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More About the Murphy Amendment, in Which Democrats Want “Tougher Accountability”

By dianeravitch
July 16, 2015 //
41

Emma Brown of the Washington Post has a good article about the Murphy amendment, which Democrats favored and Republicans opposed.

 

The chamber voted 54 to 43 against the amendment, which aimed to give the federal government more say in defining which schools are low-performing and require intervention.

 

Instead, the bill allows states to decide not only how to judge schools’ success, but which schools don’t measure up and what to do to improve them.

 

The proposed amendment’s lead sponsor, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), said that could return the country to the days when states and school districts could ignore achievement gaps and allow poor, minority and disabled children to languish.

 

“This law is an education reform law, but it has to be a civil rights law as well,” said Murphy, invoking the law’s original passage in 1965 as part of President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty.

 

The measure was opposed by many Republicans who want to rein in the federal government’s influence over education, which they say ballooned under the Bush and Obama administrations.

 

“Instead of fixing No Child Left Behind, it keeps the worst parts of it,” said Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), chairman of the Senate education committee.

 

Democratic lawmakers in both chambers are sure to continue pushing for stronger accountability provisions before sending the legislation to the White House. Education Secretary Arne Duncan has said that the Obama administration would not support the legislation unless it strengthens the federal role in school accountability. But he stopped short of saying whether the president would veto it.

 

Why do Democrats believe that the U.S. Department of Education has the capacity or knowledge to identify “failing” schools or to intervene to improve them? Nothing in the past decade suggests that this is a realistic expectation.

 

Democrats have now almost completely bought into the assumption that more testing=more equity, when it is a well-established fact that standardized tests always have a disparate impact that disadvantages students and adults of color. For many decades, the same civil rights groups that now defend standardized tests for students have litigated to block the use of standardized tests as decisive measures, whether in school or in employment. But for reasons that are hard to discern, certain leading civil rights groups now insist that without testing every child every year, children of color will be overlooked and neglected. Of course, if standardized tests could meet the needs of children of color and children in poverty, these children would be in far better shape today than they are because they have been taking standardized tests every year since 2003, when NCLB was implemented. That is an entire generation of children. What are the results? Where are the benefits of the billions spent to test every child every year? How many children have lost access to courses in the arts, history, science, civics, geography, physical education, and foreign languages because they took time away from test preparation?

 

NAEP already documents the achievement gaps every other year for every state and for many urban districts by scientific sampling. No other nation tests every child every year. The cost of testing and the instructional time lost to test prep actually hurts the children it is supposed to help.

 

Why don’t the Democrats listen to other civil rights groups, such as the Journey for Justice Alliance, which opposes high-stakes testing. Is it because they don’t have lobbyists? Here is part of their open letter to the leaders of the Senate:

 

The Journey for Justice Alliance, an alliance of 38 organizations of Black and Brown parents and students in 23 states, joins with the 175 other national and local grassroots community, youth and civil rights organizations signed on below, to call on the U.S. Congress to pass an ESEA reauthorization without requiring the regime of oppressive, high stakes, standardized testing and sanctions that have recently been promoted as civil rights provisions within ESEA.

 

We respectfully disagree that the proliferation of high stakes assessments and top-down interventions are needed in order to improve our schools. We live in the communities where these schools exist. What, from our vantage point, happens because of these tests is not improvement. It’s destruction.

 

Black and Latino families want world class public schools for our children, just as white and affluent families do. We want quality and stability. We want a varied and rich curriculum in our schools. We don’t want them closed or privatized. We want to spend our days learning, creating and debating, not preparing for test after test.

 

In the Chicago Public Schools, for example, children in kindergarten through 8th grade are administered anywhere between 8 and 25 standardized tests per year. By the time they graduate from 8th grade, they have taken an average of 180 standardized tests! We are not opposed to state mandated testing as a component of a well-rounded system of evaluating student needs. But enough is enough.

 

We want balanced assessments, such as oral exams, portfolios, daily check-ins and teacher created assessment tools—all of which are used at the University of Chicago Lab School, where President Barack Obama and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel have sent their children to be educated. For us, civil rights are about access to schools all our children deserve. Are our children less worthy?

