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critical thinking
Schools Are No Place for the ADL
Educators must consider the actual cost of a free program like “No Place for Hate,” whose sponsor conflates antisemitism with anti-Zionism, files civil rights complaints against schools, and promotes Israel propaganda in the classroom.
Jan 02, 2025
Launched in 1913 to counter antisemitism and discrimination, the Anti-Defamation League, or ADL, now resembles a mythological shapeshifter that presents alternately as a civil rights organization and a pro-Israel propagandist.
In its “No Place for Hate” program that caters to both elementary and secondary schools, the ADL’s stated mission is to empower students, teachers, and parents to “stand against bias and bullying... ” with school-wide pledges, projects, and games aimed at celebrating diversity and stamping out hate in the halls, in the cafeteria, in the reading circle, anywhere that hate may manifest.
In Norse mythology, the jealous god Loki is a shapeshifter who appears alternately as a salmon or an old woman. Disguised as the old woman, Loki—the god of darkness—carves an arrow out of mistletoe to trick the blind god Hodr into hurling an arrow at his exalted twin brother, Baldr—the god of light.
The ADL is not a salmon or a singular old woman, but a cunning policy advocate that despite allegations of spying on social justice movements and targeting Arab-led organizations has popularized its “No Place for Hate” lessons in 2,000 schools, reaching 190,000 educators and 1.8 million students—according to the ADL website.
Sure, the program offers banners draped across hallways, pledges and to-do lists, even sage advice now and then, but the pretty package turns ugly once fully opened and scrutinized for its pro-Israel indoctrination.
In the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) of over 500,000 students, No Place for Hate schools either currently or previously included Roosevelt High School, Amelia Earhart Middle School, Benjamin Franklin Elementary School, Mark Twain Elementary School, and others. The LAUSD Office of Student Civil Rights links to the ADL under “Tools for Educators,” which in turn links to an article attacking American Muslims for Palestine for “being at the core of the anti-Israel and anti-Zionist movement in the United States.” In 2022, LAUSD board member Scott Schmerelson, now board president and often a champion of public education, authored a resolution instructing the superintendent to invite the ADL to update and revise curriculum.
While selling schools on activities to bolster respect and community, the ADL—analogous to the shapeshifter in mythology—engineers the death of debate over Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish nationalist state in historic Palestine.
In a No Place for Hate lesson on scapegoating, the ADL writes, “Debates about the legitimacy of Israel’s existence or demonization of Israelis create an unsafe climate for Jewish students and interrupt opportunities for critical thinking for all students.” Notice how the ADL wrongly mixes debate over a nation state’s political ideology with demonization of individuals in that state—all in the same sentence to discourage critical analysis and evaluation.
Schools that subscribe to this sort of speech suppression, ruling out debate over an ethnostate colonizing, annihilating, and terrorizing Palestinians, are like the blind brother who hurls a lethal dart—only this time the weapon of propaganda pierces the institution of education to silence inquiring minds wrestling with the devastation live-streamed on their cell phones.
In Japanese mythology, the nine-tailed kitsune-yako fox can take human form to infiltrate high society, where the yako appears as a seductive woman to level a lethal curse—a scar, a burn—on an unsuspecting yet powerful man.
If only the man had been more observant, he might have noticed a few furry fox tails sticking out of the back of the yako’s dress. Yes, the shapeshifter can be unmasked provided those it targets are willing to look behind the facade.
The Lure of a Packaged Curriculum
The ADL lures schools with its anti-bias No Place for Hate program by claiming to help administrators, teachers, and parents build “inclusive and safe communities in which respect and equity are the goals and where all students can thrive.” It’s hard to resist such a pitch, particularly when it comes with banners, buttons, balloons, and bracelets as part of a polished package that outlines a step-by-step approach to creating community through “I Am” poems; peer-to-peer interviews; school surveys; and collages of diverse, smiling students.
The program, however, warrants deeper analysis, so best to begin with the basics.
How a School Qualifies—Registration
Schools that want to become a “No Place for Hate” school first must register with the ADL, which could be a problem for anyone concerned about allegations of ADL surveillance. The Guardianreports an internal 2020 ADL memo reveals the ADL tracked a Black Indianapolis activist who worked on the Deadly Exchange campaign to expose U.S. police training with the Israeli military.
