absolutely amazing stuff...

Colorado Coalition for Better Education Press Release
http://www.thecbe.org/


On behalf of the Coalition for Better Education, its founder Don Perl, its hundreds of members from around the state, and the tens of thousands of students, teachers, parents, and average citizens all over the country who are rising up in spontaneous and democratic opposition to high stakes standardized testing, I would like to bring to your attention the CBE's latest educational effort.

Beginning on January 16th, the CBE will be unveiling bus bench ads around the metro area and Greeley (locations enclosed below). The ads will be highlighted by our increasingly recognizable logo of a slash through CSAP and will say, "Parents: We CAN do something about this injustice. Opt out letters available at www.thecbe.org."

The January 16th rollout of our ads, and their location on bus benches, is particularly appropriate given that that is the date for this year's celebration of Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday. Opposition to high stakes standardized testing, with its well documented biases in the areas of ethnicity, gender, and especially socioeconomic status, is a civil rights issue. High stakes standardized testing is one of the primary factors in the ongoing resegregation of America's schools, with some studies showing that our schools are now more segregated, i.e. have more nonwhite children attending majority nonwhite schools, than in the era before Brown vs. Board of Education.

Parallels to the civil rights struggle also exist in terms of the responses of authority to those who are challenging their policies. Just as governments all across the nation instituted the most draconian punishments against students who protested segregation in the nineteen fifities and sixties, so are they now punishing those who would now stand up in opposition to the resegregation of our schools. The Bennett School District has threatened to fail those students who exercise their legal right to opt out of the test, while the Wiggins School District has threatened to exclude them from extracurricular activities and field trips.

Despite these abuses of power, more than three thousand students, including my daughter, "Just Said No to CSAP" last year ("Denver Post", 3/30/05). They honor the memories of Dr. King and Rosa Parks with their courage and set a shining example that we urge all of the people of Colorado, students, teachers, parents, and the citizenry in general to follow.

Tim Babbidge
Treasurer, CBE
Aurora

Please visit the website at: http://www.thecbe.org/ and look at the editorial statements of Don Perl and the teacher's letters of resignation.

"How did we stray so far from nurturing our children to requiring their slavish surrender to a contrived testing regimen? The trail starts with McGraw-Hill Publishing Company. Their profits have gone from $49,000,000 in 1993 before the advent of high-stakes standardized testing to a staggering $321,500,000 in 2003. They manufacture not only CSAP and similar high-stakes programs, but also the preparatory material. Which do you think is more important to them, the needs, talents and interests of our children, or corporate profits? Do you think that CEO's at McGraw-Hill have read and digested the literature that educators know about the myriad abilities children possess? And who suffers more in this greed motivated scheme - schools like Christa McAuliffe or schools like Billie Martinez? Billie Martinez recently lost much of its effective bilingual education program at the CSAP altar.
An educational agenda founded on corporate greed is shameful! WE THE PEOPLE not only need to prepare our children for the world, but we also need to prepare the world for our children."--Don Perl

Also the statement links. From: Exposing the myths:

"Ironically it is not just standardized tests and the CSAP that is at issue here; performance standards, and evaluating schools based entirely on test scores have all hindered educational improvement. The problem lies in the fact that we have transferred the crucial responsibility of informing, guiding, and monitoring the educational system to test publishers who have no accountability. Business leaders and policy makers, distantly removed from the students, have superseded the role of the professional educators in making vital school and classroom decisions that impact our children.

Parents are evaluating the quality of schools on “data points” instead of doing the necessary work of observing, asking questions, and participating in the efforts of our schools to instill wisdom, integrity, and courage in our growing future. Teachers and administrators have too willingly signed away both their rights and responsibilities in promoting learning that is personalized, rigorous, and meaningful and now have all of the liability and none of the authority.

Instead of educational improvement today’s current reform system has reduced opportunities for disadvantaged children, demoralized our schools, narrowed the range of thought, paralyzed the imagination of a generation, and impeded our children’s intrinsic motivation and the natural will to learn. Our educational institutions are the best hope for our future; when we as a nation ignore individualism and restrain intellectual freedom, we have diminished our capacity for greatness and limited our potential for the extraordinary."--Angela Engel, 2005