 

High stakes standardized tests have been proven to harm Black and Brown children, adults, schools and communities. Curriculum is narrowed. Their results purport to show that our children are failures. They also claim to show that our schools are failures, leading to closures or wholesale dismissal of staff. Children in low income communities lose important relationships with caring adults when this happens. Other good schools are destabilized as they receive hundreds of children from closed schools. Large proportions of Black teachers lose their jobs in this process, because it is Black teachers who are often drawn to commit their skills and energies to Black children. Standardized testing, whether intentionally or not, has negatively impacted the Black middle class, because they are the teachers, lunchroom workers, teacher aides, counselors, security staff and custodians who are fired when schools close.

 

Standardized tests are used as the reason why voting rights are removed from Black and Brown voters—a civil right every bit as important as education. Our schools and school districts are regularly judged to be failures—and then stripped of local control through the appointment of state takeover authorities that eliminate democratic process and our local voice—and have yet so far largely failed to actually improve the quality of education our children receive.

 

Throughout the course of the debate on the reauthorization of ESEA, way too much attention has focused on testing and sanctions, and not on the much more critical solutions to educational inequality.

Categories Civil Rights, Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Standardized Testing

The Rev. William Barber: A Civil Rights Leader for Our Time

By dianeravitch
July 16, 2015 //
12

The Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II is a major national figure in the civil rights movement of our time. He will be the keynote speaker at the Network for Public Education’s annual conference on April 15-17 in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Rev. Barber is the founder of the Moral Mondays movement in North Carolina, where a radical faction has taken control of the Legislature and the Governor’s seat. The Moral Mondays convenes every Monday in front of the State Capitol to protest the legislsture’s assaults on basic human rights.

Please come to Raleigh to meet Rev. Barber and hear his eloquent plea for justice and decency in our time.

Here is a statement that Rev. Barber wrote about the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

Rev. Barber writes:

Fix public education, end high stakes testing, pass ESEA

All lives of students matter. Children come into life with fresh eyes, fresh minds, and boundless hope and energy. Our elders created schools, and taxed themselves to pay for well-educated, loving people to be teachers, to keep that hope, energy, and freshness alive through the first two decades of life. But every day we hear of kids being bullied, giving up, dropping out, losing hope. To stop this man-made flood from schools to prisons, we need an all-out, multi-dimensional effort.

I write today because all people of good will, all patriotic Americans, have a chance to do something now to begin repairing the striking poverty breach that is so plain. Congress is preparing to vote on the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) on its 50th anniversary. What they decide now can change the course of federal aid to education for decades to come.

My father taught physics at the high school I attended in one of the poorest counties in North Carolina. My mother has worked in the same high school for more than 40 years. My five children worked their way through public schools in the poorest part of our state. One earned a PhD from Harvard in public health; one starts law school this fall; and two are working on their college degrees. My youngest son has several more years of public school ahead of him.

But my heart aches for their peers. Everywhere I go, I see children attending under-funded schools with over-worked teachers. The seeds of justice and love that we try to sow have a hard time taking root, when they land on hungry stomachs and hopeless hearts. Kids are born as hungry to learn as they are to eat. All of them need learning environments that help them thrive and live purposeful, prosperous lives. Educational opportunities and qualified, caring teachers make this dream possible. But as we under-resource our public schools, we are not just deferring dreams, we are shriveling and stomping on them.

The Southern Education Foundation (SEF) has tried to alert the nation for years about the crisis in our schools. Their 2013 report makes the problem plain. SEF Vice President Steve Suitts said, “Without improving the educational support that the nation provides its low income students – students with the largest needs and usually with the least support — the trends of the last decade will be prologue for a nation not at risk, but a nation in decline…”

In our Moral Monday Movement in North Carolina, we believe we must engage in every non-violent means of struggle possible to stop the tea party extremist attack on our teachers, our schools, and our children. If we sit back and watch extremists destroy our University and public school systems, we are discredited before our children, and we forfeit our chance to be called ‘repairers of the breach.’