“It scared the shit out of me,” the activist told the press, adding, “It stopped me from moving forward because I don’t want to put people in my life at risk—I work with youth, so it stopped me in my tracks.”
Decades earlier, The Washington Postreported that police in the 1990s investigated the ADL for allegedly “monitoring the activities of thousands of activists”—allegations the ADL denied. According to the newspaper, San Francisco police confiscated from ADL offices “leaked copies of confidential law enforcement reports, fingerprint cards, driver’s license photographs, and individual criminal histories drawn from police records.”
Next: Committee and Pledge
After registering with the ADL, schools then form a steering committee of faculty and students to guide the work of building community and challenging bias at every turn. No mention is made of centering students victimized by bullying and racism to spearhead the committee, which is charged with encouraging students, staff, and guardians to sign a school-wide pledge. For elementary schools, the pledge reads, “I promise my best to be kind to everyone—even if they are not like me.” For secondary, the pledge is more proactive, “I will reach out to support those who are targets of hate.”
The entire school is expected to sign the pledge which features a logo with the words, “No Place for Hate—An ADL Education Program.” While the words are innocuous enough, the platforming of the ADL raises concerns about elevating an organization with a history of surveillance, complaints against public schools, and unconditional support for Israel. This patronage continues in the wake of the International Court of Justice’s preliminary ruling (1/26/24) that South Africa’s genocide case against Israel was plausibly brought, and Amnesty International’s (12/5/24) scathing report, ‘You Feel Like You Are Subhuman’: Israel’s Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza,
There’s another issue, too. While there’s nothing in the wording of the pledge that’s problematic, the fact that virtually everyone is expected to sign it in order for the school to participate can create a coercive environment.
Only ADL-Approved Activities
After students and staff sign the ADL pledge, they then move on to the next criteria required for ADL designation as an official “No Place for Hate” school. Each school must implement three of the ADL’s approved activities, such as discussions around identity, listening journals, and walks against hate.
For middle and high school, one of the recommended activities to lead to school-wide action involves a lesson plan entitled, “Antisemitic Incidents: Being an Ally, Advocate, and Activist,” in which students are to understand and recognize antisemitism based on a troubling definition that includes the marginalization of Jewish people based on myths about Israel.
Among the “materials needed” for the lesson is a link to the ADL’s “Audit of Antisemtic Incidents 2022,” which says, “References to Israel or Zionism were part of 19% of the 219 campus incidents.” The audit includes a section “Anti-Zionism/Israel-Related” in which the ADL smears the organizations Witness for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine, charging antisemitic incidents were perpetrated by individuals associated with these groups. The ADL writes, “ Public statements of opposition to Zionism, which are often antisemitic, are included in the audit when it can be determined that they had a negative impact on one or more Jewish individuals or identifiable, localized groups of Jews.”
In No Place for Hate, students are rightfully encouraged to object to racist jokes, yet no one is encouraged to protest Israel’s killing and wounding of hundreds of thousands of Gazans, tens of thousands of whom are children
Does this mean the ADL considers antisemitic any criticism of Israel that offends a Jewish person? What about the thousands of Jews marching in cities, conducting sit-ins in the Capitol, and occupying subway stations with t-shirts that scream, “Cease-fire” or “Stop Arming Israel” or “Not in Our Name”? These Jews are more than offended by Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine; they are outraged.
Jewish Voice for Peace, a fast-growing anti-Zionist national organization, charges the ADL “is not a credible source on antisemitism and racism” because it conflates antisemitism with criticism of a state, adding, “The ADL has consistently targeted advocates for Palestinian human rights in a concerted and coordinated campaign to repress any speech that criticizes Israel’s current war on Gaza or its policy of oppression of Palestinians.”
The ADL has filed civil rights complaints with the Department of Education against Occidental and Pomona colleges, as well school districts in Philadelphia, Santa Ana, and Berkeley. In the complaint against Berkeley, the ADL objects to student protesters of U.S.-Israel genocide walking out of class to shout, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” The chant does not call for the elimination of Jews from Palestine but the right of Palestinians expelled from their homeland to return.
