������Ƶ

I was excited to read the following headline: “Teacher boycott of standardized test in Seattle spreads” (Valerie Strauss, 1/26/13, ).

I even whooped as loud as I do at basketball games to read, “A boycott of Washington State’s mandated standardized test by teachers at a Seattle school is spreading to other schools and winning support across the country, including from the two largest teachers’ unions, parents, students, researchers and educators.”

Hawaii should follow suit and dump the Hawaii State Assessment, a 10th-grade test mandated from the Bush-era No Child Left Behind law that is still on the books which allows school districts like the one in Seattle and ours in Hawaii to mandate state standardized tests.

By the end of May, I will have given at least 25 standardized tests to my 9th-grade English students. These are separate from our textbook readings. These are not weekly vocabulary quizzes or discussion about the stories, poems, plays we read or films we watch. They have nothing to do with my daily instruction. They are not journal entries, research projects, or posters: those have dropped away from my lesson plans. The standards have taken their place and the stakes are high for tests that reportedly go with them. They mean money and accreditation for the school.

Standardized tests are at the core of teachers’ jobs, but maybe not for long.

Strauss reports that the boycott “has been building momentum in the last year, since Robert Scott, then the commissioner of education in Texas, said publicly that the mentality that standardized testing is the ‘end-all, be-all’ is a ‘perversion’ of what a quality education should be.”

It appears that teachers at Seattle’s Garfield High are so fed up with mandated testing and having their jobs depend on student “achievement” that they are willing to forego pay and even risk being disciplined for their boycott which is now in the news.

I wonder if Hawaii teachers, with the support of the union, could organize boycott. Maybe lawmakers could do what Texas has done and not fund testing mandates for next year.

I notice myself buying in to the “perversion” that high stakes testing demands. It has become my “end-all and be-all.”

Instead of looking at a student’s face, I see a test score. Instead of seeing their potential in art, music, dance, sports, and anything other than guessing correctly at a set of questions, I judge whether I should put up with their misbehavior because they test well, or if I should go ahead and give them consequences in order to be consistent. The students who are terrible test takers … well, I just don’t have time.

Not only do these tests take my precious prep time to Xerox, take away days of instruction, hours to compile, grade, record, analyze, discuss, document, and submit; this is not my choice. If I want my job, I do what I am told by other teachers at the school in charge of testing and reporting the data to the district. If I still do not comply on every single detail, attend every meeting, submit every miniscule bit of data and test, test, test; I am reported as insubordinate to the principal, could lose my job, and receive a poor evaluation (still on the path to losing my job).

Strauss also reports that:

“The decision by teachers at Garfield High School to boycott the state’s Measures of Academic Progress because, they say, the exams don’t evaluate learning and are a waste of time is fueling a growing debate about the misuse of standardized tests in public education.”

“Evaluating learning” by having students take a multiple-choice test in a way that districts can then, in turn, evaluate teachers and teaching. If a student does well, then a teacher is supposedly doing his or her job.

This is not necessarily the case when it comes to teaching and learning. Factor in the multitude of growing brains, the multitude of learning styles, health, and actual skill in Standardized English and its culture, and you have a recipe calling for flexibility, creativity, and attention to individual strengths and needs. Each child would need a different test and different testing situation, different kind of test, in order for it to be fair.

This is what many teachers and lots of parents are getting fed up with, because high stakes standardized testing is just about all that is happening in terms of teaching and learning at school Seattle teachers are calling it a civil rights issue.

Students who do not reach the magic number of 300, well, we fast forward, past those students. A teacher whose students do not reach 300 is seen as inadequate, letting down his or her students as well as the school. That teacher just didn’t follow the standardized lesson plans and must be a bad teacher.

Never mind that the test is in standardized English. Never mind that some students are not great test takers. Never mind that they come to school neglected, over-tired, hungry, depressed, and angry; wary of yet another day of bullying. Never mind that the testing has become meaningless because they have had so many tests. Never mind their teacher whose job depends on their scores. Never mind.

Right, Seattle?

Susan Kay Anderson teaches English at Pahoa High School and Hawaii Community College on the Big Island. She has taught in island schools for nearly two decades.