When Congress enacted the ESEA in 1965, everyone knew education opportunities for black children were radically unequal to the opportunities for white students. Now, 50 years later, these gaps persist and are widening–despite the law’s promise to level the playing field for the nation’s most vulnerable students.

The last time Congress reauthorized ESEA, they and President George W. Bush established high-stakes testing, labeling, and policies that punish schools if kids flunked the tests. Tests don’t teach. Nurturing creative adults who know how to draw out individual children are what education is about. We don’t send our kids to school to become skilled test takers. We pay our taxes and send our kids to public schools because we need future corporate CEOs, cardiologists and aerodynamic engineers, university presidents and school principals, urban planners and architects. Our sons and daughters can’t reach these heights when accountability in our education system hinges on standardized test scores, not cultivating intellectual opportunity—the real measure of education. Standardized tests can tell us only so much. Educators know that annual multi-dimensional assessments that tell us whether a child is falling behind, whether she or he needs intervention and support the school can’t provide, or if a youngster is on track to graduate are the tools they need—not a single number.

Congress has a chance to fix the high stakes testing regime that has failed. Congress has the chance to deliver on its promise of educational opportunities for all students, especially the nation’s most vulnerable ones, which is the purpose of ESEA. Congress has the chance to repair the breach caused by sins and systems of slavery and segregation.

All our children have a fundamental civil right to a quality education. The ESEA can help make schools of hope and love. Stop drying up our kids’ dreams, like raisins in the sun.

Barber is the current president of the North Carolina State Conference of the NAACP, the National NAACP chair of the Legislative Political Action Committee, and founder of Moral Mondays.

Categories Civil Rights, Network for Public Education, North Carolina, Privatization

John Thompson: Why Does Anyone Still Support Annual Standardized Testing?

By dianeravitch
July 14, 2015 //
35

John Thompson, a teacher and historian, has watched the heated debate about standardized testing, with some claiming high-stakes testing protects Black and Hispanic children, and others saying it harms these very children. He weighs in with a thoughtful column.

 

Thompson says that the Obama administration education policy boils down to a simple formula: “test, sort, and punish…Some students may benefit but only at the cost of inflicting harm on other children.”

 

He writes:

 

Its ironic that the market-driven movement – that still pretends it is a civil rights movement – is going out with such an ignominious whimper. Output-driven reform not only damaged poor children of color by treating them as test scores, it has undermined liberals and Democrats who seek a larger agenda of equity and justice. So, a crucial short term battle is the civil war between progressives, with teachers determined to prevent Hillary Clinton (or anyone else) from repeating Arne Duncan’s agenda….

 

He notes that leaders of national civil rights groups have rejected the Senate “Every Child Achieves Act,” thinking that it will lessen the heavy emphasis on testing.

 

That raises the question of why an unwavering commitment to punitive, bubble-in testing is still thought – by some – to be a civil rights value. Why do these civil rights leaders believe they can promote justice by continuing to attack some of their most loyal, long term allies in the battles for equality and fairness?

 

It is the leaders of the civil rights groups who promoted NCLB who still support its high stakes testing. Another 38 civil rights groups have joined 175 organizations in opposing high stakes tests…

 

I sure don’t see support for No Child Left Untested by rank-in-file civil rights supporters. I see black, brown, and white parents recoiling from the way that bubble-in malpractice has robbed their children of respectful and engaging instruction. I see persons of all races torn between our original support for the ultimate goals of the Duncan administration and our sadness regarding the disappointing and destructive outcomes of the Obama administration’s policies. I sure haven’t met black, brown and white persons committed to civil rights who still believe high stakes standardized testing can enhance equity.

 

But, then again, in my tens of thousands of interactions with stakeholders, I have almost never met a person who wasn’t quickly disillusioned by NCLB testing. The only people who still seem to support stakes attached to its testing are politicos who are personally invested in the law they promoted.

 

The continued assault on teachers and unions by the Obama administration will not lead to better schools. Thompson no longer believes that Arne Duncan and his few remaining allies “are just fighting for poor children of color. Their obsessive support for reward and punish seems to also be due to a desire to exact a pound of flesh from educators for opposing their punitive approach to school reform.”

