California road trip shows widespread resistance organizing
Report on CalCARE Resistance Road Trip, September 2007 Susan Harman, Rich Gibson, and Bob Apter
First of all, our thanks to everyone who took the time to meet with us, feed us, house us, and give us your thoughts. I hope this Report does you justice.
Who we are: Rich has been an NEA organizer and bargaining specialist, and is currently an Emeritus Professor at San Diego State. Bob is an old friend of his and a UAW organizer in New York. They are both founders of the Rouge Forum, a decade-old organization of parents, students, educators, and community people dedicated to social justice and equality in schools and out. And Susan is a partly retired principal and teacher, and a founder of CalCARE, which is the CA affiliate of FairTest, and which has led the resistance movement in CA since 1999. We have a website at calcare.org, and a listserv called Cal Resisters, which you can join at our site.
What we did: Rich and Bob left San Diego on Septemb9, 2007, and we had our last meeting on the 20, 2007, after two weeks on the road. Rich says he clocked 2,444 miles (California’s a big state). We met with people in nine counties. The meetings were small, intense, and useful. They involved teachers, parents, school board members, administrators, and union officials.
What we found: We began this Road Trip to collect information about what’s going on in the various parts of the state where we already had contacts; and to see people’s responsiveness to linking the corporate takeover of our schools (rigid curriculum, the tests, inequality) with the corporate takeover of our country (in particular, the war(s)). In brief, we found anguish for the loss of our profession and the joylessness of teaching in these times, an unnerving amount of fear and isolation, but hunger for information about resistance as well as the energy to DO SOMETHING, lacking only direction.
Let me stress that the overwhelming reason for not acting is FEAR: of getting bad evaluations, of getting transferred, of getting fired (“I have a mortgage to pay”), of costing their school the loss of federal money; for high school students it’s fear of not getting recommendations for college; for academics, I have no idea what their excuse is. It seems clear that having friends is the antidote to fear; the more of us there are united in this effort, the safer each of us is. But the longer we wait to act, the more the safety of each of us is jeopardized. THE TIME TO ACT IS NOW!
Let me clear up the money issue right now. “The threat of federal dollars being withheld is all but toothless, mainly because Congress restricted this penalty to ‘administrative dollars,’ and applied it only to failure to submit acceptable ‘plans’ to Washington, not to weak academic performance.” (from Can This Law Be Fixed?: A Hard Look at the No Child Left Behind Remedies, Frederick M. Hess & Chester E. Finn Jr., August 29, 2007, Education Outlook.)
Money is complicated, because it comes in several pots. The part of NCLB that would affect us is the requirement to test 95 percent of students. If you don’t test that many, you can’t make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), no matter how high your scores are. There’s Title I, which all poor schools get, and which isn’t contingent on making AYP. There’s Reading First, which only schools that signed up for it get. Then there’s Title III for ELLs, and other much smaller Titles for different things. Actually, the money isn’t totally clear to me yet.
I’m working on a list of questions (and sometimes answers) that one of the teachers we met with put together. I’ll get it out soon.
Our first meeting was in Saratoga, an upper-middleclass suburb of San Jose. Everyone at the meeting (parents and principal) came from a small alternative progressive school, where most parents opted out. The outspoken and principled principal who opposed a test-based curriculum had been transferred, and the kids had graduated into high school, where they are being pressured to test. The high schools’ tactics are vicious: threats to withhold letters of recommendation for college, to not allow them to enroll in AP classes (Cupertino H.S.), and in one child’s case, actually denying her a “good citizenship” award. Needless to say, the kids are conflicted, and the parents are angry.
I called Cupertino H.S. and was told they have no policy re opt outs and AP classes, and that they’re open to everyone. The woman I talked with did caution me that a child who would score high but who opts out is risking lowering the school’s ranking, which would reflect back on the child; a college could say, “Oh you come from a high school that had an API of only 998 instead of 1000.” Oh my god.
(For non-Californians, the API is the Academic Performance Index, and predated NCLB. All schools are supposed to make 800, and 1,000 is the highest possible. We call it the Affluent Parents’ Index.)
The principal has published his views in the San Jose Mercury News, and said the district superintendent privately agrees with him but publicly supports the tests. (We heard this everywhere we went.) The principal has met with the local State Assemblyperson, and he set up a debate between himself and a new, mid-career change teacher who was pro-testing, but by the time they’d met a few times to arrange logistics, he’d changed the teacher’s mind. They faked the debate.
