More Than a Score (36 page)

Forget Teaching
to the Test
—
Castle Bridge Boycotts It!

When I first heard from my then five-year-old daughter's principal, Julie Zuckerman, that our school's kindergartners, first graders, and second graders would be taking a multiple-choice (“bubble-in”) standardized test in September 2013, I thought she couldn't be serious. But she was. And the children would be taking this test not once but
twice
—in the beginning weeks of school and again in the spring. I wondered who was requiring this and why. No letter had come from the New York State Department of Education (NYSED) or the city's department of education (DOE) informing us parents of the testing our children were about to be subjected to. And when I searched online for a reason, or even an acknowledgement of this uncharted practice, I found very little. There was a story in the
New York Times
from the previous summer about the possibility of tests for kindergartners being rolled out, but not much else.

Apparently the scores—specifically, the difference between how these kindergarteners through second graders fared in the spring compared to in the fall—were to be used for part of the evaluation scores of their teachers. In fact, this was the sole reason for the test.

The Elusive Search for Play

In 2009 when my daughter's father (full disclosure: he is a public high school teacher and a social justice union activist) and I first started looking around for a school for our then two-year-old, we tried to envision the ideal school for her. There would be lots of hands-on, exploratory learning; nurturing teachers working with small groups of children; classrooms filled with bright natural light; lots of resources and space for art-making and imaginative play; and cozy corners for reading. But that was a short-lived delusion. After all, we live in New York City and the days of early childhood schooling characterized by play, recess, laughter, art, and singing were far past unless you were willing and able to go the private school route. As we would soon discover, we would be lucky to find a public school that even had recess.

We were also committed to public schools and even though we live in a severely under-resourced and historically neglected school district, we wanted Quyen to attend our local zoned school. I called for an appointment to tour the school and some warning bells went off when the parent coordinator there seemed taken aback by the request—it was rare for parents to tour before deciding to enroll a child in this neighborhood school. The classrooms were big and bright, but the décor was bland and unexciting. The children wore uniforms and the teachers seemed to have a fairly “traditional” (read industrial model) approach to schooling, replete with children in rows of desks, teachers chanting “One-two-three, all eyes on me,” homework (for three- and four-year-olds!), and a behavioral shame/reward system, which in one of the classes consisted of happy and sad “bumbaloo” faces—you didn't want to get a bumbaloo face. We met with the assistant principal, who was warm and seemed to understand where we were coming from, so we decided to give it a shot. It was just pre-K, we reasoned, and we could switch her to another school if it really didn't work out.

Quyen did not take to school well. She wasn't overjoyed to be in school at all (and away from me) for so many hours, but I expected that and thought she just needed time to adjust to such a big change. She began the year speaking a fair amount of English and Spanish, but used Spanish less and less as time went on. I noticed that even though the majority of children at her school heard or spoke Spanish at home, it was not valued or encouraged at school. Although I only saw them at drop-off and dismissal for a few minutes each day, it seemed that the children were restless and joyless. I thought it might have something to do with their feeling cooped up all day, with most of the day spent in regimented, structured “learning.” I started campaigning for the school to have more play in class and outdoor recess, and was surprised to discover that recess, preferably outdoors, is encouraged by the city DOE. Yet the teachers told me that the administration had gotten rid of recess years ago and parents did not miss it. The assistant principal in turn assured me the teachers didn't want recess and most parents were happy not to have the children go outside since there were “safety concerns.” There was a methadone clinic nearby and school officials claimed that they didn't have enough staff to monitor the children in the concrete yard. And besides, I was told, no one wanted to be outside in the cold. But I insisted that they try, and recess was reinstated.

Sadly, several weeks and months into the school year, the reinstatement of recess notwithstanding, things were still not improving. Quyen began almost every morning in tears, complaining that she wasn't well and was too sad to go to school. This was a child who was normally effusive, hard to suppress, and full of curiosity and ingenuity. I, probably channeling some of my own strict and unforgiving childhood upbringing and not wanting to coddle her, forced her to go and adapt to her new environs. But I also wanted to spend some time at her school to try and get a handle on why exactly she was unhappy. It turns out that parents weren't welcome in the school. The teacher (who was untenured) was nervous about my being in the classroom and the Parents Association (PA) was barely functional. The several meetings we attended were run by the principal and consisted mainly of reading the minutes from the previous meeting and various announcements by the PA president and parent coordinator. I tried several times to meet with the principal to no avail. Unsurprisingly, even though I was one of two parents of Asian descent in the school and among the small handful of parents of any ethnic background who came to PA meetings, she also never bothered to learn my name or Quyen's for that matter. And the school was clearly committed to the model of schooling that insisted low-income children of color need vast amounts of rigor and discipline instead of joy, nurturing, and creativity. We finished out the difficult and depressing year there; we had given it a try, but it was time to look for something that hewed just a little closer to our ideal, which admittedly seemed utopian at the time.