 

 

Categories Civil Rights, Standardized Testing

Testing Does NOT Promote Civil Rights or Equity

By dianeravitch
June 10, 2015 //
52

This is a sad, sad story. At the very time that increasing numbers of parents, researchers, and educators agree that testing in American schools is out of control, the caucuses in the House of Representatives representing children of color have taken a strong stand in favor of high-stakes testing.

According to the Washington Post, they want schools held accountable if children fail to meet targets two years in a row.

“Now the Congressional Tri-Caucus has sided with dozens of civil rights groups and the Obama administration. In a letter to the Senate on Wednesday, more than 80 members of the Tri-Caucus said they cannot support the bill without key changes, including a requirement that states take action at schools that are failing to serve subgroups of children, such as those who are low-income, African American or English learners, or those who have disabilities.

“Specifically, the Tri-Caucus — made up of the Congressional Black Caucus, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus — wants the federal government to compel states to act when a school fails to meet testing targets for subgroups of students two years in a row.

“That type of change is anathema to many Republicans, who see it as a federal overreach, and to the NEA, which likens it to a return to the test-centric and overly punitive provisions of No Child Left Behind. But members of the Tri-Caucus say that the requirement is key to ensuring that states do not overlook the nation’s neediest children.

“Rep. Robert C. “Bobby” Scott (Va.), the ranking Democrat of the House education committee, said he and his colleagues are seeking a new law that “honors the civil rights legacy of the law and fulfills the needs of all of America’s children.”

This is very sad. It will make the testing corporations very happy. It will not help children.

Standardized tests are normed on a bell curve. Affluent students cluster in the top half, students whose family income is low cluster in the bottom half. The bell curve never closes. Why would civil rights groups favor a mechanism–standardized testing–that by its nature will rank, label and stigmatize the children with the greatest needs?

Categories Civil Rights, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Standardized Testing

The REAL Civil Rights Issue of Our Time: Inequitable Funding

By dianeravitch
June 8, 2015 //
17

Emma Brown reports in the Washington Post about the outrageous inequity in funding American public schools. Corporate reformers have offered charters, vouchers, and high-stakes testing as “solutions” to poverty and inequity, but they are wrong. They are actually distracting attention from what matters most: Do schools have the resources to meet the needs of the children they enroll? The answer is no.

 

Brown writes:

 

Funding for public education in most states is inadequate and inequitable, creating a huge obstacle for the nation’s growing number of poor children as they try to overcome their circumstances, according to a set of reports released Monday by civil rights groups.

 

Students in the nation’s highest-spending state (New York) receive about $12,000 more each year than students in the lowest-spending state (Idaho), according to the reports, and in most states school districts in wealthy areas spend as much or more per pupil than districts with high concentrations of poverty.

 

In addition, many states were spending less on education in 2012 than they were in 2008, relative to their overall economic productivity, according to the reports.

 

 

A recent OECD report said that the U.S. was one of three nations that spends more on rich children than on poor children.

 

Charters, vouchers, and high-stakes testing do not reduce income inequality, nor do they reduce poverty, nor do they compensate for inequitable funding.

 

That is the civil rights issue of our time.

 

 

Categories Civil Rights, Equity, Funding, Poverty

Peter Greene: Who Has Been Saved by High-Stakes Testing?

By dianeravitch
May 7, 2015 //
24

Peter Greene read the defense of standardized testing by civil rights groups. He asks, after more than a dozen years of testing, who has been saved?

Categories Civil Rights, Standardized Testing

Mercedes Schneider: Why Did Only 12 Civil Rights Groups Oppose Opting Out?

By dianeravitch
May 6, 2015 //
13

Mercedes Schneider noticed something strange about the statement signed by 12 civil rights groups in opposition to the opt out movement.

It was endorsed by only 12 groups. But last January, a statement supporting annual testing was signed by 28 civi rights groups.

What happened to the other 16?

