CHICAGO, March 10 — Chanting, “Let Us Teach”, 250 teachers, parents, and students rallied in support of 25 Chicago teachers who have taken the bold step of refusing to give a state-mandated test. The Illinois State Achievement Test (ISAT) is given over an eight-day period for two hours a day. In addition to teacher boycotters, more than 1,000 parents have signed “opt-out” letters telling the schools they don’t want their children to take the test. Top dogs at Chicago Public Schools (CPS) have had a virulent reaction to the stand taken by teachers and parents.
CPS has called opting-out parents every day for a week urging them to have their children take the test. They have patrolled the classrooms of active anti-ISAT schools, making sure that testing, not teaching, was occurring. Although non-testing students should have been allowed to read a book or engage in another quiet learning activity, at some schools students were forced to just sit there with the test booklet in front of them. Teachers were threatened with loss of their teaching license. At Saucedo School, where 20 teachers boycotted, educators were admonished for teaching opted-out students. They were told not to do any more teaching, just to supervise silent activities.
This seemingly irrational behavior on the part of those running the school system is motivated by power and control. As U.S. capitalism fights to retain its world dominance and prepares for the next world war, they need to control education. This was made very clear in the March 2012, Council on Foreign Relations report about military preparedness.
They write that more than half of all high school students either don’t graduate or are unable to pass the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery and “many U.S. generals caution that too many new enlistees cannot read training manuals for technologically sophisticated equipment.” Condoleezza Rice and Joel Klein, authors of this report, recommend “the creation of more meaningful assessments and simulations of student learning and, then, a coordinated, national effort to create targets and repercussions tied to the Common Core.”
ISAT is an old test, not tied to the national Common Core standards, but CPS does not want teachers and parents to get in the habit of deciding what to teach or what tests students should take. Current education policies — national standards, attacks on unions, and accountability tied to test scores — are consistent with a plan to shape the workforce and the military to best serve capitalist interests. Schools have always played this role, but the intensity of worldwide competition makes schools particularly important now.
The teachers who bravely stood up to CPS and decided to teach, not test, put the interests of the students first. They broke the rules. Although these teachers are not communists, they have demonstrated the important communist principle of allegiance to the working class. This display of allegiance also brought on the harsh CPS reaction. PLP looks forward to the day when even more students, teachers, and parents rise up against the racist, oppressive education capitalists provide and fight for a communist future.