More Than a Score (7 page)

I called the conference to order with our school's salutation, “Welcome to the Doghouse”—an allusion to our fearless purple-and-white mascot, the Bulldog. Then I heard myself stammer out a brief script I had hastily thrown together between signing permission slips and heating up mac and cheese on my lunch break. I tried to explain to the assembled guests how we had attempted everything we could think of before taking this drastic measure. In 2010, I helped pass a union resolution, introduced by Ballard High School teacher Noam Gundle, condemning the MAP test (then new to Seattle) as inappropriate for rating either teaching or learning. Teachers had provided survey information to the school district informing them of the inadequacy of the exam. We tried asking for an audience with the superintendent about our opposition to the MAP.

“And so . . . ” I paused, tugging at the purple baseball cap embroidered with a white “G” I had earned playing baseball at Garfield back when I was a student there myself. In those days, hitting line drives was the only validating aspect of school for me, as my standardized test scores had me convinced I was not an intelligent person. “The teachers at Garfield High School have voted unanimously to refuse to administer the MAP test.”

The Vote

Several weeks before, in the days leading up to winter break in December 2012, Mallory Clarke phoned my classroom to ask me to meet with her after school. Mallory is Garfield's reading specialist, heading the Read Right program designed to target struggling readers and help them make great gains in literacy. As a union representative at Garfield, I am accustomed to getting calls from colleagues with questions about the Seattle Education Association (SEA) union contract or district policies, so I assumed this was something about the collective bargaining agreement. After school, I climbed the stairs to Mallory's second-floor room. Upon reaching her room, she ushered me in, shut the door, asked me to sit, and then peered over the top of the worn partition by her desk, checking to see if anyone else was within earshot. I got the feeling this was not going to be a routine review of the contract. I was somewhat bemused by her precautions, but she certainly had my attention.

Her eyes widened as she got straight to the point. “I'm not going to give the MAP test.” She said it with a delighted tone of defiance. “And there are others I have talked to as well.” My first inclination was to jump out of my seat and pump my fist. But I managed to restrain myself, replying, “Wow, that's really exciting. What can I do to help?”

Over the next couple of weeks, Mallory and others set about organizing meetings of teachers in the tested subjects to see what they thought of the MAP test and what action they might be prepared to take. I participated in several of these sessions. When asked, teachers talked of losing days of class time to the test, the test not covering the material they were teaching, finding no value in the test results, students making random keystrokes during the test administered via computer. And while teachers appreciated their students' creative approaches to sabotaging such a mind-numbing exam, they bristled at having their pedagogical performance judged with such a haphazard method.

At one gathering in my classroom we discussed ways in which the MAP test exacerbated inequality and violated our students' civil rights. Teachers expressed dismay over how special education students' Individual Education Plans (IEPs) were disregarded by this test, and how English language learners, or emergent bilinguals, were being humiliated by a test that was not linguistically or culturally appropriate. I explained that as a history teacher I did not teach a subject tested by the MAP, yet my course and my students were nonetheless greatly impacted by the exam because the school library was shut down three times a year for weeks at a time while the test was administered on the library computers. This made it difficult to assign research projects because the students could not check out books or use the computers. I found that if I assigned a research project during MAP testing, the students without Internet access at home—predominantly low-income students and students of color—were at a severe disadvantage. I also passed out an essay, “Race and the (mis)Measures of Academic Progress,” published on the
Seattle Education
blog, which I had written over a year prior to argue that the MAP test leads to the exacerbation of racial inequity because, like many standardized tests, it is used to rank and sort students into different tracks—not remove the barriers or provide the resources needed to close the opportunity gap that exists in education. Another teacher shared a document, written by Seattle Public Schools parent (and now elected school board member) Sue Peters, titled “15 Reasons Why the Seattle School District Should Shelve the MAP
®
 Test—ASAP.”
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In it, Peters noted even the Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA), the producer of the MAP, recommended against using their product to evaluate teachers.

At one meeting, Kit McCormick—a language arts teacher at Garfield revered both for her pedagogy and her humor—told us about her experience at a Seattle School District training she had been to the year prior where a district official had admitted to her that the MAP test had limited utility at the high school level as it had a higher margin of error than expected gains by the
ninth grade. Then she relayed a story that made it clear the MAP was not properly aligned to the state standards that specify what must be taught at each grade level. Kit recalls explaining to us,

After the MAP last year, one of my freshmen came and asked, “What is poetic en-jam-ent?” I asked where he had heard the term and he said it was on the MAP. He was referring to a poetic technique, “enjambment,” wherein a line of poetry travels to the next line without a pause in thought or punctuation, usually indicating either an inevitability of action or a stream-of-conscious state of mind. The term is appropriately taught at the 11th or 12th AP level when readers should be concerned with style analysis issues. At the freshman level it's probably more appropriate to ask what the controlling metaphor of the poem is.

Beloved math teacher Mario Shaunette explained that he first realized the MAP was off course when he looked over the shoulder of one of his ninth-grade algebra students and saw a geometry question, which he analogized as if a Spanish teacher were to see a French question on the exam—“Sure it's foreign language,” he said, “but it's not the same subject!”

One of our primary topics of conversation at these organizing meetings was about the possibility of facing disciplinary action. We discussed 2008 Seattle test-resisting pioneer Carl Chew, a well-known middle school teacher who on his own refused to give a state-mandated standardized test. He was suspended without pay and later pushed out of the district. We acknowledged the district could take the same action with Garfield teachers, but we also reasoned it would be harder for them if all the teachers stood together—firing whole departments would be logistically challenging, at the very least.