Categories Civil Rights, Opt Out

A Summary of NPE Statement on Testing and Civil Rights

By dianeravitch
May 6, 2015 //
32

Earlier I posted the full statement of the Network response to the criticism of the opt out movement by a dozen civil rights groups.

Here is a summary.

The NPE statement was written by Seattle teacher Jesse Hagopian, editor of “More than a Score,” and a scholar of the history of standardized testing.

Categories Civil Rights, Network for Public Education

Network for Public Education Defends Test Resistance for Equity

By dianeravitch
May 5, 2015 //
72

Today, a dozen civil rights groups released a statement critical of those who oppose standardized testing. Their statement is titled: “We Oppose Anti-Testing Efforts.”

The Network for Public Education disagrees with this criticism and declares its support for those who refuse the tests. We believe that those who resist the overuse and misuse of standardized tests serve the cause of equity. The NPE statement was written by Seattle teacher Jesse Hagopian and the NPE board.

Please read both original statements. The NPE statement contains many links for documentation.

Resistance to High Stakes Tests Serves the Cause of Equity in Education

Authored by Jesse Hagopian and the NPE Board of Directors

Today several important civil rights organizations released a statement that is critical of the decision by many parents and students to opt out of high stakes standardized tests. Though we understand the concerns expressed in this statement, we believe high stakes tests are doing more harm than good to the interests of students of color, and for that reason, we respectfully disagree.

The United States is currently experiencing the largest uprising against high-stakes standardized testing in the nation’s history. Never before have more parents, students, and educators participated in acts of defiance against these tests than they are today. In New York State some 200,000 families have decided to opt their children out of the state test. The largest walkout against standardized tests in U.S. history occurred in Colorado earlier this school year when thousands refused to take the end of course exams. In cities from Seattle, to Chicago, to Toledo, to New York City, teachers have organized boycotts of the exam and have refused to administer particularly flawed and punitive exams.

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan attempted to dismiss this uprising by saying that opposition to the Common Core tests has come from “white suburban moms who — all of a sudden — their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were, and their school isn’t quite as good as they thought they were.” Secretary Duncan’s comment is offensive for many reasons. To begin, suburban white moms have a right not to have their child over tested and the curriculum narrowed to what’s on the test without being ridiculed. But the truth is his comment serves to hide the fact that increasing numbers of people from communities of color are leading this movement around the nation, including:

Members of the Baltimore Algebra Project organized a die-in of recent Black graduates who took over a Baltimore school board meeting in protest of the school closures that had been facilitated in part by labeling them failing with test scores. Heritage High School graduate Antwain Jordan said of the plan to close his alma mater, “The education system, there is no value on black life in this country. That’s nothing new, it’s not a secret. It’s the status quo, which is why these things are allowed to happen.”

During the first week in March, several New Mexico schools with Latino/a student populations of over 90% organized mass walkouts against the Common Core PARCC tests in Albuquerque and across New Mexico, with the message, “We are not a test score.”

On Feb. 17th the Newark Student Union, an organization led primarily by students of color, occupied the Newark school district headquarters in part because of their opposition to the implementation of the new Common Core tests.

On April 7th Gerald Hankerson, the President of the Seattle/King County NAACP chapter launched a press conference against the new Common Core, Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC), tests, by saying, “…the Opt Out movement is a vital component of the Black Lives Matter movement and other struggles for social justice in our region. Using standardized tests to label Black people and immigrants ‘lesser,’ while systematically under-funding their schools, has a long and ugly history in this country.”

You would expect the multi-billion dollar testing industry not to celebrate this resistance. Conglomerates such as Pearson, the over 9 billion dollar per year corporation that produces the PARCC test, could stand to lose market share and profits if the protests continue to intensify. But it is unfortunate that more civil rights groups have not come to the aid of communities resisting the test-and-punish model of education. In a recent statement issued by the national leadership of some of the nation’s most prominent civil rights organizations, they wrote:

“Data obtained through some standardized tests are particularly important to the civil rights community because they are the only available, consistent, and objective source of data about disparities in educational outcomes even while vigilance is always required to ensure tests are not misused.”