They also told us about a small local school that scored 1,000 (a perfect score) on the API, in 2005-06. In 2006-07 they plummeted to 996 and everyone was hysterical. The school had been 95% Asian and 5% white, with 1 English Learner (EL), 1 child eligible for free/reduced lunch, 100% credentialed teachers, and most parents having college or graduate degrees. The change in demographics that probably explains their dramatic (4 point) fall from grace is the addition of 1 Pacific Islander.
The next evening we were in Santa Cruz, another wealthy community (houses cost $700,000). Everybody is worried about paying the mortgage. We met with a woman who’s been organizing for years and is discouraged, and two teachers. All are also parents. They said it was hard enough to run their classrooms well, much less take on organizing a larger group. Again, they are all involved in a lovely, small, progressive oasis, which has so far escaped the heavy hand of curriculum cops. They said that the federal money that comes with NCLB is the issue for the town. The district tried to turn Title I down and the community revolted. The union, an AFT local, is concerned with salary and benefits, and not quality of the workplace. The district uses Houghton-Mifflin. (Maybe the districts with only H-M, and not Open Court, aren’t as oppressed, therefore not as desperate, therefore not as ready to act?)
Everyone everywhere asked about sanctions: what they are, when they are supposed to take effect, if in fact they get enforced. One person at this meeting said she had a friend in a “Year Six” school in another district to which nothing had happened. (Again, California has been testing a long time, so we have schools that are further down the path to hell than other states.)
They emphasized that high school kids in Santa Cruz are very strong, thereby being the first meeting to make clear that we need a coalition of groups: parents, teachers, high school kids, and (as someone pointed out in Visalia) classified employees, who tend to also be parents. Obviously, teachers can get to kids, but we also need to know what organized groups they belong to (e.g., CAs for Justice, Youth Together). Kids are easy to organize these days through the Internet and texting.
They said that a few prominent local educators publicly signing on would be invaluable, and most importantly, they asked for a plan. Let’s give them one!
Bob and Rich then had an extensive meeting with Kathy Emery in San Francisco to discuss her research and experiences with Freedom Schooling. The key concepts they came away with: We need to get ready to be ready—as with the base-building that went on for years prior to what appeared to be the explosive sudden arrival of the civil rights movement. And she pointed out the severe problems of the “foundations funding complex,” in which progressive movements compete against each other for money, and sometimes distort their goals to match the foundations’ goals.
Richmond (just north of Berkeley) was next, with Marilyn the Marvelous organizing a good-sized meeting. Richmond is a hotbed of organizing, and home of March for Education. There was a university professor who is eager to help, but also needs a plan. And unique to this meeting was a community organizer from Justice Matters, who runs a parent academy. They had a forum the next week, which presented their study of the poisonous effect of the tests on schools. The report is called Behind Test Scores: Teaching and Learning Under Arrest, and is available at www.justicematters.org.
The teachers there told us about a staff development which told them to divide the day into sections proportional to the number of items on the tests (e.g., “Literary Response and Analysis” is 9 percent of the state test, so that’s all the time you should spend on it), honest. Here’s the url: http://www.cde. ca.gov/ta/tg/sr/blueprints.asp
In response to our linking resistance to the tests with resistance to the war, they suggested using a new book by Amy Allison and David Solnit, Army of None, with high school students.
Rich told about an accidental organizing technique used in Detroit. Someone set up community gardens, and as people began using them, they began talking to each other, and organizing. He used this as an example of the importance of knowing each other well enough to trust each other.
People seemed to recognize clearly the connections between rising inequality, war, and the tests and curricula regimentation.
By the way, their Congressperson is that snake, George Miller, one of the sponsors of NCLB.
The Lagunitas School District serves the San Geronimo Valley’s four tiny towns (Woodacre, San Geronimo, Forest Knolls and Lagunitas) in the gorgeous wilds of Marin County, just north of San Francisco. Its school has three elementary programs: Waldorf, Montessori, and Open Classroom, and a middle school. Those who don’t approve of progressive ed send their kids over the hill to other Marin County schools. If it sounds like heaven, you’re close to right. Ninety percent of the Open Classroom kids have opted out for years, and the Montessori program tested less than the mandated 95 percent. The district has been in Program Improvement for three years with the additional paperwork and increased scrutiny that entails. Most of their middle school kids take the tests.
Lynne Woolsey is their Congressperson. Of the six people at the meeting, two were on the school board, two were retired teachers, one works in parent education, and the sixth is a former Board member from the Tamalpais High School district over the hill. They have a committee ongoing in the district that is charged with recommending a response to NCLB, which has already passed a resolution calling for its abolishment.
