P age 8
News
S tre e t Roots • January 23-29, 2015
Children of
the Core
In his book, “More Than a Score: The New
U prising Against High-Stakes Testing, ’’Jesse
H agopian brings together the voices o f teachers,
administrators, students a n d parents who resist the
use o f standardized tests because they believe they
create an atmosphere o f winners a n d losers
BY MIKE WOLD
C O N T R IB U T IN G W R IT E R
f you’re not in some way involved with
public schools, you may not be aware of
the explosion of standardized testing in
schools over the past 10 years. Preparing for
and taking these tests has significantly
affected teaching and learning on all levels in
classrooftis across the country.
I
Seattle’s Garfield High School, has emerged
as one of the leaders in what he calls a civil
rights movement of this time: The growing
unrest against high-stakes standardized
testing in public schools. As editor of the new
book “More Than a Score: The New Uprising
Against High-Stakes Testing,” Hagopian
brings together the voices of teachers,
administrators, students and parents who
resist tiie use of standardized tests, which
they believe create an atmosphere of winners
and losers. That’s because federal school
funding gets tied to test scores; schools that
don’t improve test scores are closed or
sanctioned; teachers are assessed on the
“value” they’ve added to their students, based
on a complicated statistical formula; and
students are denied graduation if they don’t
pass certain tests.
While the latest version of high-stakes
testing, related to the “Common Core”
standards developed by the Bill & Melinda
Gates Foundation, claims to address some of
the issues with high-stakes testing, the basic
premises — that standardized tests can:
measure critical thinking and that the best
way to reform schools is to defund or close
them when their students don’t perform well
- remains questionable. Opponents of high-
stakes testing say that it makes no sense to
blame teachers and schools for the
educational problems caused by poverty and
racism as social programs outside schools are
defunded and schools and teachers are having
to make do with fewer and fewer resources.
I sat down and talked with Hagopian about
how he became a teacher, and why he was
one of the leaders in the successful boycott
last year of the MAP (Measures of Academic
Progress) test at Garfield. We started by
talking about how he got started in teaching.
Jesse Hagopian: My senior year at
PHOTO BY ALEX GARLAND
Macalester College, I had taken courses
about the history of struggles against
oppression. I was asking them [my
professors], “How can I apply the knowledge
that I’ve learned here?” They recommended
teaching.
Teach for America told me, “You can be
part of the new civil rights movement. We’re
going to go into low-income and students-of-
color schools, and we’re going to help
transform them.”
Turns out five weeks of training isn’t nearly
enough to be an effective teacher. With few
skills and little training, I learned a ton from
my students in Washington, D.C.
My school served 100 percent African-
Americans, I’d drive past the White House on
my way to work. Ten minutes later I’m at my
classroom. There was a hole in the ceiling.
The first research project I’d ever assigned
was destroyed by the rain.
It was the year of 9/11. We saw the smoke
rising from the Pentagon. I learned that our
nation could find billions of dollars to bomb
people halfway around the world, but they
couldn t fix the hole in the ceiling. Serving a
classroom where every single one of my
students had a father or an uncle in jail and
seeing the police roam our hallways, I saw
the school-to-prison pipeline being
constructed.
(That year), the No Child Left Behind Act
came on line. I saw the rhetoric: “We need to
hold teachers accountable, and we’re going to
do that by shutting down schools that have
poor test scores.” I saw this overemphasis on
test scores, on using untrained teachers, and
I knew they didn’t have a genuine concern
with improving education.
I came back to Seattle and went to the
University of Washington to get my master’s
degree in education and then got my own
See C O M M O N CORE, page 9