More Than a Score Read Online Free PDF Page B

More Than a Score marked the day of action by petitioning parents at some thirty different schools to opt their children out of standardized tests. The student unions of Portland held a press conference to express their solidarity with the MAP boycott and assert the right of students to refuse to take standardized exams. Letters of solidarity and pictures of teachers who had assembled with “Scrap the MAP” signs came flooding in from around the nation. The presidents of the nation’s two major teachers’ unions, Denis Van Rokel of the National Education Association and Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers, sent letters in support of our boycott. I never felt so proud to be a union member. In concert with our day of action, we organized a mass email and phone call campaign to demand the Seattle School District “suspend the test, not the teachers”—and the superintendent’s office was so flooded with calls that the greeting message for the district had to be changed to direct people to a newly created voicemail account for those callers with “questions about MAP testing.”

    Education Spring
    After successfully boycotting the MAP test in the winter, we had to gear up for another boycott during the third round of testing in the spring. If the district sensed the movement was petering out, the threat of consequences would become all the more real. We redoubled our efforts.
    The district’s task force to review the MAP got under way with little representation by actual educators. Meanwhile, a “shadow” MAP review organization was formed, led by two great Seattle teachers, Gerardine Carroll and Liza Campbell. Their Teacher Work Group on Assessment included more than twenty teachers who developed guidelines called “Markers of Quality Assessment.” These markers defined authentic assessments as those that reflect actual student knowledge and learning, not just test-taking skills; are educational in and of themselves; are free of gender, class, and racial bias; are differentiated to meet students’ needs; allow students opportunities to go back and improve; and undergo regular evaluation and revision by educators. The Teacher Work Group on Assessment concluded, “Quality assessments, at their base, must integrate with classroom curriculum, measure student growth toward standards achievement, and take the form of performance tasks. These tasks, taken as a whole, should replace the MAP because they grow from classroom work, are rigorously evaluated and respect true learning.”
    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