More Than a Score (9 page)

Later that spring, in celebration of May Day, International Worker's Day, the Scrap the MAP citywide coalition called for an international day of solidarity with the boycott. We received correspondences of support from parents, students, teachers, and labor unions from around the world, including Japan, Australia, Canada, Mexico, the United Kingdom, and communities across the United States.

We were emboldened as reports from around the country rolled in of people taking independent actions in opposition to their own standardized tests. We read of students walking out against the tests in Chicago. We learned of a parent Facebook page for Long Island, New York, that quickly garnered some eight thousand members, helping ignite an opt-out movement in that region. We heard about more than ten thousand parents, students, and educators in Texas marching in opposition to the then fifteen state-required standardized tests their students needed to graduate.

Even though I was thoroughly sleep deprived with a newborn baby at home, it was honestly a pleasure to get up early in the morning, check the education news headlines from around the country, and get to work to talk to my coworkers about our latest plans and the newest acts of resistance from around the country. Moreover, I had never been so engrossed in my lesson plans as I was that spring. As my AP US history class lessons engaged the 1950s and the era of the civil rights movement, the students approached the days' lessons with an uncommon urgency. Our reenactment of a debate between various constituencies of the Black population in Montgomery, Alabama, about whether to go through with the boycott of the segregated bus system took on an entirely new meaning from any civil rights lesson I had taught before. The passion and detail of the students' plea to their 1950s classmates to refuse to ride on those buses was something that just cannot be faked. My students were participating in their own boycott in a struggle for social justice, and this hands-on education brought to life for them struggles I was trying to teach them about from the past.

On the afternoon of May 13, at 2:06 pm, I was entering an assignment into my computer during the final period when a ping rang out from my computer, informing me of an incoming email. I spied a letter from the superintendent. I clicked it open and scanned the message. More platitudes about doing what's best for kids. But then, buried in the middle of the email there was one short sentence that caught my eye: “MAP will be optional for high schools for the 2013–2014 school year.” I stood to my feet and yelled out, right there in front of the students, pumping my fist in the air, “We won! We scrapped the MAP!” I did nothing to attempt to regain order in the classroom for the last minutes of class. Students began whooping and spontaneous celebrations broke out as the news traveled that we had scored a historic victory over an illegitimate test. The only thing that tempered our exuberance was the knowledge that middle and elementary schools would still have to struggle to eliminate the test.

Our collective action not only produced a victory for the boycott of the MAP, it also transformed the culture of our school. Students and parents came to view teachers not as the maligned villains in the corporate drama about education quality so often portrayed in the media but as heroes willing to risk their jobs to improve education. Teachers could see in practice that students were not simply naïve youth who whose minds needed filling with our knowledge but powerful allies with ideas, convictions, and formidable capacities of their own. Teachers, too, saw each other anew, as they were now regularly escaping the usual isolation of their own classrooms and conversing about everything from the boycott to public education policy and advice about an upcoming unit. In my three years teaching at Garfield and during my four years as a Garfield student, I had never felt the school so alive with purpose.

Possibilities

After I was done stammering through my introduction to the media at our January 9, 2013, press conference, others began sharing their stories. Kris McBride explained how the MAP did not align with the state standards, stating that when ninth-grade algebra students at Garfield take the math test, “It's filled with geometry, it's filled with probability and statistics, and other things that aren't part of the curriculum at all.” My confidence in our action grew as Kris spoke, because, I thought, if the testing coordinator herself is spearheading this test boycott, we just might be able to pull this off. Next, Kit McCormick told how she was not allowed to see what's on the test, so she could not prepare the students to do their best. I winced when Kit said she was supposed to take her students for MAP testing the previous Wednesday, but she had already refused. I worried that her words could allow the district to single her out as a teacher who had already been insubordinate, discipline her, and then use her as an example to prevent the unity of our staff. My mind drifted from her address as I began to fixate on the numerous ways our staff could be vulnerable to attack and disquiet seized my nerves again. As cameras flashed, I tuned back into Kit's remarks as she continued, “I just see no use for it at all. And so I'm not going to do it. But I'd be happy to have my students evaluated in a way that would be meaningful for both them and me.” Kit's self-assurance caught me off guard. I knew we had all voted to reject this test, but there was no way I could have known the staff would rise with such poise and determination.

Then, Mario Shaunette rose and approached the podium. He began speaking, deliberately pronouncing each impassioned word. “I work hard to try to build up the confidence of my students that they can be good at math.” His unhurried pace then slowed to a full stop when his emotions swelled, disrupted his composure, and he fought to hold back tears. He then continued,

Three times a year we have tests set up that make students feel dumb. And then we have to undo that. They feel like they should have known the answer. And they feel stupid. . . . Because the MAP tests students on things not in the curriculum. And then we have to undo that. It's not an accurate measure of what they can do, so they don't put in the effort. Absolutely we believe our students should be tested. We're all for that, and we do testing on a daily basis. But, if I don't step up now, and say this is a harmful test, who will? I'm teaching them by my example: I'm taking charge of what I do here.

