Street roots., January 23, 2015, Page 9, Image 9

Street Roots • January 23-29, 2015
News
Page 9
COMMON CORE, from page 8
classroom at Madison Middle School in
West Seattle. Then in 2008,1 was laid off.
That year I traveled with my wife, who was
in international health, to Haiti. We got to
Haiti two days before the earthquake hit. On
returning to the States, I was heartbroken
to see the United States send one of our
most strident proponents of corporate
education reform to Haiti: Paul Valias, the
CEO of the public schools in Chicago,
Philadelphia and New Orleans after Katrina.
They have no public schools left in New
Orleans: It’s 100 percent charters. That
showed me that this is a global problem.
Big-time global corporates like Pearson (and
other) textbook and testing companies are
pushing beyond the U.S. borders to try to
capture markets around the world.
M.W.: D o you think the drivin g force
behind it is the textbook a n d testing companies,
or is there more to it than that?
J.H.: It’s an important part, that there are
companies that profit directly off of the idea
that knowledge is the endless string of facts
that they print in their textbooks or that
they create tests to judge students’ ability to
eliminate wrong answer choices. But it’s
also about busting the teachers’ unions. The
high-stakes testing craze is about getting rid
of seniority protections and making
teachers’ jobs much more tenuously tied to
the fluctuation of test scores. These test *
scores are highly invalid, (especially) the
value-added model that tries to measure an
individual teacher’s contribution to an
individual student
M.W.: That model sounds like a classic
m isuse o f statistics.
J.H.: Exactly. The American Statistical
Society said that value-added modeling is
junk science in education. This complicated
formula leaves so many factors opt that it’s
a meaningless number. In my book I
highlight a teacher in Florida who won a
teacher of the year award, but the value-
added modeling showed he was in the
lowest percentile. The scores fluctuate
between 25 and 50 percent, year to year, so
a teacher that’s rated highly one year has a .
50 percent chance to be rated very low the
next year.
They’re dedicated to reducing the process
of teaching and learning to a single score, so
that they can use that score to fire teachers,
tie their pay to it, deny students graduation,
close schools. Then they can turn education
over to the privatizers, who want to push
charter schools, private companies that
want to bring in more online learning
instead of students being mentored by
human educators.
We’re moving away from an education
into what I call a “testucation.” In Chicago a
parent told me their kindergartner takes 14
standardized tests a year. The entire year is
preparing for the next exercise in filling in
bubbles.
M.W.: W hen d id yo u fir s t realize that
standardized testing was not good education?
J.H.: I went to Garfield as a student. The
tests had me convinced that I wasn’t
intelligent. School was very arduous, and I
was not happy to be here. I was glad that I
was on the baseball team, but the tests
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shamed me. It wasn’t until I had some
teachers really invest time and show me
how education could be about challenging
racism that I realized that standardized
tests had missed something about me.
M.W.: In the book, you talk about how the
generation o f new teachers has grown up with
a ll these standardized tests a n d d o e sn ’t know
that education can be som ething different.
J.H.: They are transforming a generation
to believe that knowledge is the ability to
eliminate wrong answer choices and to live
in fear of making a mistake. Mistakes
should be wonderful opportunities to see
something in a different light, to evaluate
why you made that decision and how to
move beyond th a t Instead, mistakes are
horrible transgressions that must be
punished severely. When you train a whole
generation to live in fear of making
mistakes, you kill creativity, because what is
creativity? It’s the ability to try new things
out, to experiment and to make mistakes
and grow from them.
In the book I refer to the “testocracy,”
the elite, strata of society, that is trying to
transform education to make it about
testing. Eli Broad, one of the richest people
in the U.S., has a foundation that trains
superintendents in a corporate style of
education reform. (Editor’s note: Broad
co-founded homebuilding company, KB
Home, and founded retirement-savings
company SunAmerica, both Fortune 500
companies.) We received one of his
graduates here in Seattle, who happened to
sit on the board of the organization that
made the Measures of Academic Progress
(MAP) test. She didn’t disclose that when
the Seattle Public Schools adopted the MAP
test.
