Teach What Matters

Recently I flew to New York City for film project called, "8 Powerful Voices for Public Education."  Below is the address I delivered to make the case for teaching skills that will empower students to challenge oppression and solve societal problems--not just prepare them for the next mind-numbing standardized test. #TeachWhatMatters. Pass it on. https://youtu.be/eXBHmpHLPZ8

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Black to School: The Rising Struggle to Make Black Education Matter

A world where Black lives matter and Black education is empowering will not come easily. It won't be funded by benevolent philanthropists. It won't be promoted by corporate lobbyists or legislated by the politicians they own. It will only happen with an uprising beyond even the scale and militancy of the last century's civil rights and Black Power movements. The contradictions of unhinged police murder of Black people in the "land of the free," coupled with corporate education reformers' racist schooling policies enacted in the name of "closing the achievement gap," are already producing large-scale, renewed social unrest. The question of how powerful this movement grows is up to us.

“The reforms are introduced with blood”–A Oaxaca teacher on the life and death struggle against the testocracy

The teachers in Oaxaca, Mexico have been setting the international standard for social movement unionism and the defense of public education for many years. In her 2005 release of Granito de Arena, my friend, award-winning Seattle filmmaker Jill Freidberg, captured the story of hundreds of thousands of public schoolteachers in Oaxaca who have built a powerful …

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Off the Deep End: The Swim Test vs. The Standardized Test

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 …

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“More Than a Score” TEDx Talk: Jesse Hagopian on the uprising against high-stakes testing and for a meaningful education

I recently gave this talk titled, "More Than a Score," for the TEDx  Rainer event at Seattle's McCaw Hall theater.  In this talk I advocate for the great uprising against reducing our children to a test score and I make an argument to opt in to authentic assessments--not only because it will better engage students, …

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