Not All Parents Oppose Excessive Testing
The credit for this article goes to the great Alexander Russo, who urged journalists to do a better job reporting on testing by finding the many parents and students who don't oppose excessive standardized testing. This is much the same way that the media overemphasized Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier, when the vast majority African American ballplayers were content to stay in the Negro Leagues.
Alexander Russo has long been a friend of this blog and that's because he has a clear way of getting to the bottom of a story. When other "journalists" were reporting on the teachers at two Chicago Public Schools refusing to give the ISAT, Russo saw that the real story was the nearly 50 people on his blog who vented about CPS principals.
I didn't have to go much further than Chicago's Bernard E. Epton School of Sufficiency. For those of you who don't remember, the Epton School got in some trouble last year when the principal was caught importing unlicensed standardized tests from China. The principal, Dr. Michelle Perry claimed she acted at the urging of her teachers who noticed a 2 month period in the beginning of the year when there was no standardized testing in the school.
I was fortunate enough to get a chance to interview an entire family about their pro-standardized testing attitude and how they have found a home at Epton. I was joined by