'Act of Conscience' as Teachers Vow Permanent Boycott of Common Core

[eridani]

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2014/04/09-9

Last spring I was invited to the Earth School in the East Village of New York City to speak at a forum about the lessons of the MAP test boycott that I helped to organize in Seattle. Earth School 4th and 5th grade teacher Jia Lee, along with insurgent teacher union activists in MORE and parents in Change The Stakes, helped organize the event and a powerful conversation about organizing test resistance ensued.

Now, a year later, you can imagine my elation when I received an email from Jia announcing that three teachers at the Earth School declared to their administration and public schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña that they will not proctor Common Core state standardized tests this year — or ever — saying in a letter that they “can no longer implement policies that seek to transform the broad promises of public education into a narrow obsession with the ranking and sorting of children.”

They go on to write, “As an act of conscience, we are declining the role of test administrators for the 2014 New York State Common Core Tests. We are acting in solidarity with countless public school teachers who have paved their own paths of resistance and spoken truthfully about the decay of their profession under market-based reforms. These acts of conscience have been necessary because we are accountable to the children we teach and our pedagogy, both of which are dishonored daily by current policies.”

[chervilant]

1. Indeed...

These acts of conscience have been necessary because we are accountable to the children we teach and our pedagogy, both of which are dishonored daily by current policies.

We teachers are witness to the steady erosion of our system of public education.

[femmocrat]

2. They are brave, but will probably be looking for a new job next year.

Sad, but true.

[Igel]

3. I've seen that POV that all tests are merely a way of sorting and ranking students.

Since we don't like ranking and sorting, that means all tests are bad.

Problem is, tests do other things. The "ranking and sorting" argument overlooks this. You teach your 10th grade chemistry classes about hydrogen by solving the Schroedinger equation for them over the course of 2-3 class periods and you can assume they got it. But if you test them, you can learn not only a "ranking and sorting" of the students but also whether or not they got it at all. Or you could, if you taught something appropriate instead of wildly inappropriate, find the kids who did learn.

If you're an administrator, you can use a common test to find the teacher that didn't teach what was required and the one who did. This has to be done intelligently--yeah, I know, "intelligent administrator" can be an oxymoron, but so can "responsible teacher", so there! By "intelligently" I mean looking at class time, teacher absences, things that interfere with classes, and whether the teacher focused on getting 90% of kids to master 80% of the content or getting 50% of kids to master 90% of content. Ultimately that should be a joint decision or district/school policy.

Common Core has problems. I think the test regime that the US is moving to reflects parental denial and paranoia more than it does finding out whether our kids have the minimum skills necessary to be at least on the low side of average. Parents see their kids not prospering as they think they've been promised and need a scapegoat. Obviously the parents aren't at fault; the kids can't ever be; it's not something larger than them, we'd need to personalize that and anthromorphize the economy into something that doesn't like us. After you've excused all the bad thinking and fallacies permitted to previous cohorts of poor students, that leaves teachers and curriculum.