My friend Gillian Russom teaches high school in the L.A. public schools. She is also a union activist in the United Teachers of Los Angeles, a fierce advocate for social justice, and an outspoken opponent of high stakes testing. Gillian recently wrote this short post about the out-of-control testing happening at her school and I …
Continue reading More Teaching, Less Testing!
By Jesse Hagopian, originally published at The Progressive Magazine As we enter the high-stakes testing season, a great uprising to opt out of these punitive and reductive exams is sweeping the country. So it’s no surprise that corporate education reformers--attempting to defend the multibillion dollar testing industry--have been launching aggressive attacks on the movement. One …
Continue reading Off the Deep End: The Swim Test vs. The Standardized Test
A couple of weeks ago, Gwen Ifill and the PBS News Hour crew flew to Seattle. They spent one day following me and one day following the richest person who ever lived, Bill Gates, to ask us about our ideas on education reform. I was simply shocked to hear that they would be running an …
During the last days of the school year I wrote an essay for my website, I Am An Educator.com, about my kindergarten son opting out of the MAP test. I received an overwhelming number of positive responses to that piece, but none more powerful than from a mother from Minneapolis, Minnesota. Kelly Pylkas-Bock expressed her …
Today marks the first day scheduled for Common Core testing, such as it is, at Seattle's Garfield High School. As I reported last week, Garfield educators were debating about how best to oppose the new deeply flawed Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) Common Core tests, when the parents spoke and opted out hundreds of students …
I AM AN EDUCATOR 
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