More Than a Score (8 page)

One of the biggest boosts to our movement came when the Garfield High School Parent Teacher Student Association (PTSA) board voted unanimously to support the MAP boycott. Garfield's PTSA president, Philip Sherburne, an attorney and participant in the civil rights movement, was a strong supporter. In his statement, he wrote,

The real issue is what the school district is going to do, starting early in a student's educational life, to help as many students as possible perform at grade level. Students should not be entering high school unprepared to do ninth-grade work. A major effort to get students to grade-level performance and to keep them there through graduation requires a level of focus and an investment of resources that we have not seen from the District or the Legislature. It is this focus on improving student achievement and providing the resources to accomplish it that deserves all our attention.

Sherburne refused to let anyone mischaracterize our movement as one of teachers who did not want to be held accountable. He made it clear the teachers and parents of Garfield were not against assessing our students, only that we needed better assessments that were not wasting precious resources and time.

The next important step was that the boycott spread to other schools in the district. In some instances educators heard of our actions in the news and organized their own schools to participate. In others, organizers in the rank-and-file education justice organization, the Social Equality Educators (SEE), played a critical role in helping the boycott spread. We now felt the power of a growing uprising. At the urging of fourth-grade teacher Matt Carter, Orca, with grades K–8, became the second school to join the boycott, quickly followed by Chief Sealth High School and Ballard High School. Later during the spring round of testing, the Center School and Thornton Creek Elementary actively joined the boycott.

The task of organizing the boycott grew immense as we set about organizing rallies, spreading the boycott to additional schools, making alliances with community groups, issuing press releases, conducting interviews, writing op-eds, communicating with the school district, consulting with parents, and even holding staff events like “Bulldog Bowling Night” to keep up morale. At one all-staff meeting in the week after announcing the boycott, Garfield elected a steering committee for the boycott: Kris McBride, Jessica Griffin (math teacher), Mallory Clarke, Kit McCormick, and myself. Mallory and I then represented Garfield at the all-city MAP Boycott Coordinating Council that comprised educator representatives from the various participating schools.

Forces were amassing on the other side, too. Twice in January,
Seattle Times
editorialists railed against teachers for refusing the MAP and called on Superintendent Banda to be firm with us. The many education reform groups funded by the Gates Foundation were no doubt explaining to the superintendent the importance of disciplining those who would attempt to crumble the standardized testing edifice.

The pressure on the school district was clearly intense. In an effort to halt the spread of the boycott, the superintendent issued a statement on January 22 to principals instructing them to hold mandatory staff meetings to inform teachers of the potential of a ten-day suspension without pay for refusing to administer the MAP test. However, by then, a remarkable transformation had occurred that could not be undone any more than a butterfly can turn back into a chrysalis: the faculty at Garfield High School had lost its fear. At this point, every threat only emboldened educators who knew that any sanction visited upon the boycotting teachers would be met with overwhelming opposition from thousands of supporters.

When these bullying tactics only strengthened the resolve of teachers, Superintendent Banda issued a new directive to school principals, mandating that they begin overseeing the MAP test themselves if teachers wouldn't cooperate. This tactic was particularly insidious, as it was designed to turn administrators against teachers. The divide-and-conquer tactic, however, fell on its face. Both sides knew the relationship between the administration and the teachers were critical for the high functioning of our school, not to mention the success of the boycott.

On the day of the “test or else” decree, Seattle's superintendent came to Garfield with two other district officials to meet for a second and final time with the five of us on the steering committee. Kris McBride served as point person for this meeting and began by welcoming Mr. Banda to Garfield and thanking him for his time. I was truly awed by Kris's composure. She was responsible for administering the MAP at Garfield—and likely the most vulnerable to district charges of insubordination—and yet she looked these officials squarely in the eye, shook their hands, and spoke with an evenness that belied any uncertainties she may have had.

After a quick exchange of pleasantries, we got down to business. The superintendent told us his visit to our school represented a good-faith effort to start a dialogue with teachers. He told us that many teachers in Seattle used the MAP test and found it useful. He explained that in schools where the teachers took the test seriously, the kids did too, and the results were therefore more beneficial. He also told us that the best way to handle this situation was for teachers to participate in a newly formed district task force that would evaluate the MAP test and release a recommendation in the spring. Until then, he recommended we continue administering the MAP and revisit the question in the spring.

When he finished, our team of highly trained educators used our pedagogical expertise in an attempt to explain why the MAP test was an inappropriate instrument for assessing our students. We knew Superintendent Banda was not responsible for selecting or purchasing the MAP test for Seattle, and as the new leader of our school district, we understood he probably was not fully aware of the sordid history and many shortcomings of this exam. We truly hoped our lesson plan for that meeting would help scaffold an understanding of why he should “scrap the MAP,” as our rally chant went.

Jessica Griffin began our lesson by explaining how the MAP was not aligned to her curriculum and tested students on concepts she had not taught because they were beyond the scope of the course. Utilizing her mathematical expertise, Jessica then explained what it meant that the MAP had a higher margin of error than expected gains at the high school level: it rendered the test statistically invalid. She then checked for understanding by asking what the superintendent's team thought of her criticisms of the test. There was no response. Mallory, whose PhD in education focused on the literacy of urban youth, explained the value of the formative reading skills assessment she used instead of the MAP. She voiced the critical insight that even if MAP data were a useful diagnostic tool, teachers do not receive any more resources to help the students who demonstrate deficiencies.

Mr. Banda diligently inscribed our objections to the test on his yellow legal pad, yet neither he nor the two district officials flanking him had a single direct response to any of our critiques. At this point, I realized our visitors were not really engaging with the “lesson” we had prepared on quality assessment, and if this class period were going to be salvaged, our only hope was to employ an old teacher trick: the attention grabber. “Respectfully, you are at a critical moment in your career,” I said.

