Ban the Bubble is pleased to endorse Dr. Suzie Abajian for the South Pasadena Board of Education.  Below is a letter Ban the Bubble organizer Gary Rowe sent to the South Pasadena Review:

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                                                    Abajian for Board of Education

             Dr. Suzie Abajian is an outstanding choice for Board of Education.  Her candidacy brings two distinct advantages to the race:  first, her unique educational qualifications;  and second, her state-of-the-art curricular views.

            Qualifications:  Dr. Abajian, alone among the candidates, holds a Ph.D. in education.  She is thus well-versed in the vast academic educational literature.  She understands at a professional level what has been proven to work, what shows promise, and what, conversely, sounds seductive but has failed.  Her understanding of public education is not purely theoretical either:  She taught math at the high school and college levels and has also supervised teachers over the course of her 14 year career in education.  Because of her experience, she knows what works at the ground level.  As the District looks for a new superintendent, shouldn’t we do more than muddle through?  Shouldn’t we have the benefit of a member with this kind of practical and academic educational background?
         
            Curriculum:  If you believe that education is simply about generating high standardized test scores, then Dr. Abajian is probably not your candidate.  She is a critic of the test-score craze that has narrowed curricula and crowded-out creativity in the country and in the District over the last decade.  She believes instead in a truly rich curriculum that focuses on the whole child.  She values what bubble-in testing can’t capture –- creativity and conceptual understanding; probing analysis rather than rote learning; foreign languages and immersion programs, the arts, drama, and physical education as integral parts of the curriculum, not just occasional frills.

            It is no accident that Dr. Abajian has the endorsement of the nation’s leading progressive educators, such as Professors Diane Ravitch and Stephen Krashen, as well as the Network for Public Education, which supports candidates committed to evidence-based educational initiatives rather than high-stakes testing.  

Governor Brown Nails It!

In his State of the State Address yesterday, Gov. Brown spoke truth to the reigning educational power.  He demolished the idea that educational achievement can be quantified and measured and tested to a level of precision.  The Governor deserves our thunderous applause.  Defiance of No Child Left Behind?  The time has come -- follow our Governor's lead!  Let's never talk of test scores and measurable achievement again.

Here are excerpts from his speech:

Education

In the right order of things, education—the early fashioning of character and the formation of conscience—comes before legislation. Nothing is more determinative of our future than how we teach our children. If we fail at this, we will sow growing social chaos and inequality that no law can rectify. 

In California’s public schools, there are six million students, 300,000 teachers—all subject to tens of thousands of laws and regulations. In addition to the teacher in the classroom, we have a principal in every school, a superintendent and governing board for each school district. Then we have the State Superintendent and the State Board of Education, which makes rules and approves endless waivers—often of laws which you just passed. Then there is the Congress which passes laws like “No Child Left Behind,” and finally the Federal Department of Education, whose rules, audits and fines reach into every classroom in America, where sixty million children study, not six million. 

Add to this the fact that three million California school age children speak a language at home other than English and more than two million children live in poverty. And we have a funding system that is overly complex, bureaucratically driven and deeply inequitable. That is the state of affairs today. 

The laws that are in fashion demand tightly constrained curricula and reams of accountability data. All the better if it requires quiz-bits of information, regurgitated at regular intervals and stored in vast computers. Performance metrics, of course, are invoked like talismans. Distant authorities crack the whip, demanding quantitative measures and a stark, single number to encapsulate the precise achievement level of every child. 

We seem to think that education is a thing—like a vaccine—that can be designed from afar and simply injected into our children. But as the Irish poet, William Butler Yeats said, “Education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire.” 

This year, as you consider new education laws, I ask you to consider the principle of Subsidiarity. Subsidiarity is the idea that a central authority should only perform those tasks which cannot be performed at a more immediate or local level. In other words, higher or more remote levels of government, like the state, should render assistance to local school districts, but always respect their primary jurisdiction and the dignity and freedom of teachers and students. 

Subsidiarity is offended when distant authorities prescribe in minute detail what is taught, how it is taught and how it is to be measured. I would prefer to trust our teachers who are in the classroom each day, doing the real work – lighting fires in young minds. 

My 2013 Budget Summary lays out the case for cutting categorical programs and putting maximum authority and discretion back at the local level—with school boards. I am asking you to approve a brand new Local Control Funding Formula which would distribute supplemental funds — over an extended period of time — to school districts based on the real world problems they face. This formula recognizes the fact that a child in a family making $20,000 a year or speaking a language different from English or living in a foster home requires more help. Equal treatment for children in unequal situations is not justice.

With respect to higher education, cost pressures are relentless and many students cannot get the classes they need. A half million fewer students this year enrolled in the community colleges than in 2008. Graduation in four years is the exception and transition from one segment to the other is difficult. The University of California, the Cal State system and the community colleges are all working on this. The key here is thoughtful change, working with the faculty and the college presidents. But tuition increases are not the answer. I will not let the students become the default financiers of our colleges and universities.

National Resolution on High Stakes Testing

     In April, Ban the Bubble endorsed the National Resolution on High-Stakes Testing.  Written by educational leaders, professors, and civil rights groups, this resolution calls attention to the damage that standardized testing has done to public education and urges Congress and the states to take a different course.

     Please go to the website and endorse the resolution yourself.  And ask your school board members to join the many other school districts around the country that have endorsed this important resolution.

     It's time to get a large grassroots movement together to fight "data-driven," standardized test-best "accountability" -- to recognize that poor-quality quantitative data that bubble-in tests produce is too crude a tool to tell us about what is really important in school.  Teachers need to be free to teach, rather than forced to drill.  Districts need to develop analytic skills and nurture creativity in their students, not produce high test scores.  The two are incompatible.

     Take a stand.  And urge your elected representatives to do the same.  Our children's education depends on it.  As education historian Diane Ravitch, one of the resolution's drafters, has so nicely put it:

Tests are a tool, not a goal. We should use them as needed, not let them use us. Their misuse has turned them into a weapon to narrow the curriculum, incentivize cheating, promote gaming the system, and control teachers. The more we rely on high-stakes standardized tests, the more we destroy students' creativity, ingenuity, and willingness to think differently, and the more we demoralize teachers. The important decisions that each of us will face in our lives cannot be narrowed to one of four bubbles. We must prepare students to live in the world, not to comply on command.

The National Testing Resolution calls on all those who are concerned about the future of our society and the well-being of children to stop this mad obsession with test scores.

I hope the revolt grows until it consumes the terrible cult of measurement that has now so distorted the means and ends of education.

Our Mission Statement

     Our draft mission statement appears on the right.  Check it out.