Additionally, the ADL, which tells students to be kind and compassionate—never bullying—writes a threatening letter to nearly 200 college presidents, demanding investigations of the nonviolent Students for Justice in Palestine, the campus organization leading protests against Israel’s slaughter in Gaza.
The Kicker
If a school wants to implement its own activity for challenging bias and bullying, it must first appeal to the ADL for approval. Absent ADL approval, the activity cannot count toward achieving official “No Place for Hate” status. One need not be a champion of public education to cringe at the outsourcing of anti-bias education to a private political advocacy organization, particularly one that, according to the website Open Secrets, spent over a million dollars in 2024 to lobby lawmakers to vote for a pro-Israel agenda.
The ADL is, after all, an enthusiastic proponent of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, with examples that conflate criticism of Israel with antisemitism to open the door for more legal complaints against schools and colleges, even when the speech in question is constitutionally protected free political speech, not hatred of Jews.
School-to-Prison Pipeline via the ADL
The ADL’s No Place for Hate program includes a section on social justice, as opposed to simple acts of kindness, such as offering to help a teacher distribute papers or hold down a fountain faucet for another student. The ADL aptly defines a social justice action as one that involves a group of people who organize to bring about “institutional change” that might solve the problems of gun violence, homelessness, or school-to-prison pipeline.
How contradictory then that the ADL encourages students and teachers to both report incidents of bias and hate to the ADL by completing an incident report form, as well as—in cases of extreme injustice—calling the police, rather than referring those involved to a student-faculty council on restorative justice process that emphasizes making amends, performing school service, or developing empathy through role-plays. Under the subheading, “Best Practices for School Administrators—Act Quickly and Respond,”the curriculum advises principals to “clarify what the role and duties of school resource officers (SRO’s) and (whether) police should and should not be in the process. Contact law enforcement as necessary.”
Given the ADL’s close working relationship with police, it is worth considering whether involving the ADL increases the likelihood of police involvement and a punitive rather than educational approach, potentially creating something akin to the school-to-prison pipeline that the ADL critiques.
Never mind the police for a minute. Reporting incidents—some of which may relate to criticism of Israel—to the ADL could spell legal trouble down the road, should the school’s administration not follow the ADL’s prescription for addressing the situation.
Moreover, despite the No Place for Hate social justice verbiage, it’s hard to imagine the ADL ever approving a school-wide letter-writing campaign to Congress to block weapons to Israel during its genocide in Gaza or testimony before school boards to divest from companies building segregated roads in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Note, the No Place for Hate glossary defines antisemitism as “The marginalization and/or oppression of people who are Jewish, based on the belief in stereotypes and myths about Jewish people, Judaism, and Israel.”
Antisemitism is real—white supremacy at Charlottesville, murders at the Tree of Life Synagogue, Nazi symbols at January 6—but to redefine antisemitism to include criticism of Israel only confuses people while allowing a nation state to act with impunity.
Pyramid of Hate
The ADL’s No Place for Hate program introduces students to the Pyramid of Hate to encourage discussion and analysis of escalating acts of bias and bigotry. At the pyramid’s base is Biased Attitudes of stereotyping; one level higher is Acts of Bias, such as bullying; even higher on the pyramid is Discrimination; and at the top of the pyramid is Genocide, the act or intention to systematically annihilate a people.
Even though the curriculum has been updated since October 7, 2023 there is no mention of Israel’s bombardment and starvation of over 2 million imprisoned Gazans, nor the multitude of experts around the world who have named Israel’s actions genocide.
In No Place for Hate, students are rightfully encouraged to object to racist jokes, yet no one is encouraged to protest Israel’s killing and wounding of hundreds of thousands of Gazans, tens of thousands of whom are children. A 2024 study by the Community Training Center for Crisis Management in Gaza found “96% of children surveyed feel their death is imminent, while 49% have expressed a desire to die.”
