David Michael Miller
Parents, teachers and community members in Madison know there is a lot at stake for our public schools.
That’s why the Barrymore Theatre was packed last week for a screening of the movie Beyond Measure, which documents the national movement to opt out of standardized tests, and shows students, teachers and parents pushing for a much more creative approach to education.
The movie features one of The Progressive’s education fellows, Jesse Hagopian — the teacher who led the boycott of the Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) test at Garfield High School in Seattle — a leader of the national movement to end the “test-and-punish” approach to public schooling.
Another leader of the national opt-out movement, the dean of the school of education at Edgewood College, Tim Slekar, was in the audience at the Barrymore.
After the film, Slekar called for a “revolution” — to stop over-testing and build a richer educational environment for all kids.
The Madison audience seemed ready to respond. But how?
The idea that public schools have failed — a message explicitly promoted in a $30 million campaign by the right-wing, anti-public-sector Bradley Foundation — has been used against our public school system to devastating effect.
We’ve seen the statewide education budget slashed, and the simultaneous rise of a separate, private system of voucher and charter schools, which sucks even more money out of local school districts. We’ve seen the vilification of teachers and the assault on their unions, as part of a strategy pursued by the school choice lobby to argue for breaking up (and cashing in on) our public schools.
Frankly, I was nervous about introducing a movie that makes a harsh critique of traditional public schools. Can our schools be improved? Absolutely! But politically, it’s hard to argue, simultaneously, that there is something seriously wrong with how our schools are functioning, and that we need to defend these same schools with all our might.
I called Jesse Hagopian to talk this problem over before the film.
“This is a difficult conversation to have when the public schools are under such horrific assault by the corporate reformers,” he told me. “But our movement will be stronger if we can talk about a progressive vision for education.”
That vision includes Garfield’s rejection of the MAP test, and African American parents and educators, like Hagopian, demanding the same creative, intellectually stimulating curriculum for kids of color that white, suburban parents want for their own kids.
Hagopian and the Seattle teachers are getting help from the teachers at the New York Performance Standards Consortium, another group of public school teachers who work with kids of color, English language learners and special-needs students to offer deeply engaging, creative, and satisfying instruction.
“We’ve got to do two things at once,” Hagopian added. “Opt out and fight back, and build a progressive, innovative model of education.”
That’s a neat trick to pull off.
In the film, a California charter school called High Tech High shows excited students and teachers in a beautiful, open-classroom environment doing project-based work. A teacher and an administrator from hard-scrabble Trigg County in Kentucky visit the school and are wowed.
In perhaps the most revealing scene in the movie, the Kentucky teacher tries to replicate what she’s seen at High Tech High, and ends up berating a student for the less than brilliant result — a lumpy sculpture made with duct tape and plastic bottles. To be fair, the student had no idea what she expected him to produce.
The lesson: It takes more than buzzwords and bootstraps to change the educational environment. It takes peer support, training and respect for teaching as serious, sophisticated work.
Madison teachers are understandably suspicious about plans to remake education in the current political environment.
Take the “personalized pathways” plan for our high schools, which would connect kids to internships and out-of-classroom research projects. Depending on who you listen to, the plan is either a wonderful opportunity to expand students’ horizons, or a nefarious plot to turn children into “human capital” and do away with the subjects that help create literate and functional citizens.
Schools superintendent Jen Cheatham will present a new charter school plan for Madison in early February. It’s a touchy subject in a state where charters have been draining resources and energy from the majority of students, instead of making schools better for everyone.
Locally, some pro-public-school activists are optimistic that Madison can maintain great schools and better serve minority and low-income kids.
“If this is going to be successful, it has to be for all students — not just a sorting mechanism,” Matt Calvert, a youth development specialist with the UW Extension, said of the “personalized pathways” plan.
Over the next couple of months, the community will have a chance to decide how it shakes out.
Ruth Conniff is the editor-in-chief of The Progressive magazine