Leaning into the microphone, as if to communicate to the assembled media not to lose these words in the editing room, Mario said of his students, “I'm teaching them that when there are things like that that are going on that are improper, that are incorrect. . . ” He paused, looked down, shook his head and then, lifting his chin and looking directly into the eyes of one reporter, continued with his statement, “you have to step up and say something about it. . . . I hope everybody that has to administer a flawed test refuses.”

Dear Brandon: An Open Letter to a Student on What the MAP Boycott Meant to Me

Dear Brandon,

 

I'm writing to let you know about the huge thing that happened to us at your alma mater, Garfield High, and to tell you about the role you played in making it happen. But first I want to start with an apology. I did something to you that I regret. You'll remember you were a senior in my reading class. It was the first year of the district's Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) test, and I was required to escort you to the computer lab so you could spend hours in front of a screen punching buttons in answer to test questions. I suspected the exercise was a waste of time. I knew I didn't need the test results and wouldn't be using them. As you know, you were tested daily in my classroom. Still, I was cowardly and allowed the district to decide how those precious hours of yours would be spent. Your senior year was your last chance to become a proficient reader before heading off to college, and brilliant as you are, it was taking you more time than the average student to finish the reading program.

If you had stayed in my classroom, I know you could have made significant gains in reading. Instead, I let your time go to waste. I don't know how your first year in college went, or even whether you were able to finish it, but I have thought many times since you graduated that I didn't do everything I could have to prepare you for the demands of your first college year. If I had it to do over again, I would have simply kept you all in class. You are one of the important reasons I joined the MAP test boycott at Garfield last year, Brandon.

In the years after your class, I quietly failed to interrupt the learning in my classroom by refusing to take students to the testing lab. By that time, the district had informed us the MAP was invalid at the high school level, anyway. Remember Kris McBride? She was a math teacher, and then she became the testing coordinator. Last fall, she informed me that, given the new reporting procedures for the MAP test, I couldn't just quietly boycott the test anymore. I realized to continue my nonparticipation I'd have to do so publicly. Kris knew of one other teacher who had similar opinions, Adam Gish, in the LA department, and I hoped we could find at least one more to stand up with us. As stalwart as Adam was, I didn't want us to stand alone. I had heard stories of other teachers in the district taking similar solitary stands in the past, and they suffered bitter outcomes. Kris and I split the names of “tested subjects” teachers who would be required to administer the MAP and went off to contact our lists. Every teacher we talked to agreed to boycott with us—some enthusiastically, some reluctantly, and some only after serious reflection. We were surprised and gratified. Each teacher we spoke with told multiple stories of students harmed, indignities endured, and precious time wasted.

Many of us had voiced our opposition and been ignored. Our beloved librarian Janet Woodward had a disciplinary letter in her personnel file for talking to students about the test and posting videos of their varied opinions. The district conducted a survey of teacher views of the MAP, but results had been suppressed. Staff agreed we faced few choices if we wanted to be heard. By Friday before winter break, all twenty-four “tested subjects” teachers had agreed to boycott the test. I'll tell you, Brandon, I was so nervous and scared, but I was also excited and hopeful. Next I contacted Jesse Hagopian, one of our union reps (a Bulldog from the Garfield class of 1997 himself), to report what we were doing. I was pleased to see his enthusiastic response when I asked for his support. By the faculty meeting the following Wednesday, nearly 100 percent of the staff voted to support the boycott.

Then things began to happen. There was no more kidding around; this was serious. Were our jobs in jeopardy? Would this damage our careers? We had a new superintendent, and no one knew how he might respond.

We decided we needed a steering committee to lead the boycott, and I agreed to run. I had been stifling a growing feeling of frustration and helplessness in the face of a slow-motion tsunami of education policy that was hurting my students and my work life. Corporations and conservative foundations were creating policy that just didn't make any sense if you were a teacher or a parent. Did you know my daughter attended Garfield, too? Each time I was faced with one of their changes in our school, puzzling out the logic of it led me to discover that private individuals or companies were getting an awful lot of public money shifted to their bank accounts. The MAP test was the last straw for me.

For lack of funds, the district had just canceled summer school and night school—the only ways for struggling students to get a second chance to make up lost credits. Somehow, there were millions of dollars available for a test to evaluate teachers that even the test makers said we weren't supposed to use for that purpose. On top of all this, my profession seemed to be the popular spot to place blame for everything from lowered lifetime income to high crime statistics. I am very proud of the job I do in my classroom for students like you, Brandon. I think the results I get are impressive. My reading program can move students who come in reading at fourth-grade level or below to grade-level reading within a year or less. Yet every time I opened a newspaper or clicked on a link, someone was maligning my colleagues and me as lazy and incompetent. I'm not stupid, so I can figure out teacher-bashing serves the purpose of undermining our ability to protect schools from the incursion of profit motives. What might be even worse, though, is that the teacher blaming seemed to be distracting our attention from the real work of closing the achievement gap. Unfortunately, knowing it was a purposeful strategy didn't make it any less personally insulting.