Once these small meetings confirmed that teachers in the tested subjects were united in opposition to the MAP test, we concluded our test boycott could only be truly effective if it were an initiative of the entire school. We then brought a proposal to boycott the MAP to an all-staff meeting and the bulk of our school's more than ninety educators assembled in the library to discuss the prospects for taking this bold course of action. I began the meeting by explaining the process. We would hold an open discussion and then take a vote. I made it clear this was a personal decision for each teacher. Each of us faced different life circumstances, and regardless of the outcome, we would all still be one Bulldog family.

Kris McBride summarized why so many teachers were opposed to the MAP. Several teachers shared stories corroborating Kris's overview. Teachers asked questions about what we would consider a valid assessment that could replace the MAP. Prepared for that question, I distributed the chapter from
Pencils Down: Rethinking High-Stakes Testing and Accountability in Public Schools
devoted to models of assessment beyond standardized tests that give educators a more holistic understanding of a student's abilities and thought processes.

Several teachers raised valid concerns about why it would be dangerous to refuse to give this test, providing personal testimony of how the district had acted punitively for far smaller transgressions of policy. These educators asked me what the consequences could be for boycotting the MAP. “If you refuse a directive, you can be labeled ‘insubordinate,'” I explained. “We have a progressive discipline policy in the Seattle Public Schools, but ultimately your job could be on the line.” Rest assured those were not the words that inspired the Garfield educators' boycott of the MAP. It was Karen Gunn, a highly respected mathematics instructor, who then rose to address the assembly. Her words sped up history: “I have something to say. This flawed test is going to label my students, and me, as failures because it isn't testing what I am teaching. I would rather be reprimanded for standing up for what I believe in than for doing nothing and letting this test take advantage of us.”

When she sat down I knew it was time to call for the vote, and as soon as I did, the hands shot up. Garfield High School's teachers voted unanimously—save a couple of abstentions—to refuse to administer the MAP. The teachers then lined up to sign their names to a letter that read in part: “We, the Garfield teachers, respectfully decline to give the MAP test to any of our students. We have had different levels of experiences with MAP in our varied careers, have read about it, and discussed it with our colleagues. After this thorough review, we have all come to the conclusion that we cannot in good conscience subject our students to this test again.” The letter then outlined our objections to the MAP, including the following points:

• Seattle School District staff admitted to a Garfield teacher that the test is not a valid at the high school level because the margin of error is higher than the expected gains.

• The test is not aligned to our curriculum.

• The MAP especially hurts students receiving extra academic support—English language learners and those enrolled in special education. These are the kids who lose the most each time they waste five hours on the test.

• Our computer labs are commandeered for weeks when the MAP is administered, so students working on research projects can't get near them. The students without home computers—predominantly low-income and students of color—are hurt the most.

• The MAP test is used in evaluating teachers. And yet the maker of the test, the Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA), says that the test should not be used to assess teachers unless many safeguards—not present in the Seattle schools—are in place to achieve the highest level of reliability.

• Former superintendent, the late Maria Goodloe-Johnson, brought the MAP to Seattle at a cost of some $4 million while she was serving on the board of the company that sells it. The state auditor had already called this an ethics violation because she did not disclose it until after the district approved the company's contract.

The teachers at Garfield had not voted to oppose standardized testing in general. We had not even voted to denounce high-stakes testing in particular. In fact, while the vast majority of teachers at our school did believe to varying degrees that standardized testing had become overbearing, there were a range of opinions and varying levels of understanding about the usefulness or effectiveness of such exams. Some teachers favored replacing the MAP with a better standardized test. Others believed we had far too many standardized tests in the public schools and we should move toward portfolios, coupled with performance-based assessments, that could reveal and evaluate a whole range of abilities—such as the abilities to revise one's thinking after being introduced to new information, to research, to debate, to express passion for an issue one cares about, to incorporate ideas from peers into one's own unique answer, and countless more. None of those skills, nor the important factors of organization or motivation, are measured by bubble tests where success comes largely from the ability to eliminate wrong answer choices. Still, our active refusal to administer this one specific test, this one test we all could agree was irreparably flawed, achieved a new intensity in the debate on the massive “testing industrial complex” as a whole.

Conquering Test Anxiety

My second son, Satchel Ray, was born two days after we had announced the MAP test boycott—on Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday no less, which we took as a sign of good things to come. To see my four-year-old son Miles embrace his new baby brother for the first time—at the very moment my colleagues were birthing perhaps the nation's first all-school boycott of a district-mandated test—was a moment of true joy and possibility.

Yet the euphoria of those early days quickly waned as the first high-stakes test of our resolve came in the form of an all-district email from Seattle Public Schools superintendent Jose Banda to every educator in the district, declaring that the MAP test was not optional and he expected every educator to perform assigned duties. I know more than one Bulldog teacher's heart quickened—especially those in the tested subjects—as they realized this was meant as a warning that we could be charged with insubordination.

Within minutes of the superintendent's email, the lunch bell rang. Over the intercom, Kris McBride's voice was just audible over the din of students rushing to pack up their belongings, announcing that all Garfield staff should go to the first floor conference room to enjoy pizza sent by a school in Florida that supported us. Over slices of pizza, Garfield staff realized our struggle had become visible across the country. Educators from as far as Hawaii, people we'd never met, were counting on us to stand strong. Despite the threatening email, Doghouse teachers were not going to back down. Our determination was buoyed over the coming days as the chocolates, flowers, cards, books, donations, emails, photos of teachers holding “Scrap the MAP” signs, and resolutions of support came streaming in from around the country—and later from around the world.