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Conscientious objectors typically protest serving in the military.
But a growing number of teachers are becoming conscientious objectors to protest the harm done to their students by high-stakes standardized testing.
Last week, two Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) teachers announced that they intend to claim conscientious objector status and ask to be reassigned when their students are scheduled to take their tests. They’re part of a national movement to encourage teachers to opt out of high-stakes standardized testing of public students that don’t truly measure a student’s intelligence or aptitude.
Dale Weiss and Cathy Jester made the announcement at a union- and community group-sponsored event featuring Diane Ravitch, who served as assistant secretary of education during the George W. Bush administration and became a strong critic of standardized testing and school privatization after monitoring their initial implementation.
Weiss and Jester say that they cannot in good conscience administer the computer-based Badger Exam, the state’s new Common Core-aligned test for third through eighth graders, when 70% of the students are expected to fail. Students will take the exam in the final eight weeks of this academic year. Low test scores will be met with sanctions, loss of resources or even more extreme measures, testing critics warn, even though the test itself may be causing the poor results.
Weiss, a third grade MPS teacher with a doctorate in education, said she took a portion of the Badger Exam for third graders twice to preview it. Both times she found the questions and directions to be confusing and the technology constantly malfunctioned. The second time she took the exam, she answered only three of 12 questions correctly. Her frustration turned to anger, she told the audience.
“I got very little sleep that night,” Weiss said. “I kept thinking about my third grade students. I cannot begin to fathom what the experience of taking the Badger Exam would be like for these 8- and 9-year-old children.”
She said they’d be labeled as failures simply because they took a poorly designed exam.
“I know that there is no part of my moral fiber and good conscience that could be complicit with something I know to be so harmful for students, something I know to be so very wrong,” Weiss said, before announcing she would claim conscientious objector status.
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Jester, a seventh-grade MPS teacher with a master’s degree, said she tried the preview of the exam as well and gave up in frustration. She said her students would likely fail because the test designers want that result.
“The standardized test was specifically designed so 70% of students would fail,” Jester said. “I am extremely angry about this. My students deserve a fair chance to pass. All students do. No student should be destined to fail just because the test was designed that way. This design is harmful to my students and to all students.”
Ravitch, the author of Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools and The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education, said shutting down schools for low test scores is “unprecedented” in our history.
“Until the past decade schools were never closed because of low test scores,” Ravitch said. “Low test scores are distress signals. They usually signify schools that have high poverty, a high number of English language learners and intense segregation. Low scores should be a call for support, a call for help, a call for action by superintendents, by city officials, by state officials, by federal officials. Now it is a signal to fire the staff, close the school and hand it over to private management.”
She was sharply critical of reformers who don’t know anything about education but see an opportunity to profit from public schools.
“Today the people who call themselves reformers don’t want to actually reform the public schools, they want to tear them down, privatize them, monetize them, hand them over to private managers,” Ravitch said. “When equity investors hold annual conferences about how to make a profit in the public education sector, you know that something fundamental has changed.”