In its open letter to educators, the Drop The ADL From Schools campaign—endorsed by 90 organization—writes the ADL “attacks schools, educators, and students with bad-faith accusations of antisemitism in order to silence and punish constitutionally protected criticism of Israel and the political ideology of Zionism.” The organization asks educators to cut ties with the ADL, including use of its No Place for Hate curriculum. Meanwhile, CODEPINK activists are testifying in front of school boards on California’s Central Coast, urging board members to expel the ADL.
Bottom Line
For all its political correctness—the curriculum’s emphasis on pronouns and respect for non-binary identities—at the end of the school day No Place for Hate personifies the mythical character of the shapeshifter as it lures school districts into checking off the anti-bias box while surrendering authority to the controversial Anti-Defamation League. Sure, the program offers banners draped across hallways, pledges and to-do lists, even sage advice now and then, but the pretty package turns ugly once fully opened and scrutinized for its pro-Israel indoctrination.
The Alternative–the Power Within
While it’s tempting for administrators to subscribe to a free, pre-packaged curriculum, there is no one-size-fits-all answer to addressing racism or bullying and bias that seeps into our schools as a result of society’s structural racism: segregation, caste, economic inequality, voter suppression. But this work must be done bottom up, by creating a school community of critical thinkers, principled actors, and life-long learners.
From the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD) in Creating a School Community:
Students in schools with a strong sense of community are more likely to be academically motivated (Solomon, Battistich, Watson, Schaps, & Lewis, 2000); to act ethically and altruistically (Schaps, Battistich, & Solomon, 1997); to develop social and emotional competencies (Solomon et al., 2000); and to avoid a number of problem behaviors, including drug use and violence (Resnick et al., 1997).
Rather than ceding control to the Anti-Defamation League for a top-down prescription, schools can exercise their own agency to build community through schoolwide public service projects, murals that reflect students’ ethnic diversity, and cultural events that celebrate acts of resistance to oppression and colonization. Inside the classroom, teachers can address issues of race, bias, and bullying with books and short stories that lend themselves to rich discussion.
In the Final Analysis...
Educators must consider the actual cost of a free program like “No Place for Hate,” whose sponsor conflates antisemitism with anti-Zionism, files civil rights complaints against schools, and promotes Israel propaganda in the classroom. The answer to creating a positive school climate is not “out there”—in the hands of an organization with a distinct political agenda—but in here, in the school and in the school-to-community relationship.
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Communism Isn't What Terrifies the GOP? It's High-Quality and Well-Funded Public Education
Can you imagine a country where everyone was fully educated? People might actually become informed voters and demand freedom and justice for all! The idea absolutely terrifies the right.
Jan 10, 2023
Have you heard the latest Republican lie?
There are so many it’s hard to keep track, but here’s the newest one.
Public school teachers are turning their students into communists.
I’m not kidding.
That’s what they’re saying on far right blogs, podcasts and TV shows.
Everyone from Betsy DeVos to Ron DeSantis and the sober fellows of the Heritage Foundation are up in arms.
All because Mr. Singer wore a red sweater vest one day to class.
In matters of opinion, isn’t it better to tell students the facts and let them think for themselves about their relative virtues?
Not really, but that might have been a better provocation than the reality – which is all in far right pundits’ heads.
So for the GOP, it’s all about fear – what can you scare voters to believe that will shepherd them to support your agenda?
So to start with, Republicans want you to be terrified of public schools.
The reason?
They want you to have to pay to get your kids educated – but public schools give learning away for free to everyone – just for paying taxes.
Right-wingers would much rather make it all a business where the more you pay, the better the education your kids get. There’d be poor quality charter schools for those who can’t afford the entry fee, but the best of everything would be reserved for the kids of the rich and powerful whose parents would use school vouchers to offset some of their tuition at private institutions.
Public schools would undo all that – especially if they were adequately funded.
Can you imagine a country where everyone was fully educated!?
People might become informed voters and demand freedom and justice for all!
Lawmakers might have to create real policies, a platform, solutions – to actually govern!
So GOP operatives spread hysterical lies about public schools. They call them “government schools” as if that meant some imposed bureaucracy of outsiders and not what it actually does – schools governed by elected members of the community.
The lies and innuendo are never ending. Public school educators teach fake history where the civil rights movement was a good thing. They refuse to instill the truth of Creationism over fake Evolution. Teachers are pedophile groomers – never mind the actual Republican lawmakers charged with pedophilia and rape. And on and on and on.
