When I Want To Know More...

...About Resisting to Standardized Testing

An always reliable and interesting source is FairTest.  FairTest, The National Center for Fair and Open Testing,  states as its mission working  "to end the misuses and flaws of standardized testing and to ensure that evaluation of students, teachers and schools is fair, open, valid and educationally beneficial."   As the nation's go-to organization on the ways tests are used, and the state and federal policies that have made testing a governing tool of our schools, FairTest provides thoughtful and timely information on everything from the number of colleges no longer requiring SAT scores for admission, to important new studies on the effects of test-based accountability.  

FairTest is also our Town Hall for the growing national conversation on why these tests are so dominant, whether they are inevitable (which frankly people used to say), and what parents, teachers, policymakers and thoughtful community leaders can do to get rid of this system and replace it with more educational ways of assessing children.   Without FairTest, many people might not know that it's unethical to base a major decision about a child (retention in grade, or promotion, for example) on the basis of a single test or test score.  Without FairTest, many parents might still feel alone in watching their kids come to hate school when so much of the day is spent in test-prep drills.

And without FairTest, we might not know that the movement not just to speak up against the tests, but to opt out of taking them, is a huge national movement.  For news on test resistance and on proposals to authentically reform our schools, I turn to Bob Schaeffer's weekly update of news from around the country.  Who knew that New Mexico students walked out rather than take their state tests -- tests they knew carried no weight with colleges and took them away from their real studies. Who knew parents of young children in Maryland, Texas (!), New York, [add your state's name here] -- all said, "not my child."  "You can't have my child's test score for your profits or for your bonus."     

Reading Bob Schaeffer's capture of good news from around the country will lift your spirits, give you optimism and want you to personally thank all the teachers, parents, school board members, even legislators who are beginning to show some courage.  You can subscribe at http://www/fairtest.org/weekly-news-signup.  It's also impossible to read the now very long list of news accounts from across the country, but even sampling will give you a sense of the expanding geography of pro-child, pro-public-school activism that is not only challenging the testing system but envisioning better ways of teaching our kids!

See FairTest website for their many other important services on behalf of our children and their schools. Thank you Monty Neill!

APRIL IS THE CRUELEST MONTH 

The timing of our launch of Educating. All Our Children. requires we begin where the children are this month:  locked into silent classrooms, in row-ordered desks, divided by stands of white board, hunched over answer sheets or computer screens, contributing their labor to the profits of big testing companies.

Or should we say, the children sit captured in concentrated efforts to assure their teacher keeps her job, their principal gains a bonus? Or, we see the kids working for stars:  how many stars, how many A or B ratings, will they need to keep their school open? Is this a word problem, requiring our close reading of the text? Or is it simple math? If so, why the complicated statistical formulas essential to the scoring but understood by almost no one?

Educating. All Our Children. will look back into where these tests comes from? How did they become “high stakes? And who decided?  And what can we do about them?

But because this very week, the children are in “the testing season,” it seems most timely to get to the good news:  this is also the season of “test resistance.”  Students are demanding to be taught, not to be tested. Parents are “opting out” of the testing, refusing to let their children become “data points” in the testing machine.

Here are three great resources for keeping up with the resistance:

• Can resisting high stakes tests really be a national movement?  Bob Schaeffer, for FairTest, captures stories from across the country:  “Testing Resistance and Reform.”

• There is even an OptOut map by The Movement to End Corporate Education Reform -- to see who in your area is “opting out” and how you can put your own community on the test-resistance map!

• Diane Ravitch’s blog offers a national forum for the stories of parents and teachers challenging the system, as well as her own keen insights into this strange “reform” system.

In future posts, we'll delve more into who's setting these policies, who is benefiting from testing our children, and why this all matters for our democracy as well as for our children.