Union News: Our voice on high-stakes testing is being heard
Union News: Our voice on high-stakes testing is being heard
Greetings, MTA members,
We hope you are getting a well-deserved break and are staying cool.
Last week, because of all the work you have been doing to challenge high-stakes testing, we were invited to meet with U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona during the NEA Representative Assembly.
“We must stop teaching to the test…. Too many generations of students, particularly Black and brown students, missed out on STEM, hands-on learning, experiential learning or project-based learning because teaching was reduced to test prep. Enough is enough!”
“We must stop teaching to the test…. Too many generations of students, particularly Black and brown students, missed out on STEM, hands-on learning, experiential learning or project-based learning because teaching was reduced to test prep. Enough is enough!”
Miguel Cardona, U.S. Secretary of Education
“Assessments need to be flashlights to drive instruction and support, not hammers that put a scarlet letter on teachers or schools.”
Our message is getting through, from Massachusetts to Washington, D.C. It is time to get rid of the MCAS graduation requirement, as a key step in dismantling a destructive assessment system, and replace it with an educator-led approach that looks at the broad goals we hold for our schools, based in our standards, our curriculum and our mission to educate future citizens.
MTA Events
Registration is open for the MTA Summer Conference at UMass Amherst, August 6 - 9. The conference will feature more than 100 workshops and events, special guest speakers – Loretta Ross, a prominent reproductive justice advocate, and Adolph Reed, professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania, among them – and dancing and relaxing at our “union educator camp.”
Tomorrow’s Teachers: $25,000 scholarships for future public school educators
In order to address one major cause of the teacher shortage, we won inclusion of $15 million in the state budget to help recruit and retain educators – including student debt relief for new educators and a $25,000 scholarship – each year for up to four years of college – for public higher ed students who become teachers in one of our public schools.
Political Education
As we mentioned above, one of our exciting guest speakers at the MTA Summer Conference will be Adolph Reed, one of the preeminent political scientists of his generation, and a leading scholar-activist who sees unions as crucial to reclaiming working class power to achieve economic and racial justice.
We thought we’d share again an excerpt from his memoir about growing up in New Orleans, “The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives.”
“While the segregationist system was clearly and obviously racist and white supremacist, it wasn’t merely about white supremacy for its own sake alone. It was the instrument of a specific order of political and economic power that was clearly racial but that most fundamentally stabilized and reinforced the dominance of powerful political and economic interests.”
“[The] core of the Jim Crow order was a class system rooted in employment and production relations that were imposed, stabilized, regulated, and naturalized through a regime of white supremacist law, practice, custom, rhetoric, and ideology. Defeating the white supremacist regime was a tremendous victory for social justice and egalitarian interests. At the same time, that victory left the undergirding class system untouched and in practical terms affirmed it. That is the source of that bizarre sensation I felt in the region a generation after the defeat of Jim Crow. The larger takeaway from this reality is that a simple racism/anti-racism framework isn’t adequate for making sense of the segregation era, and it certainly isn’t up to the task of interpreting what has succeeded it or challenge the forms of inequality and injustice that persist.”
In solidarity,
Max and Deb