M.W.: That was (former superintendent
M aria ) Goodloe-Johnson.
J.H.: Yes. When we adopted that test, I
got behind a [union] resolution saying that
the MAP test was an inappropriate measure
of teacher contributions to student learning.
That passed. A couple of years later I got a
assessments, give us much better feedback.
By inundating our schools with high stakes
testing, we’re actually eliminating
assessment altogether and actually aren’t
getting any useful feedback on the things
we’re actually teaching. We’re getting
feedback on their ability to eliminate wrong
answer choices.
phone call from a teacher here at Garfield
who told me she was going to refuse to give
the exam. She began talking to others.
Uniformly, the staff here thought this test
was a complete waste of time and
demoralizing to students.
Our ninth grade algebra teacher talks
about how he saw geometry q u e s tio n s o n
the test: th e y d o n ’t t ak e g e o m e try u n til th e
next year. Our English-language-learner
teachers talked about how the test was
culturally and linguistically inappropriate for
their students. As a social studies teacher,
what frustrated me was how our computer
labs were monopolized for weeks at a time
to administer this test.
The staff voted unanimously to refuse the
te st That kicked off what became known as
the “Education Spring.” We saw walkouts of
students in Oregon, Colorado, Chicago. We
saw mass opt-out organizations of parents.
Last year some 60,000 parents across New
York state opted their kids out of the tests;
there were teacher boycotts in Chicago and
New York.
. replace these tests?
J.H.: One of the amazing parts of the
research for this book was talking with the
Consortium Schools in New York. The
Consortium Schools don’t have to
administer the standardized tests for the
state. They’re public schools; they have
more high-needs students than the general
population. These schools have better
outcomes than the rest of the schools in
New York state. They have an inquiry-based
approach to education and assessment that
empowers students to pursue questions that
they’re interested in and then show what
they know.
They don’t want to know, can you fill in a
bubble, can you eliminate a wrong answer
choice, can you make a right guess? They
want to know, can you develop a thesis, can
you find evidence to back up that thesis, can
you argue it convincingly? The students
develop a thesis and do research over time
and then present that to a panel of experts.
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they have more college attendance, kids
staying in college longer. Their model is a
powerful testament to what real education
reform would look like.
M.W.: A re there tests com ing up here that
we should be watching fo r?
J.H.: The Smarter Balance tests that are
tied to Common Core are going to be
offered for the first time this spring. We’ll
see if teachers in Seattle begin revolting
against this new wave of high-stakes tests.
M.W.: W hat’s the basic message o f yo u r
book?
M.W.: You talk in the book about the effect
o f the boycott on yo u r teaching.
J.H.: The year of the MAP test boycott,
history came to life in a way that it never
has before. We did a re-enactment of the
Montgomery bus boycott You’ve never seen
students research and argue their'position
as vehemently as that year when they were
in the middle of organizing their own
boycott. History wasn’t just something to be
read dryly out of a textbqok. It was
something that could empower them in
their own struggles.
M.W.: Would you ju s t elim inate tests?
J.H.: Teachers are not against tests. We
invented tests. We want to know if students
learn what we’re teaching them. The
problem is, these tests are not assessing
what we’re teaching. Oftentimes we don’t
get the results until the next year. The
assessments that we make every day,,
whether it’s checking for understanding by
asking questions or more formal
J.H.: We can reclaim education as
educators, students, parents and teachers.
Across the country all the different
constituencies of the education community
are coming together to reclaim education
and to say it should be about civic courage.
We want education to be about solving the
real problems we face in our world, like how
to get the hole fixed in the ceiling in the
classroom, how to keep kids from ending up
in prison like their fathers and their uncles,
how to stop the wars that are endlessly
proliferating and, most terrifying of all,
climate change. If education is about filling
in a bubble, then our future as a human
species has a limited amount of time left.
Education should be dedicated to developing
leaders who can identify prohlems in their
community and their nation and their world
and organize collaboratively to address
those problems.
Reprinted from Real Change News, Seattle.