By John Thompson.

Valerie Strauss does a great service for students and schools by showcasing  the “small but growing number of teachers who are refusing to administer standardized tests that they think are harmful to their students and publicly explaining why they are doing so, sometimes at the risk of being fired.” Two outstanding Tulsa teachers have joined educators in Florida and Colorado, as well as students in opting out of standardized testing.

These first grade teachers, Miss Karen Hendren and Mrs. Nikki Jones were featured in a front page Tulsa World and the United Opt Out web site. They wrote an open letter to parents documenting the damage being done by testing and the new value-added evaluation system being implemented by the Tulsa schools under the guidance of the Gates Foundation.

Miss Hendren and Mrs. Jones explain how this obsession with testing “has robbed us of our ethics. They are robbing children of their educational liberties.” Our poorest kids are falling further behind because they are being robbed of reading instruction. By Hendren’s and Jones’ estimate, their students lose 288 hours or 72 days of school to testing!

They inventory the logistics of administering five sets of first grade tests, as classes are prepared for high-stakes third grade reading tests. More importantly, they described the brutality of the process.

Miss Hendren and Mrs. Jones recount the strengths of four students who are victims of the testing mania. One pulls his hair, two cry, one throws his chair, and the fourth, who could be categorized as gifted and talented, is dismayed that his scores are low, despite his mastery of so many subjects. Particularly interesting was the way that “adaptive” testing, which is supposed to be a more constructive, individualized assessment, inevitably results in students reaching their failure level, often prompting discouragement or, even, despair.

Since first graders are too young for high-stakes achievement tests for evaluating individual teachers, Tulsa relies on high-stakes student survey data. So, teachers can be sanctioned by the answers to questions such as, “Are you sleepy at school?”

Still, the abuse of teachers isn’t as bad as a regime that makes children “pee their pants.”

Tulsa has an otherwise excellent superintendent, Keith Ballard, who has opposed state level testing abuses. He has invested in high-quality early education and full-service community schools.  Ballard also deserves credit for investing in the socio-emotional. I doubt he would be perpetuating this bubble-in outrage if he had a choice. But Tulsa accepted the Gates Foundation’s grant money. So, Ballard is threatening the teachers’ jobs.

It is inconceivable that Ballard now feels comfortable with this part of the bargain he made – because he accepted corporate reformers’ money, he’s trapping into a system that drive a Lead teacher and professional development contributor, like Hendren, to take such a professional risk. This April, NPR’s Claudio Sanchez and Cory Turner reported on Jones, whose “firm but gentle” manner demonstrates how “play should be the beating heart of a child’s preschool experience.” NPR said that she “arrives each morning brimming with ideas and strategies rooted in research and good pedagogy. Indeed, what looks like an art project with acorns, pine cones, glass beads and a film projector is also a stealth math lesson. Jones says her kids love to count, add and subtract with little or no direct instruction.”

Fortunately, the president of the Tulsa Classroom Teachers Association and a member of the National Education Association board of directors, is showing courageous leadership. Patti Ferguson-Palmer  wrote the following “Open Letter of Support for Two Brave Teachers” on Tuesday morning:

Nikki Coates-Jones and Karen Hendren, are speaking out on a national level against toxic testing and ‘accountability’ measures which take away precious instructional time from our classrooms. They are passionate about teaching and are deeply committed to their own students and to all students whose experiences in school have become dry and joyless due to constant test preparation and data mining.

These ladies are widely recognized as highly effective teachers and these highly-effective teachers have had enough. They are refusing to administer the MAP test and student surveys to their first-graders. They are part of the United Opt-Out movement and they are courageously speaking on behalf of students and teachers who have suffered in silence for too long.

I give them my full support and encouragement and I will be with them as they take this path.

What do you think? Is it time to expand the Opt Out movement? We can all support those who Opt Out, can’t we?

Photo by Eden, Janine and Jim, used with Creative Commons license.