14 The Hampton Roads Messenger Our Education


Volume 9 Number 1


September 2014


High Stakes Testing is 'Toxic' Warns New NEA President


new tests will be computer-based and will require students to articulate their answers in writing, instead of filling in bubbles. California is still working out how to use the tests in teacher evaluations.


Eskelsen García told audience


members Wednesday that she was initially “as critical as anyone” of the


Extremism FROM PAGE 1


Above: NEA President-elect Lily Eskelsen García (at podium), CTA Secretary Treasurer Mikki Cichocki, and UTLA President Alex Caputo-Pearl. (Credit: Tammy Gann)


BY PETER SCHURMANN LOS ANGELES – Stories


about Lily Eskelsen García typically mention the fact her career began as a lunch lady in a local school in her native Utah. But the new head of the nation’s largest teacher’s union, the National Education Association, offers a slightly different take: “I was the salad girl,” she said. “They wouldn’t even trust me with hot food.”


On the urging of a kindergarten


teacher she later returned to school, paying part of her way by singing folk songs in coffee shops around Salt Lake City. Nine years later Utah named her Teacher of the Year.


This September, she takes the


helm of the 3 million-member NEA. As the first fluent-Spanish speaker to hold the post, she comes in just as a majority of the nation’s public school students will be non-white for the first time in the country’s history. She also comes in amid heated political battles over the future shape of U.S. classrooms, from the Common Core education standards to legal tussles over teacher tenure rules and the growing charter school movement.


Speaking at a briefing for ethnic


media in Los Angeles Wednesday, Eskelsen García acknowledged the challenges ahead of her. “What we’re up against,” she said, “are people who use good words like reform, and


accountability, and progress.” But their real meaning will be to “narrow what it means to teach a child to fit on a standardized test.”


Eskelsen García believes the push toward high stakes testing and efforts to measure teacher performance on how well students do on these tests is "poisoning what it means to teach and learn in this country." She points to Texas, where she says teacher salaries have been determined by test results, leading many to artificially inflate scores. In Oklahoma, some 8000 third graders were held back because they failed to “hit a cut score that some politician decided meant something.”


Eskelsen García described such practices as “toxic.”


Echoing her comments, U.S.


Secretary of Education Arne Duncan on Thursday stated that high stakes tests were “sucking the oxygen out of rooms in a lot of schools.” He also said states could delay for another year using tests in teacher performance ratings. The move is sure to please NEA members, who last month approved a resolution calling on Duncan to resign.


Meanwhile states across the


country continue to roll out new standardized


tests aligned with


the Common Core. California will introduce its own version of the Common Core test, known as the Smarter Balance, next spring. The


addressing criminal justice disparities, and expanding rights in such areas as voting, marriage equality, immigrant policy and labor.


Barber says these issues also


are important in Minnesota, a prime reason why he accepted the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers (MFT) invitation to come here “to learn what’s going on in Minneapolis. We also know that there are extreme levels of poverty and unemployment in [Minnesota], particularly on how it impacts African Americans.”


Although state voters two years


ago did reject the Voter ID proposal, Barber warns Minnesotans to “not rest on our laurels. The fact that you had to even vote down a Voter ID [proposal] or to vote down an attempt to suppress the vote today says that, whether you are in Minnesota or in Mississippi, you should be deeply concerned about extremist Tea Party-type policies that want to take us backwards.


“That’s why in Minnesota you


had to fight Voter ID. There is a strand in politics…that seems to be bent on going backwards.”


He strongly believes that every


American should have equal protection under the law. “You cannot remove that right of protection from someone because [of] their race, their creed or their color, or because of their income, class or their sexual orientation. It’s just not right.”


“We had to bring Rev. Barber


here,” said MFT President Lynn Nordgren prior to the visiting North Carolina minister’s dinnertime speech to educators, officials and others last Friday at the Millennium Hotel in downtown Minneapolis. Barber also led a “March for Equity” on Nicollet Mall in downtown Minneapolis during his two-day stay last week.


“There is a longing for a moral


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compass” in this country,” said Barber in a sermon-like speech that time and time again brought the audience to their feet, clapping affirmatively on his insistence that working together — “a fusion coalition,” as he called it — is deeply necessary in this country.


“We wouldn’t be talking about a


moral movement if it was just Black [people],” said the pastor. “We say we’re an anti-racist, anti-poverty fusion moral coalition. You got to build broad in your language in order to be broad in your actions.”


As a result, Moral Mondays


have engaged people of “all different colors and races, and political parties, over 1,000 clergy — Jewish, Muslim, Christian, Bihai, Buddhist and other [faiths]. We got labor unions, civil rights, women and GLBT working together like never before. We’ve


Common Core standards, which were designed to revamp the way schools instruct and assess students. She has since come to support them, though she said her fear is that they will be “corrupted” by efforts to limit what textbooks schools could use and to create “cut scores that determine if a student gets punished.”


made a state movement a national issue.


“Sometimes you may not be


able to change the politicians but you can change the climate in which the politicians have to exist,” said Barber. “When you build a platform, not for the politicians but for the everyday person, and when you put a face on the pain, and people can see it, then you can shift the center of [discussion].”


Barber added that “rollback


politics” in North Carolina is occurring in other GOP-dominated state legislatures as well. “When you can run for office and actually say to folk, ‘Elect me and I will do everything I can to undo the promise of America,’ we are in a moral crisis.


“These are not just policies” but


rather “political extremism” being enacted on the people, stated Barber. He strongly suggested that the current moral crisis in America “demands people to stand up for what’s right.”


These “extremist attacks” on the


poor and low-income “working people and the unemployed” in this country “are constitutionally inconsistent, morally indefensible, historically inaccurate and economically insane,” he said. “If they are unified enough in their attempt to go backwards, we certainly ought to build a fusion coalition and be unified to keep us pushing forward.”


Asked for comment on the recent


police shootings in Ferguson, Missouri and other places, Barber said, “I am deeply concerned about the violence we’ve seen in the last two weeks… Of profiling African American males, we cannot have one more episode of ‘police gone crazy.’ There has to be some investigation and has to be prosecution.


“The question is what do we do, or what kind of society are we in when certain persons with the power of the badge and the power of a gun decide that their role is not to protect and to serve but to prey and shoot our citizens because of their class or their color — not just for Black people, but for all people.


“We also have to raise our voices


against killing in our community by our own,” he continued. “We at the [local] NAACP have spoken on both those issues. What sustains me is my faith,” said the longtime pastor. “I just believe that the only meaningful life is [one in which] you engage in the cause of justice, love and righteousness, and seeing your fellow man and woman uplifted. Those are some of the things that keep us going.”


Barber said although he didn’t


plan for Moral Mondays, “We are chosen sometimes by [the] time. The spirit of the movement took all of us over. There’s a certain strength that comes from the people.”


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