Rich distinguished among Grand Strategy (utopia, peace and justice, etc.); Strategy, which is specific to communities; and Tactics, like boycotts, press conferences, freedom schools.
Rick (from over the hill) reminded us that several years ago half the kids at Drake H.S. and huge numbers at Tamalpais H.S. opted out, with great flyers, because testing represents a distortion of education and a very real danger to learning because it forces curriculum into circumscribed packages. The Drake students walked out on testing days and held ‘teach-ins’ [Freedom Schools] elsewhere. Their mass refusal attracted great attention not only at the state level, where the governor and his education secretary were angry and reactive (phoning the local superintendent and demanding “answers”), but on a national level as well. Rick got calls from the New York Times and quite a few other media outlets, and they appeared on radio shows debating representatives from the CA Ed Department.
Lagunitas gets $40,000 in Title I.
Ideas: rally therapists and counselors to make a statement to the press about the stress kids are under, the attempted suicides (I think he said 11 at one high school last year)
Publish the released questions (this is legal) and have discussions about them
Publish the state standards and ask people to guess what grade they’re for
Edit down the video of Alfie Kohn’s wonderful presentation that we made years ago (it’s two hours long)
List the ten most common arguments pro tests and responses to them
Put their superintendent in touch with the San Jose principal
Boycotts in middle class locales are dismissed because all these kids will go to college regardless. So we need to team up with a poor district. Susan will put them in touch with the Justice Matters organizers in Richmond, starting with the Justice Matters meeting on Oct. 2.
Some especially interesting comments from this meeting were:
“How do intelligent, loving parents continue to allow this to happen?”
“There is a syndrome where people say, ‘we agree with you but don’t tell anyone.’”
“This is child abuse and people know about it, but they don’t do much of anything.”
In this last case, the law says if you know about abuse and don’t report it, you are an accomplice. CA law says all school personnel are mandated reporters.
In Petaluma (a little farther north) we met at the union office, an AFT local. Everyone there was a teacher (and one husband — a parent). There are 14 schools in Petaluma. They use Houghton Mifflin. They spoke of how much worse things were in Santa Rosa, where they use Open Cult. Latinos aren’t doing well on the CAHSEE (CA High School Exit Exam). The superintendent is “consciously schizophrenic.”
Teachers are distraught about the ruination of the curriculum, at both the elementary and the high school levels. One teacher resents the loyalty oath/security affidavit you have to sign before you can touch a test. She wonders what would happen if she refused to sign it. Probably, like everything else, something bad if she did it alone and probably nothing if the whole school did it. It would present a problem for the testers, though, because of their need for secrecy.
The district is imposing what they call “fidelity”, which means everybody should be on the same page at the same time. Fidelity also appears to mean a harshly enforced form of loyalty, as in threats to teachers who might tell parents about the opt out right.
Some memorable quotes from this meeting:
“There is no will to fight the tests in my school if we can still close our doors and teach.”
“We are threatened to not tell parents about opt-out rights.”
“I have horror stories of kids losing control of their bowels about tests.”
“The seventh grade language arts standards have 300 discrete skills, and the tests address 20.”
“Parents voted funding increases for arts and music programs, but tests wiped that out.”
“We need to know about our jobs better, comparisons about what it is like to teach from school to school, so we can see common problems.”
“What drives our district more than anything is money.”
One parent had asked the state for the names of the schools that are “similar” to them in the official “similar schools ranking.” CDE couldn’t tell him. Also, Gary said he’s asked around at statewide meetings and nobody’s ever said they’d been part of a NAEP test.
Petaluma just passed a parcel tax increase, and we wondered if taxpayers would be angry if they knew the money was being used to buy the subjects test prep has pushed out of the schools (like music, art, dance, PE, etc).
Teachers were confused and outraged about the 2nd grade test. The truth is that the 2nd grade tests were due to stop this year (Senate Bill 1448, passed in 2004), but Ahnold [Schwarzenegger, our governator] reinstated them as payoff for getting the budget approved. This is totally undemocratic, and we should all write to him and complain. Here’s the relevant text:
“SB 1448, Alpert. Pupil assessment.
(1) Existing law, the Leroy Greene California Assessment of Academic Achievement Act, requires each school district, charter school, and county office of education to administer to each of its pupils in grades 2 to 11, inclusive, certain achievement tests. Existing law repeals the act on January 1, 2005. This bill would extend the repeal date of the act to January 1, 2011, thereby imposing a state-mandated local program. The bill would, commencing July 1, 2007, exclude pupils in grade 2 from the standards-based achievement test requirement and make conforming changes.”