We agree that it is vital to understand the disparities that exist in education and to detail the opportunity gap that exists between students of color and white students, between lower income students and students from more affluent families. There is a long and troubling history of schools serving children of color not receiving equitable access to resources and not providing these students with culturally competent empowering curriculum. Moreover, the schools are more segregated today than they were in the 1960s—a fact that must be particular troubling to the NAACP that fought and won the Brown vs Board of Education desegregation decision. For these reasons, we understand why national civil rights organizations are committed to exposing the neglect of students of color.

Yet we know that high-stakes standardized tests, rather than reducing the opportunity gap, have been used to rank, sort, label, and punish students of color. This fact has been amply demonstrated through the experience of the past thirteen years of NCLB’s mandate of national testing in grades 3-8 and once in high school. The outcomes of the NCLB policy shows that test score achievement gaps between African American and white students have only increased, not decreased. If the point of the testing is to highlight inequality and fix it, so far it has only increased inequality. Further, the focus on test score data has allowed policy makers to rationalize the demonization of schools and educators, while simultaneously avoiding the more critically necessary structural changes that need to be made in our education system and the broader society.

We also know that standardized testing is not the only, or the most important, method to know that students of color are being underserved; student graduation rates, college attendants rates, studies showing that wealthier and predominantly white schools receiving a disproportionate amount of funding are all important measures of the opportunity gap that don’t require the use of high-stakes standardized tests.

The civil rights organizations go on to write in their recent statement on assessment,

That’s why we’re troubled by the rhetoric that some opponents of testing have appropriated from our movement. The anti-testing effort has called assessments anti-Black and compared them to the discriminatory tests used to suppress African-American voters during Jim Crow segregation. They’ve raised the specter of White supremacists who employed biased tests to ‘prove’ that people of color were inferior to Whites.

There are some legitimate concerns about testing in schools that must be addressed. But instead of stimulating worthy discussions about over-testing, cultural bias in tests, and the misuse of test data, these activists would rather claim a false mantle of civil rights activism.

To begin, we agree with these civil rights organizations when they write that over-testing, cultural bias in tests, and misuse of test data are “legitimate concerns about testing in schools that must be addressed”—and in fact we hope to hear more from these civil rights organizations about these very real and destructive aspects of high-stakes standardized testing. Moreover, we believe that when these civil rights organizations fully confront just how pervasive over-testing, cultural bias and misuse of data is in the public education system, these facts alone will be enough to convince them join the mass civil rights opt out uprising that is happening around the nation. Let us take each one of these points in turn.

Over testing

The American Federation of Teachers (AFT, the second largest teacher’s union in the nation) conducted a 2013 study based on a analysis of two mid-size urban school districts that found the time students spent taking tests claimed up to 50 hours per year. In addition, the study found that students spent from between 60 to more than 110 hours per year directly engaged in test preparation activities. The immense amount of time devoted to testing has resulted in students in a constant state of preparation for the next high-stakes exam rather than learning the many skills that aren’t measured by standardized tests such as critical thinking, collaboration, civic courage, creativity, empathy, and leadership. The new Common Core tests are only in math and language arts and thus have served to skew the curriculum away from the arts, physical education, civics, social studies, science, music, and a myriad of other subjects that students of color are too often denied access to.

Cultural bias

Standardized tests have repeatedly been found to contain cultural biases. The process by which test questions are “normed” tends to eliminate questions that non-white students answer correctly in higher numbers. In New York, the number of Black students rated “below standard” jumped from 15.5% to 50% with the introduction of new Common Core tests. English learners did even worse – 84% tested “below standard” on the new tests. This sort of failure has devastating effects on students, and does not reflect their true abilities.

Violations of student privacy

Common Core tests are associated with the collection of unprecedented levels of data from individual students, with few safeguards for student privacy. These systems allow for-profit testing companies, and third party companies, access to information that could be used against the interests of students in the future.

However, if those problems weren’t enough there are a myriad of other ways that these high-stakes standardized tests are being used to perpetuate institutional racism.

