In this article, teacher Sarah Chambers explains how and why her school organized a boycott of standardized testing. The article is excerpted from “More Than a Score,” edited by Seattle teacher Jesse Hagopian.
Sarah said the idea of boycotting struck her when she saw a student slumped over his desk during the test, pulling out his eyelashes.
She writes:
“In that moment, I thought to myself, “This over-testing is child abuse.” I cannot inflict this mental and emotional harm on one more student. That’s when the word “boycott” first flashed across my mind.
“This is the story of how an emotion became a movement in which the parents, students, and teachers of Maria Saucedo Scholastic Academy organized to reclaim the classroom and demand that students are more than a test score.
“Boycotts do not just happen—they are organized. The testing boycott at my school was strategically planned with a multifaceted approach that included teacher, parent and student support. Although the planning and implementation of this strategy occurred in a one-month span, the agitation around over-testing and employee power in the school organizational structure was built over a couple of years.”
Parents, teachers, and students can learn from the story of Saucedo Academy.
And consider buying “More than a Score: The Néw Uprising Against High-Stakes Testing ,” which has many excellent essays about resistance to corporate reform.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The level of sophistication in this opt out campaign is impressive. The efforts of the central administration to prevent the opt out reveal the perils of being a teacher in the Chicago Public School system where officials think lies and intimidation are perfectly ok and are tactics actually used to threaten teachers, principals, parents and even children who are eight years old. Read the whole article to appreciate the attention to detail in organizing this effort. Congratulations and may these efforts succeed nationwide.
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The education deformers call their movement a civil rights movement. What occurred at Saucedo and Drummond schools are te REAL civil rights movement. The devotion of parents students and staff was not merely a throw back to a different time, it was a new struggle, fighting for rights. Inspirational.
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Reblogged this on We Are More.
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