The Fight Against High-Stakes Testing: A Civil Rights Movement
The largest ongoing revolt against high-stakes testing in history is currently being waged by teachers, students, parents and administrators at schools across the United States.
Jesse Hagopian is part of it. A history teacher and the Black Student Union adviser atGarfield High School in Seattle, Hagopian and his colleagues made history in 2013, when they chose to boycott their region's standardized test, the MAP.
"I think that we have to see this movement against high-stakes standardized testing as a civil rights movement."
Administered via computer, the MAP test (which stands for Measures of Academic Progress), is given to some 3 million students across the United States and the world. When Garfield's teachers and students boycotted the MAP, they faced threats from the superintendent of schools, but they had the support of their Parent Teacher Association (PTA) and local schools.
"To see students standing up for their own education ... was a powerful moment," Hagopian told the Laura Flanders Show recently.
Garfield's boycott helped inspire acts of resistance across the nation, many of which are written up in More Than a Score: The New Uprising Against High-Stakes Testing, edited by Hagopian and published by Haymarket Press.
In this conversation, Hagopian describes what went into the Garfield boycott, the first resisters (who, he says, are the wealthy who send their kids elsewhere) and the origins of standardized testing in the eugenics movement of the early 1900s. He also imagines an education system fit for a more cooperative economy.
"I think that we have to see this movement against high-stakes standardized testing as a civil rights movement," says Hagopian in this interview.
Watch Jesse Hagopian's interview in full on The Laura Flanders Show, which airs at 9 pm Eastern and Pacific on KCET/LINKtv, (DIRECTV, ch. 375 & DISH Network ch. 9410); in English and Spanish on TeleSUR, or online, with comprehensive archives at GRITtv.org.
Laura Flanders: You call yourself a member of a movement of "test-defiers."
Jesse Hagopian: That's right.
Special spelling, tell us what you mean.
We're a group that is refusing to give high-stakes standardized tests, refusing to take The Fight Against High-Stakes Testing: A Civil Rights Movement: