas, for a total of ten years. She earned her master's degree in English as a Second Language at Southeast Missouri State University. She currently is an instructional coach at an elementary school and devotes the rest of her time to her work at United Opt Out National. Her blog can be found at www.pegwithpen.com.

 

 

Falmata Seid
was a Black Student Union Senator at Garfield High School and a student leader in the MAP test boycott. He wrote the poem “Modern-Day Slavery” during the MAP test boycott and has performed it at press conferences, college campuses, and conferences around the Northwest. Falmata is currently attending Washington State University.

 

 

Tim Shea
was a seventeen-year-old senior at Classical High School during the time of writing. After realizing how many hours of his education he had wasted taking standardized tests, he joined the Providence Student Union and was a member of its Citywide Leadership Team. When not fighting for student rights, he enjoyed either catching or receiving on Classical's varsity baseball and football teams. Tim is currently a student at Harvard University.

 

 

Phyllis Tashlik
was an English teacher for more than thirty years in the New York City public schools. As part of her work for the New York Performance Standards Consortium, she has served as director of the Center for Inquiry for Teaching and Learning, the consortium's professional development center. She has authored a number of books, including
Hispanic, Female and Young
,
Active Voices II
, and
Back to the Books
,
with Ann Cook
.

 

 

Dao X. Tran,
a product of the Philadelphia public school system from kindergarten through twelfth grade, is an editor based in New York City, where she lives with her daughter. Dao coedited
101 Changemakers: Rebels and Radicals Who Changed US History
(Haymarket, 2012) with Michele Bollinger and is working on the Teacher Oral History Project. She served as co-chair of the Castle Bridge School PTA in 2013–14. 

NOTES

 

Preface

1
. Rebecca Klein, “Joey Furlong, Fourth Grade Student, Asked to Take State Test While in the Hospital,”
Huffington Post
, May 1, 2013, www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/01/joey-furlong-state-test-hospital-new-york_n_3193933.html.

2
. Howard Nelson,
Testing More, Teaching Less: What America's Obsession with Student Testing Costs in Money and Lost Instructional Time
(Washington, DC: American Federation of Teachers, 2013), http://www.aft.org/pdfs/teachers/testingmore2013.pdf.

3
. As of this writing, Rhee has stepped down from the active leadership of StudentsFirst, though she remains on the board of directors. Many critics view Rhee's move away from the organization she founded as a retreat on the part of the corporate education reform forces that she represents.

4
. Dean Paton, “The Myth Behind Public School Failure,”
Yes!
, February 21, 2014, http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/education-uprising/the-myth-behind-public-school-failure.

5
. “Infographic: Why Corporations Want Our Public Schools,”
Yes!
, February 21, 2014, accessed July 28, 2014, http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/education-uprising/why-corporations-want-our-public-schools.

6
. Walter F. Roche Jr., “Bush's Family Profits from ‘No Child' Act,”
Los Angeles Times
, October 22, 2006, http://articles.latimes.com/2006/oct/22/nation/na-ignite22.

7
. Alfie Kohn,
The Case Against Standardized Testing: Raising the Scores, Ruining the Schools
(Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2000), 63.

8
. Chicago Teachers Union, “Resolution to Oppose the Common Core State Standards,” May 7, 2014, http://www.ctunet.com/blog/chicago-teachers-union-joins-opposition-to-common-core.

9
. Lydia Ann Stern, “More Area Parents Are Taking Children Out of Standardized Tests,”
York Daily Record
, April 14, 2014, http://www.ydr.com/local/ci_25558877/more-area-parents-are-taking-children-out-standardized; Lisa Guisbond, “Testing Reform Victories: The First Wave,” a report for the National Center for Fair & Open Testing, September 2014, http://www.fairtest.org/sites/default/files/TestingReformVictoriesReport.pdf; PDK/Gallup Poll, “Public's Attitudes Toward the Public Schools,” October 2014, http://pdkpoll.pdkintl.org/october.

10
. Kohn,
Case Against Standardized Testing
, 14.