Colorado high school seniors at some schools responded to the latest standardized test they were expected to take with
a mass boycott. The students were fed up with standardized testing, and the Colorado Measures of Academic Success results weren't even going to be available until after the students had graduated.
Only 3 percent of his class and 63 percent of the district actually took the new CMAS test. Cherry Creek School District officials encouraged students to take it but weren’t surprised by the number of parent refusals.
“We were expecting it. We have seen growing parent concern about the number of tests that are given to students each year,” said district communications director Tustin Amole. [...]
In the Boulder Valley School District, the Daily Camera reports that 84 percent of students refused to take the tests Thursday, with some protesting and collecting food and school supplies for low-income families instead.
Students in Boulder made the video above outlining their problems with CMAS. With so many students boycotting the useless test, their districts may face losing a level of accreditation. But it's clear that it's the test, not the students or the district, being discredited by this boycott. And it's an inspiring development in resistance to overtesting.
(Via Diane Ravitch.)
Continue reading below the fold for more of the week's education and labor news.
A fair day's wage
- The Belabored podcast looks at the Detroit bankruptcy.
- Let's talk about abuse of temp worker visas.
- Republican hissy fits meet with success as President Obama withdraws Sharon Block's National Labor Relations Board nomination and nominates Lauren McFerran in her place.
- Port truck drivers are keeping up the fight in Los Angeles.
- UAW applauds Volkswagen for new union-friendly policy.
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- This is gross: Brooklyn non-profit caught systematically underpaying mentally disabled employees.
- Bike share workers are organizing:
After New York City workers organized the first ever bike share union in the US in September, three other cities—Washington, D.C., Boston, and most recently Chicago—have made significant progress on their own bike share worker organizing campaigns. A majority of workers in all three cities signed union authorization cards this fall; D.C. workers are negotiating a union election date while Boston and Chicago workers will vote whether or not to unionize within the next month.
The roughly 280 bike share workers in these four cities—who, despite the bike share services’ varying names, all work under the same owner, Alta Bicycle Share, which was recently bought by the real estate company REQX—may all soon be represented by the Transport Workers Union. TWU represents workers in more traditional public transit sectors like bus drivers and airline workers, but Local 100 now aims to lead a national campaign to organize rentable city bicycles like Citi Bike in New York and Divvy in Chicago.
Education
- More of this, please: Students challenge Teach for America officials.
Dani Lea, a sophomore at Vanderbilt University, believes that Teach for America (TFA) teachers in her high school in Charlotte, North Carolina, were detrimental to her learning experience and for those around her. Lea claimed that her principal didn't even know which teachers were members of TFA and which weren't.
Upon hearing this, TFA co-CEO Matthew Kramer said, “That’s not our lived experience.” Lea responded, “That was my lived experience.”
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(A little nepotism in action, but it's an important point.)