\doc\web\2000\05\oven.txt From: George N. Schmidt [mailto:Csubstance@AOL.COM] 4/25/00 "I actually think that individual teachers have individual responsibility not to load the data boxcars going to the standards and accountability ovens..." If the cost of the ads is as low as you say, the trick will be to try an assortment and see what brings in the best responses. A couple of facts should be obvious: 1. We're all still trying out various ideas for The Resistance and none is working everywhere. 2. There is a large base among teachers in Washington to build political opposition to the WASL (at least if your news postings are accurate). 3. To think of the ARN list as a "Focus Group" is probably a stretch. Even with Leo in China and a half dozen of us here in New Orleans for AERA, you're getting a very rarified segment of society. I wouldn't recommend convening a focus group of Muslims for my pork product line, and I doubt ARN types will be useful as a focus group for Washington (state) voters. You'd probably do better if you could somehow convene a cabal of loggers, tree huggers, code nerds, and elementary teachers. Calling for a boycott of the tests gets you my vote, but I'm registered to vote in Illinois and (until just recently) I hadn't missed a Democratic Primary election day in my precinct in ten years. You might also ask whether teachers have the right to conscientiously object to subjecting their kids to these tests... "First, do no harm." If we teachers had a Hypocratic Oath, would any of us be administering any of these tests? The boycott should begin with every teacher breaking all the number two pencils and declaring "test day" as a day or reading, dancing, singing, or play. Now people who don't already know can get a better idea of why I'm the teacher Chicago has suspended without pay for the past year -- after I had a distinguished 30-year classroom teaching career in the inner city. I actually think that individual teachers have individual responsibility not to load the data boxcars going to the standards and accountability ovens... George Schmidt Editor, Substance 5132 W. Berteau Chicago, IL 60641 -------------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe from the ARN-L list, send command SIGNOFF ARN-L to LISTSERV@LISTS.CUA.EDU. In a message dated 4/22/00 10:00:41 AM, pfarr@UCLINK4.BERKELEY.EDU writes: <> Hello Pete, You can use the following. I am sending this from New Orleans, where Sharon and I are joining Rich, Wayne, Mary, Lisa, Monty and others against test insanity here at the AERA convention this week. I won't be back in our office and up to speed for another week, so I help the following helps as our statement from here on behalf of your Resistance there in California. I wrote it in a rush, so I hope you'll use your spell checker on it before you pass it around (if you decide to do so). April 25, 2000 Hello California Friends: The crimes of the high stakes testing movement are no more clearly exposed than in the fate of the children and faculties of the public schools that serve Chicago's most impoverished Third World communities. Chicago in the 1990s proves that this national standards and accountability "movement" is an attack on children, teachers, and those who serve the poor by the wealthiest and most hypocritical leaders of American society and politics today. Less than a decade ago, the agenda for public discussion of the problems of the inner city recognized that economic, social, political and educational inequities and injustice in America hurt the children most. Injustice was opposed, not praised. Now that we have high stakes standardized testing, America blames the victims of poverty and racism -- and praises those who profit from our social crimes. The movement for so-called "standards and accountability" based on high stakes standardized test is now a reality, so its political and social fruits can be judged. It is an attack on the poor, on minorities, on immigrants, and on those of us who teach the children of the poor. Chicago is the most developed example of how this attack is done. I can only offer you the briefest outline here of the terrible consequences of this movement. Since 1996, the use of "high stakes" attached to standardized tests in Chicago's public schools has been a pretext for attacking the students, teachers and principals in our city's poorest schools instead of attacking the real social, economic and educational problems underlying schools from inner city communities that score poorly on standardized tests. Since 1996, thousands of children whose only "crime" was being poor (and, usually, African American or Mexican American) have been retained in class (as early as third grade), denied 8th grade graduation, or placed in academic gulags for children who don't reach arbitrary academic cut scores based solely on grade equivalents in the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills. These children became the pawns in a cynical political and public relations game calling "ending social promotion" which for a time made the most ignorant politicians in Chicago nationally famous figures in "Education Reform." Since 1997, hundreds of Chicago teachers and principals (most of them African Americans) have been fired from their jobs and ruined in their careers because they had the courage to spend their careers teaching Chicago's poorest children in our city's roughest schools. The use of high stakes testing in Chicago has been an excuse to praise the already privileged and victimize the least powerful men, women and children in Chicago. The political, economic, social, and educational leaders who have organorganizedsociety to create injustice now praise themselves and blame their victims, to the din of media and public hypocrisy unrivunrivalede the days of Jim Crow and official "separate but equal" in our schools. No longer do we talk about injustices like racial segregation and unequal funding for the schools that serve the children of the poor. Now the wealthy praise themselves for the results of their wealth and blame the children of the poor and the adults who teach the children of the poor for "educational failure." The hypocrisies of American inequality, racism, and class exploitation have made their masterpiece in the high stakes testing movement. Anyone facing high stakes tests before the tragedies have begun to affect your children and teachers should resist to the greatest extent of your abilities now. Tomorrow you will find yourselves facing thousands of tragedies if you let this self-serving politicians' monster in the door of public education. For more than a year, I have been suspended without pay from my Chicago public school teaching job after my organizing and reporting against the city's educational hypocrisy became too much for the powers here to bear. For more than a year, the newspaper I edit (Substance) has been facing a million dollar lawsuit from the leaders of Chicago's school system -- and public denunciation from our Mayor, Richard M. Daley, one of America's most powerful politicians -- for effectively exposing the idiocy of Chicago's "high stakes" and test crazed public school leadership. Our trials and tribulations were worth it. I would rather face their wrath (and their expensive armies of lawyers) than continue to be an active part of the crime against children and against our profession that this test insanity is perpetrating every day in Chicago and elsewhere in America. I believe that the only thing teachers, parents, and concerned educators can do in the fact of the atrocities that come with high stakes standardized testing is to resist by every means possible these politicians' attacks on our schools, our profession, and our children. Good luck to you in your fight. George N. Schmidt Editor, Substance Newspaper 5132 W. Berteau Chicago, IL 60641 -------------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe from the ARN-L list, send command SIGNOFF ARN-L to LISTSERV@LISTS.CUA.EDU.