Which brings us to the latest one – the new red scare that public school teachers are raising the next generation to hate Adam Smith and love Karl Marx.
The whole idea seems to have started with DeVos, the billionaire heiress and former Secretary of Education under President Donald Trump.
Robert Bluey, vice president of publishing for the Heritage Foundation, asked her a question on The Daily Signal Podcast (a Heritage Foundation mouthpiece) about the growing popularity of socialism among young people.
And it’s true, according to a 2018 Gallup poll, Americans aged 18 to 29 are almost as positive about socialism (51%) as they are about capitalism (45%).
So on behalf of the right-wing think tank behind the critical race theory brouhaha, transphobic legislation, climate change denial and a host of other regressive causes, Bluey asked DeVos why young people aren’t as firmly championing capitalism as previous generations.
DeVos, of course, blamed teachers. She responded:
“I recall visiting a classroom not too long ago where one of the teachers was wearing a shirt that said “Find Your Truth,” suggesting that, of course, truth is a very fungible and mutable thing instead of focusing on the fact that there is objective truth and part of learning is actually pursuing that truth.”
This is a rather strange answer. It may be the case that there are absolute truths in the world, but economic theories certainly don’t qualify. In matters of opinion, isn’t it better to tell students the facts and let them think for themselves about their relative virtues?
Not for DeVos. Indoctrination apparently is just fine so long as you’re indoctrinating kids into the right things.
Tell them capitalism is great. Tell them socialism is terrible. Screw critical thinking.
The Heritage Foundation, at least, liked her answer, using it as a template to fund a plethora of stories about public schools – not just leaving the matter up to students to decide – but actually bullying kids into championing communism.
Douglas Blair, a Daily Signal producer, codified the idea in his article “I’m a Former Teacher. Here’s How Your Children Are Getting Indoctrinated in Leftist Ideology.”
In the text of article, Blair admits he was only “in education” for 4 years, but it seems he was not a full-time classroom teacher for most of that time. According to his Linked-In account, he was a French teacher for 9 months in a school in Portland, Oregon. Before that he was an Extracurricular Aide, an English Language Assistant and Language Immersion Counselor at various schools in the US and France.
His evidence of indoctrination reads like “Kids Say the Darndest Things – Republican Edition.”
For example, he says he asked an elementary school girl if she liked Winston Churchill, and she frowned calling Churchill racist.
I’m not sure why that’s so upsetting. Churchill led Great Britain through WWII, but he undeniably WAS a racist, too. Churchill said that he hated people with “slit eyes and pig tails.” To him, people from India were “the beastliest people in the world next to the Germans.” He admitted that he “did not really think that black people were as capable or as efficient as white people.”
So Blair’s examples of indoctrination come out to complaining that kids learned accurate history.
If only the GOP could use history and education to change minds instead of decrying them.
Florida Gov. DeSantis is giving it a try. In 2022, he signed a law requiring schools in the sunshine state to actively teach about the horrors of communism.
That’s right. Whether teachers need to or not, they have to spend at least 45 minutes on it every November.
“We want to make sure that every year folks in Florida, but particularly our students, will learn about the evils of communism. The dictators that have led communist regimes and the hundreds of millions of individuals who suffered and continue to suffer under the weight of this discredited ideology,” DeSantis said, adding that “a lot of young people don’t really know that much” about the political ideology.
At first blush, this may sound like a good idea. More historical knowledge is a good thing, but it’s the context that makes this troubling.
Florida Republicans already have passed a battalion of laws telling educators what they CANNOT teach.
So you can’t teach about racial issues including the history of slavery if it makes any student “feel uncomfortable.” Math books are censored from depicting “prohibited topics.” You can’t talk about a wide range of human sexuality including LGBTQ people because of the infamous “Don’t Say Gay” bill.
But you’d better teach about how bad communism is! Or else!
First, this is the very definition of a GOVERNMENT SCHOOL – the legislature dictating what teachers teach on a given day and not trusting them to do their own jobs.