Perhaps the most curious omission from their letter is the fact that they assert that, “The anti-testing effort has called assessments anti-Black and compared them to the discriminatory tests used to suppress African-American voters during Jim Crow segregation,” yet they offer no rebuttal of the assertion that the standardized tests today share many of the characteristics of the discriminatory exams of the past. As a recent editorial by the social justice periodical Rethinking Schools asserted:

The United States has a long history of using intelligence tests to support white supremacy and class stratification. Standardized tests first entered the public schools in the 1920s, pushed by eugenicists whose pseudoscience promoted the “natural superiority” of wealthy, white, U.S.-born males. High-stakes standardized tests have disguised class and race privilege as merit ever since. The consistent use of test scores to demonstrate first a “mental ability” gap and now an “achievement” gap exposes the intrinsic nature of these tests: They are built to maintain inequality, not to serve as an antidote to educational disparities.

This is why some of the most prominent early voices of opposition to standardized testing in schools came from leading African American scholars such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Horace Mann Bond, and Howard Long. Du Bois, one of the most important Black intellectuals in the history of the United States and a founding member of the NAACP, recalled in 1940, “It was not until I was long out of school and indeed after the [first] World War that there came the hurried use of the new technique of psychological tests, which were quickly adjusted so as to put black folk absolutely beyond the possibility of civilization.”

The great educator and historian Horace Mann Bond, in his work “Intelligence Tests and Propaganda,” wrote this statement that so clearly reveals one of the primary flaws of standardized testing that persist to this day:

“But so long as any group of men attempts to use these tests as funds of information for the approximation of crude and inaccurate generalizations, so long must we continue to cry, “Hold!” To compare the crowded millions of New York’s East Side with the children of Morningside Heights [an upper-class neighborhood at the time] indeed involves a great contradiction; and to claim that the results of the tests given to such diverse groups, drawn from such varying strata of the social complex, are in any wise accurate, is to expose a fatuous sense of unfairness and lack of appreciation of the great environmental factors of modern urban life.”

Bond was expressing then what is today know as the “Zip Code Effect,”—the fact that what standardized tests really measure is a student’s proximity to wealth and the dominant culture, resulting in wealthier, and predominately whiter, districts scoring better on tests. Their scores do not reflect the intelligence of wealthier, mostly white students when compared to those of lower-income students and students of color, but do reflect the advantages that wealthier children have—books in the home, parents with more time to read with them, private tutoring, access to test-prep agencies, high-quality health care, and access to good food, to name a few. This is why attaching high-stakes to these exams only serves to exacerbate racial and class inequality.

This point was recently driven home by Boston University economics professors Olesya Baker and Kevin Lang’s 2013 study, “The School to Prison Pipeline Exposed.” In this peer-reviewed study they reveal that the increases in the use of high-stakes standardized high school exit exams are linked to higher incarceration rates. This landmark study should be a clarion call to everyone interested in ending mass incarceration to end the practice of high-stakes exit exams in high school and work towards authentic assessments.

A July, 2010 statement authored by many of the same civil rights organizations that penned the aforementioned letter titled, “Framework for Providing All Students an Opportunity to Learn through Reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act,” stated:

“The practice of tracking students by perceived ability is a major civil rights obstacle…Ideally, we must provide opportunities for all students to prepare for college and careers without creating systems that lead to racially and regionally identifiable tracks, which offer unequal access to high-quality.
We agree with this statement and thank these civil rights organizations for raising concerns about the terrible effects of tracking on the public schools and the detriment that tracking has been to Black students, other students of color, and low-income students.”

We only want to emphasize that the standardized exams they are now defending are one of the most significant contributing factors to the tracking and racial segregation of students into separate and unequal programs and schools.

In that same “Framework” document the civil rights groups write:

“Because public schools are critical community institutions especially in urban and rural areas, they should be closed only as a measure of last resort. And where a school district deems school closure necessary solely for budgetary or population reasons, the burdens cannot be allowed to fall disproportionately on our most vulnerable communities.”