You are new to this district and the decision you make in the next twenty-four hours will have a profound effect on your legacy in this school district. If you decide to carry out your plan to require administrators to remove students from our classrooms and take them to the computer lab, you will have made your choice to side with the corporate education reformers, some of the wealthiest people the world has ever known. They want the public schools to use standardized testing to evaluate teachers. Or you can cancel that plan and decide to stand with the unanimous vote of the teachers of Garfield High School, the unanimous vote of the student body government of Garfield High School, and the unanimous vote of the PTSA of Garfield High School.

I noticed as I spoke that Superintendent Banda rolled his pen back and forth between his thumb and pointer finger with an increasing pressure that slowed its revolution, no doubt a technique he employed to decelerate his rising temper. Under normal circumstances I am opposed to extrinsic motivators in education and I am a very strong proponent of fostering intrinsic motivation, but at that moment I got desperate and made this offer: “If you side with us, when CNN comes to interview us for our national day of action in support of the boycott, we would be proud to say that we have a real educational leader here in Seattle.” Those words brought the meeting to a quick close as Mr. Banda thanked us for our time and moved to principal Ted Howard's office for a closed-door meeting.

From the beginning, the Garfield High School faculty had been impressed with Principal Howard's thoughtful approach to the boycott and his true understanding of our concerns. We also knew that he and other administrators were under immense pressure from the school district to make the boycott end. We hoped that behind that door plans were not being made to sanction any of us, but our true fear was that the school district had found the Achilles' heel of our effort and would successfully circumvent our boycott. If the MAP were successfully given to students by the administration, the lesson people would draw around the country would be that you can attempt to boycott a test, but in the end the test-pushers are too powerful.

At this point, if the boycott were to succeed, students—with the support of their parents—would have to go beyond a vote of support and become active participants. It was then that our social movement really caught fire. I had only read and taught about these moments in history, but I'd never experienced one myself. My parents had talked about their involvement in protesting the US war in Vietnam, the civil rights movement, and working to end apartheid in South Africa, but I had often wondered if I would be limited to teaching about mass struggles rather than participating in one.

Students, on their own initiative, produced a flyer that declared their right to refuse to take the test. Juniors and seniors—even those with the well-documented and seriously debilitating disease known as “senioritis”—got to school early and distributed the broadside to their younger classmates as they arrived. The PTSA simultaneously notified parents of their right to opt children out of the test. Emails were sent, phone calls were made, and the very day after our meeting with the superintendent, dozens of parents sent opt-out letters in opposition to the misuse and overuse of standardized testing.

Coerced administrators, however reluctantly, entered classrooms to read off lists of students who were to accompany them to the library to take the MAP, some for the second time this year (the third round of testing was scheduled for spring). Many students refused to leave their seats. They were enacting a sit-in in their own classrooms, exercising the right to refuse to be reduced to a test score. Other students marched off to the computer lab, only to express their creative defiance by repeatedly hitting the “A” key, completing the test in mere seconds and thus rendering their test scores invalid.

Suspend the Test, Not the Teachers

In the midst of this collective defiance we organized a national day of action to support Seattle's MAP test boycott on February 6, 2013. We were overwhelmed by the show of solidarity. The Seattle NAACP held a press conference in solidarity with the MAP boycott, and James Bible, then the Seattle/King County president of the NAACP, joined rallying Garfield teachers to proclaim that the MAP test was part of exacerbating racial disparities because of its use as the gatekeeper to the advanced placement program that enrolled white students disproportionately as compared with students of color. Teachers at Berkeley High School in California held a lunchtime rally to support the MAP boycott and to speak out against the abuses of standardized testing. In Chicago, a parent organization called More Than a Score marked the day of action by petitioning parents at some thirty different schools to opt their children out of standardized tests. The student unions of Portland held a press conference to express their solidarity with the MAP boycott and assert the right of students to refuse to take standardized exams. Letters of solidarity and pictures of teachers who had assembled with “Scrap the MAP” signs came flooding in from around the nation. The presidents of the nation's two major teachers' unions, Denis Van Rokel of the National Education Association and Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers, sent letters in support of our boycott. I never felt so proud to be a union member. In concert with our day of action, we organized a mass email and phone call campaign to demand the Seattle School District “suspend the test, not the teachers”—and the superintendent's office was so flooded with calls that the greeting message for the district had to be changed to direct people to a newly created voicemail account for those callers with “questions about MAP testing.”

Education Spring

After successfully boycotting the MAP test in the winter, we had to gear up for another boycott during the third round of testing in the spring. If the district sensed the movement was petering out, the threat of consequences would become all the more real. We redoubled our efforts.

The district's task force to review the MAP got under way with little representation by actual educators. Meanwhile, a “shadow” MAP review organization was formed, led by two great Seattle teachers, Gerardine Carroll and Liza Campbell. Their Teacher Work Group on Assessment included more than twenty teachers who developed guidelines called “Markers of Quality Assessment.” These markers defined authentic assessments as those that reflect actual student knowledge and learning, not just test-taking skills; are educational in and of themselves; are free of gender, class, and racial bias; are differentiated to meet students' needs; allow students opportunities to go back and improve; and undergo regular evaluation and revision by educators. The Teacher Work Group on Assessment concluded, “Quality assessments, at their base, must integrate with classroom curriculum, measure student growth toward standards achievement, and take the form of performance tasks. These tasks, taken as a whole, should replace the MAP because they grow from classroom work, are rigorously evaluated and respect true learning.”