Second, why single out communism? Certainly it has lead to horrors and misery, but so has capitalism. Are we to teach about the terrors of rampant greed, sweatshops, wars for oil, runaway inequality? After all, students in impoverished neighborhoods going to underfunded schools are actual victims of free enterprise, not collectivism. The free hand of the market is soaked in blood, too.
Third, there’s the subtext. This sounds to me like an invitation to conflate communism with socialism (which are two different ideas with different histories) and to champion one ideology over another.
Finally, let’s not forget this all comes from state law. It’s politics, not pedagogy, and in politics it’s only indoctrination when someone else does it.
So are public school teachers really molding their students into young Bolsheviks?
I seriously doubt it.
Economic theory rarely comes up in math, reading or science. Maybe it comes up occasionally in social studies.
In my middle school language arts classes, we discuss all kinds of things that come out of the books we’re reading.
Sometimes economic inequality comes out of S. E. Hinton’s “The Outsiders” or Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird.” When we read Lois Lowry’s “The Giver” the concept of distribution of resources is broached.
In each case, I encourage my students to think about the problems from the stories, the solutions offered in the narratives and to discuss the matter with classmates. We hold Socratic Seminars and write critical essays. For “The Giver,” students work in groups to create their own utopias – you’d be surprised how many are socialist, though there are also a number of capitalist republics, dictatorships, and anarchies. Kids love anarchy.
[Education] is one of the chief engines of change, and nothing can truly stop that. If Republicans think they can, they’re in for a shock.
And I admit it – I encourage my students to think for themselves. I try not to give them my answers – my truths.
Facts are facts and opinions are opinions.
I would be a bad teacher if I forced my conclusions on my students.
So why ARE young people increasingly more critical of capitalism these days and more friendly toward socialism?
I’d say it’s because of the income inequality they see in the world around them.
Despite Republican’s claims, capitalism is not a perfect system. To be fair, no system is. But criticizing capitalism is not a bad thing, and finding value in aspects of socialism is no crime.
To achieve a better world, we have to do more than simply recreate the one in which we live.
That’s why education is so important. It is one of the chief engines of change, and nothing can truly stop that.
If Republicans think they can, they’re in for a shock.
Perhaps they should have paid more attention in school.
Or exposed their opinions to more rigorous critical thinking…
Nah!
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Obama Regrets 'Taking the Joy Out of Teaching and Learning' with Too Much Testing
Oct 30, 2015
In a stunning turn of events, President Obama announced last weekend that "unnecessary testing" is "consuming too much instructional time" and creating "undue stress for educators and students." Rarely has a president so thoroughly repudiated such a defining aspect of his public education policy. In a three-minute video announcing this reversal, Obama cracks jokes about how silly it is to over-test students and recalls that the teachers who had the most influence on his life did not prepare him best for his standardized tests. Perhaps Obama hopes we will forget it was his own Education Secretary, Arne Duncan, who radically reorganized America's education system around the almighty test score.
Obama's statement comes in the wake of another study revealing the overwhelming number of standardized tests children are forced to take: The average student today is subjected to 112 standardized tests between preschool and high school graduation. Because it's what we have rewarded and required, America's education system has completely fixated on how well students perform on tests. Further, the highest concentration of these tests is in schools serving low-income students and students of color.
To be sure, Obama isn't the only president who has menaced the education system with high-stakes exams. This thoroughly bi-partisan project was enabled by George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind Act. NCLB became law in 2002 with overwhelming support from Republicans and Democrats alike.
Instead of erasing the wrong answer choice of NCLB's test-and-punish policy, Obama decided to press ahead. Like a student filling in her entire Scantron sheet with answer choice, "D," Duncan's erroneous Race to the Top initiative was the incorrect solution for students. However, it made four corporations rich by assigning their tests as the law of the land. Desperate school districts, ravaged by the Great Recession, eagerly sought Race to the Top points by promulgating more and more tests.
