Seattle Boycott

At Garfield High School, teachers have been boycotting the MAP (Measure of Academy Progress) tests since January. They have received support from other schools around the country, including a high school in Florida and Chicago.  They have also received support from the student government, and from associations such as the American Federation of Teachers, Iowa Education Association, San Diego Education Association and Seattle Education Association.  Teachers are saying that the MAP tests do not test a student's knowledge as they only test a student on one day not the whole school year, thus that is no good way to test a student's knowledge. According to The Seattle Times, “The teachers say they don’t oppose all tests, but think the MAP exams are not appropriate or useful tools for their students.” MAP tests are not standardized tests that will allow you to go into a good college, and a grade is not given to a student for taking the test. I think most students do not know what the MAP tests are testing. In addition, the test is tiring because there might be areas that you have not covered in class and some of the reading passages are quite long to only answer 2 or 3 questions on them. On the other hand, using personal experience, the test creates a sort of competition among the students to see who will score the highest. Nevertheless, most students will start off with some sort of positive attitude as they are missing class, but towards the end of the exam are rushing through it to finish because there seems to be a never-ending amount of questions to complete, one after the other. It is a standardized test and is therefore not adapted to each school’s way of teaching students. 

Jesse Hagopian, a history teacher at Garfield High School mentioned, "None of us is against accountability or rigor, we just want assessments that reflect what we teach in the classroom and that mold our students into successful participants in our various communities".  I think that in today's world, we as students need to learn how to solve problems in life and we will not learn that from standardized tests. For most of us, these tests evoke stress when instead of MAP tests we could be evaluated with an Academic Portfolio that we would work on throughout the school year. This would be a much better way to test an individual because a student would have the whole year to work on their portfolios, they would have more freedom to be creative and really show themselves as individuals. A portfolio would make us unique and focus on strengthening our strengths as well as our weaknesses.  

In the video, Jesse Hagopian makes several good points including one that I feel I should mention below because it is something that most of us will be relate to. He talks about how the MAP tests are taken on the computers thus students who need the lab aren't able to use a computer because of MAP testing going on. I must say that from personal experience this is a frustrating thing mostly because the MAP testing takes a long time.