Brooklyn Teachers Strike a Blow Against Excessive Testing with May Day Boycott

[marmar]

(In These Times) On May Day 2014, a group of teachers at the International High School at Prospect Heights (IHSPH) in Brooklyn stood outside their school building and informed gathered reporters that they would not be administering the New York City English Language Arts (ELA) Performance Assessment Exam scheduled to take place that day. The test, which is part of a new teacher evaluation system imposed by the state last year, exists solely to rate teacher performance; unlike, for example the Regents Exam, which dates back to 1866 and determines whether students graduate. Thirty people—nearly all of the teachers and staff at the small public school—signed a statement declaring they would not participate.

The date was a coincidence—May Day, the internationally recognized workers' day, happened to be the day the test was scheduled—but it could not have been better for the teachers' action. Amid growing unrest among teachers, parents and students over high-stakes testing and the new Common Core educational standards, these teachers' action is another step in challenging what new Massachusetts Teachers Association President Barbara Madeloni (whose recent victory I cover in a forthcoming piece) calls “predatory education reform,” driven by private companies that aim to run schools like corporations and pocket the profits.

“This is taking back the whole conversation around education,” Rosie Frascella, a 12th grade English teacher at IHSPH, tells In These Times. That conversation has been dominated by heated rhetoric from “reformers” and anti-union elected officials about “bad” or “lazy” teachers, but Frascella and her colleagues challenged that idea by putting themselves on the line to do what they believed was right. “I'd rather take a zero, you can fail me in my evaluations but you are not going to hurt my students. You can say I'm a bad teacher but I'm standing up for my students and what I know is right for them.”

After their press conference, the teachers proceeded into the building, where, according to Emily Giles, who teaches ninth- and 10th-grade science at IHSPH, they taught class as they would have any other day. Although 50 percent of the students had already been opted out of taking the test by their parents, Giles says administrators still attempted to give the test to a small handful—with little success. ..............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/16679/protest_the_test