The cry of the parents, students, educators and other stewards of education was loud and sorrowful as Obama moved to reduce the intellectual and emotional process of teaching and learning to a single score--one that would be used to close schools, fire teachers and deny students promotion or graduation. Take, for instance, this essay penned by Diane Ravitch in 2010. She countered Obama's claim that Race to the Top was his most important accomplishment:
[RttT] will make the current standardized tests of basic skills more important than ever, and even more time and resources will be devoted to raising scores on these tests. The curriculum will be narrowed even more than under George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind, because of the link between wages and scores. There will be even less time available for the arts, science, history, civics, foreign language, even physical education. Teachers will teach to the test.
What Ravitch warned us about has come to pass, and Obama has now admitted as much without fully admitting to his direct role in promoting the tests. Duncan and Obama, with funding from the Gates Foundation, coupled Race to the Top with Common Core State Standards and the high-stakes tests that came shrink-wrapped with them. Together, these policies have orchestrated a radical seizure of power by what I call the "technocracy"--The multibillion-dollar testing corporations, the billionaire philanthropists who promote their policies, and the politicians who write their policies into law.
These policies in turn have produced the largest uprising against high-stakes testing in U.S. history. To give you just a few highlights of the size and scope of this unprecedented struggle, students have staged walkouts of the tests in Portland, Chicago, Colorado, New Mexico, and beyond. Teachers from Seattle to Toledo to New York City have refused to administer the tests. And the parent movement to opt children out of tests has exploded into a mass social movement, including some 60,000 families in Washington State and more than 200,000 families in New York State. One of the sparks that helped ignite this uprising occurred at Garfield High School, where I teach when the entire faculty voted unanimously to refuse to administer the Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) test. The boycott spread to several other schools in Seattle, and then the superintendent threatened my colleagues with a ten-day suspension without pay. Because of the unanimous vote of the student government and the PTA in support of the boycott--and the solidarity we received from around the country--the superintendent backed off his threat and canceled the MAP test altogether at the high school level. Can you imagine the vindication that my colleagues feel today--after having risked their jobs to reduce testing--from hearing the president acknowledge there is too much testing in the schools? And it should be clear that this national uprising, this Education Spring, has forced the testocracy to retreat and is the reason that the Obama administration has come to its current understanding on testing in schools.
However, the testocracy, having amassed so much power and wealth, won't slink quietly into the night. A Facebook video from Obama isn't going to convince the Pearson corporation to give up its $9 billion in corporate profits from testing and textbooks. The tangle of tests promulgated by the federal government is now embedded at state and district levels.
More importantly, the President exposed how halfhearted his change of heart was by declaring he would not reduce the federal requirement to annually test all students in grades 3 through 8 in math and reading, with high school students still tested at least once. A reauthorization of NCLB is in the works, and all versions preserve these harmful testing mandates. Also, Obama's call to reduce testing to 2% of the school year still requires students to take standardized tests for an outlandish twenty-four hours. And it isn't even all the time directly spent taking the tests that's the biggest problem. The real shame, which Obama never addressed, is that as long as there are high stakes attached to standardized tests, test prep activities will continue to dominate instructional time. As long as the testocracy continues to demand that these tests determine students' graduation and teachers' evaluation or pay, test prep will continue to crowd out all the things that educators know are vital to teaching the whole child--critical thinking, imagination, the arts, recess, collaboration, problem-based learning, and more.
Obama's main accomplice in proliferating costly testing, Arne Duncan, said, "It's important that we're all honest with ourselves. At the federal, state, and local level, we have all supported policies that have contributed to the problem in implementation."
Yes, let's all be honest with ourselves. Honesty would require acknowledgment that standardized test scores primarily demonstrate a student's family income level, not how well a teacher has coached how to fill in bubbles. Honesty would dictate that we recognize that the biggest obstacle to the success of our students is that politicians are not being held accountable for the fact that nearly half of the children in public schools now live in poverty. As Congress debates the new iteration of federal education policy, they should focus on supporting programs to uplift disadvantaged children and leave the assessment policy to local educators. They have proven they don't understand how to assess our students best, and now they have admitted as much. It's time to listen to those of us who have advocated for an end to endlessly ranking and sorting our youth with high-stakes tests. It's time Congress repeal the requirement of standardized tests at every grade level. It's time to end the reign of the testocracy and allow parents, students, and educators to implement authentic assessments designed to help support student learning and nurture the whole child.
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