High-stakes tests disrupt teaching and learning .... By Barbara Madeloni

From Holyoke to New Bedford, schools in our poorest communities are being told that they do not measure up, that the teachers are failing the students, and that mass firings, receivership and new rules must be applied to get our students up to par.

In communities where students come to school hungry, where parents work double and triple shifts but still cannot make enough to support their families, where homelessness and chronic unemployment leave families shaken and uncertain, the word from our education "leaders" is that attention must be paid — to a test score. I yearn for the outrage and vigor that state Commissioner of Education Chester and New Bedford Public Schools Superintendent Pia Durkin hold for low test scores to be applied to economic injustice, racism and chronic underfunding of our schools.

It is a peculiar twist of our data-driven focus that we choose to ignore the numbers that tell us most about children's lives, the economic realities. The average household in New Bedford would need an extra $30,000 a year to get up to the Massachusetts average, and the poverty rate is double that for the state. Across the state, in every case where the school has been designated as supposedly underperforming, we find that at least 75 percent of the students are receiving free lunch because of their families' low incomes. In the John Avery Parker Elementary School, if we look at the absolute level of students' scores, Parker ranks near the bottom. If we instead look at how much the school and the teachers do to improve scores, then Parker is doing better than the average school in the state. Teachers and the school system are being blamed for the poverty in the community, not credited for doing a better-than-average job of teaching and raising scores, in extremely difficult circumstances. How did we get here?

It starts with high-stakes tests, with the idea that we can measure a child or a teacher's worth by a test score. Teachers, students and parents are pitted against each other, using testing to distract us from the real struggles our communities and schools are facing. These tests are used to label teachers and their unions, students and their parents, as failures. Through threats, fear and punitive measures, divisiveness grows.

The testing disrupts the very core of teaching and learning: relationships. It exacerbates the troubling issues of student engagement and family connections, and takes the joy out of learning. The three groups most invested in the hope our schools represent — teachers, students and the parents of those students— are positioned to blame each other rather than to work together. Testing and turnarounds become a great distraction from the conditions of our students' lives, from the complicated work of creating positive and powerful relationships across difference, from the ways our schools, as the center of our democratic project, are becoming more and more autocratic.

We need to name what is really going on. Our communities are struggling against profound economic and racial injustice. Our schools are under-resourced. And policy decisions are being driven by those who hold no respect for teachers, who see our children only as test scores, and who would rather be spending millions on test development than support school communities where there is the time, patience and support necessary for students and teachers to grow. We need to refuse the distraction of testing, talk to each other as teachers, parents and students, and take back the democratic voice that is public education. We need to organize within our union and within our communities to fight for economic and racial justice; to demand jobs, housing, health care and the resources our teachers and schools need.

And we need to stop talking about education as testing and standardization, and start talking about how we — educators, families, community members — raise our young people to enter the world with hope, creativity, imagination, empathy, and the thoughtfulness and critical questioning to face the many problems the future holds, to grow all of the possibilities we wish for them.

This reclaiming of our schools and communities — of our work and our children — can happen if we come together as teachers, paraprofessionals, parents, bus drivers, custodians, secretaries, and students and discover our shared commitment to each other, to the democratic project, to the possibilities in each child.

In that solidarity, we will find our courage and strength.

Barbara Madeloni of Northampton is a former high school English teacher and now a teacher educator. She is currently running for president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association.