Again, we agree, but we want to point out that it is the use of test scores in labeling schools as “failing” that have contributed to clear cutting of schools that serve students of color in cities around the nation—most notably the closing of 50 schools in Chicago last year all in Black and Brown neighborhoods.

We call on the civil rights community to support the work of educators around the nation who are working to develop authentic forms of assessment that can be used to help support students to develop critical thinking. Innovative programs like New York City Consortium Schools have a wavier from state standardized tests and instead use performance based assessments that have produced dramatically better outcomes for all students, even though they have more special needs students than the general population—and have demonstrated higher graduation rates, better college attendance rates, and smaller racial divides in achievement than the rest of New York’s public schools.

Finally, we ask that you consider the rousing call to action against the new Common Core tests that was recently issued by the Seattle/King County NAACP chapter in the following statement:

It is the position of the Seattle King County Branch of the NAACP to come out against the Smarter Balanced Assessment tests, commonly referred to as SBAC. Seattle and Washington State public schools are not supplied with proper resources and a lack of equity within our schools continue to exist.

The State of Washington cannot hold teachers responsible for the outcome of students test results; when these very students are attending schools in a State that ranks 47th out of 50 States in the Nation when it comes to funding education. Furthermore, Washington State cannot expect the majority of students to perform well on increased targeted performance assessments while the State continues to underfund education in direct violation of a Washington State Supreme Court Order. We also know that our students of color are disproportionately underfunded and will disproportionately be labeled failing by the new SBAC test.

For this reason, we view the opt out movement as a vital component of the Black Lives Matter movement and other struggles for social justice. Using standardized tests to label Black people and immigrants as lesser—while systematically underfunding their schools—has a long and ugly history.

It is true we need accountability measures, but that should start with politicians be accountable to fully funding education and ending the opportunity gap. The costs tied to the test this year will run into the hundreds of millions of dollars. If the State really wants students to achieve academic performance at higher levels these dollars should be put in our classrooms and used for our children’s academic achievement, instead of putting dollars in the pockets of test developers.

We urge families to opt out of the SBAC test and to contact their local and state officials to advise them to abide by the State Supreme Court McCleary decision to fully fund education.

–Rita Green, MBA; Seattle King County NAACP Education Chair
We join the Seattle NAACP in calling for true accountability for educational opportunities. For too long, our nation has labored under the illusion that “shining a light” on inequities is an adequate remedy. Inequitable opportunities are manifestly evident to anyone who cares to look. The use of tests for this purpose has become part of the problem, rather than a solution. We reiterate our support for parents and students who make the difficult choice to opt out of high stakes tests, and call on our nation’s leaders to shift policies away from these tests.

Categories Civil Rights, Network for Public Education, Resistance, Standardized Testing

Seattle NAACP Supports Opt Out!

By dianeravitch
April 11, 2015 //
10

The local chapter of the NAACP in Seattle voted to encourage parents to opt out of state testing.

 

On Tuesday, April 7, 2015 Gerald Hankerson, the President of the Seattle/King County NAACP and Rita Green, the Education Chair of the Seattle/King County NAACP, began our press conference with a powerful idea and a call for action that holds the potential to help produce a tremendous social transformation. Together their opening remarks at the press conference—a gathering of parents, teachers, and community leaders that I helped to organize in opposition to the Common Core “Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium” (SBAC) tests—represent a clarion call to both education advocates and social justice activists across the country. Their simple, yet mighty, proposition is that the movement to oppose high-stakes standardized testing and the Black Lives Matter movement (and other struggles against oppression) should and can unite in a great uprising in service of transforming our schools into an environment designed to nurture our children, in body and intellect, rather than to rank, sort, and reproduce institutional racism.
Seattle NAACP President Hankerson (font left) and Education Chair Rita Green (front right) with supporters outside of the press conference.
Hankerson, kicking off the event, referenced the “long and ugly history” of using standardized tests in an effort to establish white supremacy. This is a history that the corporate “testocracy” is desperate to insure remains hidden from the public, as the uncovering of this history would bury their attempts to claim that standardizing testing is the key to closing  “achievement gap.”

Categories Civil Rights, Education Reform, Opt Out
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