Responde to Seattle Boycott

Standardized MAP test have become overpass. Time to change.

Standardized tests have for a long time, becoming part of our student life. We are use to do test that only serves to compare our grades with the ones of our friends, like a competition, and to make part of our curriculum. However, most part of these MAP test intend us to memorize facts and dates, and not to expose what we have learned. Moreover, we just need to memorize the content of the test one day before it and then after taking the assessment, we just forgot it, or even some students just cheat, copying notes to be read in the test time, since they were supposed to measure student’s knowledgeknow that it will not measure nothing but their capacity of memorization. And unfortunately, this is what most commonly happens.

 

 

There must be an alternative to replace MAP, in order to create a new way of measures student’s acquired knowledge. That is what teachers of Garfield High School in Seattle are looking for. They are fighting against this standardized and overpass tests, boycotting MAP, which is sent by Washington, refusing to apply these tests in their students.

They are battling not only with their student’s future, but also with the future of all the teenagers that study and an American or International School, and in a long date, with the ones from schools of other countries, such as Brazil. This action, which got wide comprisement, will have repercussion all over the world, in a long or a short period. The best way of applying assessments is majoring students learned knowledge and their capacity of critical thinking to resolve real problems, not only the ones that the MAP charges.

As Jesse Hagopian and his students posted on Facebook, “Many others, myself included, believe that portfolios, which collect student work and demonstrate yearlong student growth, would be a good replacement for the MAP. Such assessments would be directly tied to our curriculum and would demonstrate improvement over time rather than a random snapshot of a student on one particular day.”

Teachers are also worry about their students in doing other affaires beyond taking test and getting good grades. They are worry about having a good intellectual formation, to become a long and self-learner person, a critical citizen, so how can they measure that? With MAP? Obvious not. We must find a way also to charge it from them and make them became all of it.

“Testing is not teaching!”

 

It is time to change. We must help realize that and enter in this fight to end this craze of just doing test, which measure nothing, and does not increase our intellectual formation.