A Progressive, Dual-Language Option

During our original search for pre-K, the progressive public school Central Park East One (CPE1) was our first choice, but it's a small school that is highly sought after and we were not able to gain admission for Quyen. So when we learned that Principal Julie was leaving CPE1 to found another school in Washington Heights that would be dual language (English/Spanish)
and
progressive, we were thrilled. Quyen would be going to a school with a mission to provide a high-quality education that is project based and infused with art and music, promotes hands-on learning—and where staff, children, teachers, and families would work together to nourish and support the children's development.

So, getting news of an impending mandatory, standardized, multiple-choice test was like getting a brisk slap. We had managed to get Quyen into a nurturing and challenging school, where the principal and tightly knit staff knew every single child and most of their grownups by first name, and yet we still could not escape the distorted clang of the school “reform” bell. By this time Quyen had gone through a remarkable first year at Castle Bridge. She was learning by doing about a range of topics—life cycles through chicken egg incubation and caring for chicks, balance, math, physics, and problem solving in block work, expressing herself in drawing and writing, as well as having time each day to explore projects of her choosing. She was a “natural” at math, was learning to love music and singing in a choir, developing her socio-emotional self, had learned how to read and write in English, and was starting to do the same in Spanish.

Bubbles Are for Blowing, Not Filling In

It turns out Castle Bridge (as a new school) was among the thirty-some schools in the city that were mandated to give these tests to the littlest students because we did not have students in third through eighth grades who would take the New York State exams. A few of us parents met with Jane Hirschmann from Time Out from Testing to discuss these mysterious tests. We then formed a committee to investigate further.

We put ourselves in our kids' shoes and imagined coming to school—a school we loved, with caring teachers and a supportive environment—and being suddenly thrust into the standardized testing environment:
We usually spend time playing and learning how to take care of ourselves and our friends. But one day, our teacher sits us down and puts a test booklet put in front of us. It has, say, twenty-seven multiple-choice, bubble-in math problems, from which she will read aloud and ask us to “fill in the bubble for the right answer
.
”

Never mind that some of us haven't yet had much experience holding a pencil. Never mind that some of us haven't yet learned how to read. Never mind that we may not recognize numbers yet. To help us locate which question we are to answer, our teacher will prompt us to find the image of the cat, or the key, or the eye. But she can't help us if we are confused, and we can't work together as we are usually encouraged to do. How odd!

Oh, and if we don't speak or understand much English—too bad. If we have learning challenges or disabilities—too bad. We'll actually “get” more time to sit in front of the test and get more frustrated, more stressed, more upset. All this to do what? To help our teacher understand what we know and are able to do with math? No. To make sure we get needed services and support? No.

If supporting our children's learning had been the actual purpose of the Measures of Student Learning (MOSL) tests and they were developed by educators, I and other parents might not have been so up in arms. As it turns out, these tests were not about our children's learning at all. They were in fact about ranking and sorting their teachers. 

Our political “leaders,” both Republicans and Democrats, from President Obama and Arne Duncan to Governor “1%” Cuomo and New York State education commissioner John King, have ignored what's important to parents and instead listened to powerful and wealthy education
de
formers. These officials don't even send their children to public schools.
They
are failing our children, yet they push for our children's teachers to be accountable based on children's test data. All while they opt for their own children to go to schools that don't take these tests, that have small class sizes and project-based, hands-on, arts-infused learning—that's what we want for our children! 

From Opting Out to Mass Refusal

By this point, a handful of us had decided that we would opt out our own children from these MOSLs since, as Diana Zavala, a parent activist and educator affiliated with Change the Stakes (CTS, a citywide parent group), put it, “They can't fire parents.” But we worried about the rest of the children at our wonderful school and hundreds more at the other targeted schools. It was also clear that this test, if unchallenged, would be used to normalize testing kids in younger grades, something that had been off the table for years. We thought, Why not make this a collective stand? After all, we felt sure that other parents, if they knew about these tests and why they were being given, would want to refuse as well.

Elexis Loubriel-Pujols (PTA co-chair with me) and I knew it would be crucial to get the parent body and families informed and mobilized. We and other parents gathered what little info we could, revised an information sheet and sample opt-out letter that we grabbed from the CTS website, and presented at the next PTA meeting. We had a lively discussion about what we understood the test to look like and why it seemed wrong to grade our children's teachers based on our kids' test scores. One Spanish-language-dominant parent brought up his own negative and painful experiences with test anxiety, another talked about transferring his child to Castle Bridge especially to avoid the widespread focus on excessive high-stakes testing in public schools, and yet another of her decision to enroll at the school because of its focus on developing the whole child. There was a question about whether there was any possible benefit to the tests, and we could not see any.

At roughly the same time, a
Daily News
article about the wrongness of bubble testing kindergarteners came out, confirming some of what we knew.
1
Reporter Rachel Monahan had contacted me for that article and I told her that a handful of us had committed to refusing for our kids to take the tests—and that there was a potential larger boycott brewing. Our reasons? There was no educative reason for the tests. We checked with several of our school's teachers and found that they agreed the tests would be no help in their knowing more about our children's development and would potentially be harmful because of the lost class time and focus they would require.