Graduation Not Incarceration: No to exit exams in Washington!

Some 6,000 high school seniors in Washington are at risk of not graduating because they haven't passed one of the myriad of high-stakes tests, including the Smarter Balance Assessment Consortium (SBAC) Common Core aligned language arts and math exams, as well as a biology end-of-course exam. These students could have met all the other requirements, …

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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.

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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Six Reasons Why the Opt Out Movement is Good for Students and Parents of Color

By Jesse Hagopian, first published in The Progressive magazine Corporate education reformers who seek to reduce teaching and learning to a single score are beginning to realize they are losing the public relations battle. Hundreds of thousands of families across the country are opting out in what has become largest revolt against high-stakes testing in …

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We are opting our first grade son out of the MAP test—here’s our letter explaining why

The infamous MAP test is set to be administered in my son’s school this week. The MAP is a computerized test meant to measure students in math and reading. Seattle Public Schools initially required MAP kindergarten through high school, with multiple testing periods per year. In 2013, Garfield High School launched a boycott of the …

Continue reading We are opting our first grade son out of the MAP test—here’s our letter explaining why