By Gloria Pipkin CALIFORNIA —United Teachers of Los Angeles has elected a slate of officers who ran on a platform of active opposition to excessive standardized testing and the “anti-student, anti-teacher provisions” of NCLB. A.J. Duffy, Joshua Pechthalt, and Julie Washington, who will take office on July 1, issued a statement opposing the current agenda that serves to “undermine authentic student achievement, demoralize teachers and push more kids out of school” and pledged to support reform that addresses the unique needs of nonstandard children.

COLORADO — Antoinette Medina, a student at Brentwood Middle School in Greeley, opted out of this year’s CSAP. Because schools receive a negative score for each student who refuses to take the test, school officials don’t publicize the option. But Antoinette’s mother, Terri Medina, learned of her rights to withhold permission for her daughter to be tested from Colorado anti-testing activist Don Perl. “They have enough pressures at school as is. Why make them go through this?” Terri Medina told the Greeley Tribune.

CONNECTICUT— “It’s the slash-and-burn rhetoric of a Beltway political operative, not the approach you would expect from the nation’s chief educator,” Allan Taylor, chairman of the State Board of Education, told the Hartford Courant in response to U.S. secretary of education Margaret Spellings’ charges that the state’s legal action against NCLB is “un-American.”

Betty Sternberg, head of Connecticut’s department of education, has emerged as a tenacious advocate during the struggle against NCLB. A Democrat who grew up in Manhattan, Sternberg credits her New York roots with the “feisty” nature she has displayed.

FLORIDA – Kerry Ann O’Brien, a fifth grader from Ponce Inlet, wrote a letter to the editor of the Daytona Beach News-Journal protesting the high stakes of FCAT. “We shouldn’t have to fail if we have done well all year. School is all about one test,” Kerry wrote.

Becky Farber, a junior at Palmetto High School who writes a regular column for the Miami Herald called “Report Card,” satirized efforts by Jeb Bush and Republican legislators to repeal a constitutional amendment that limits class size.

When Zach Blend and other sociology students at Rollins College were assigned to devote 15 hours to a community project of their choice, they worked with the Florida Coalition for Assessment Reform to organize and host a campus forum called “Putting FCAT to the Test,” where they administered FCAT released items and critiqued the test.

INDIANA — Barb Edler, an elementary special education teacher, wrote to a state education official about inconsistencies in scoring of the ISTEP. When the official responded that parents and taxpayers needed to hear about the flaws, Istep circulated her letter to newspapers around the state.

TEXAS — State education officials have defied NCLB by allowing 9% of English learners and students with disabilities (three times the number allowed by the feds) to take off-grade-level forms of the TAKS. The Christian Science Monitor quoted education expert David Shreve of the National Conference of State Legislatures as saying, “In Texas, it’s just an out-and-out case of civil disobedience. They’re saying it [NCLB] just doesn’t work here, and we’re not going to follow it.”

A new TAKS resistance group called Organization of Proud Parents Opposing State-Enforced TAKS has formed. See their web site at http://www.opposetaks.org/ .

UTAH –— After the Republican-dominated legislature passed a bill that prohibits the state from following federal regulations that conflict with state law, and U. S. education secretary Margaret Spelling wrote Sen. Orrin Hatch that the action could jeopardize federal funding, Rep. Steven R. Mascaro told the New York Times, “I don’t like to be threatened. I wish they’d take the stinking money and go back to Washington.”


WASHINGTON — In Olympia, WA, about 60 parents and students joined Mothers Against WASL in a March from the Capitol to the office of the state education superintendent to publicize their plans to boycott the WASL. The event, organized by Juanita Doyon of Spanaway, was the fifth annual protest of WASL.

WASHINGTON — Steven Baker and Marcus Moran, seventh graders at Kulshan Middle School in Bellingham, led a protest of WASL at their school before going in to take the test. They carried signs saying “Honk If You Hate Wash” and “WASL – Washing Away Student Learning.” After the principal forced them to come inside the school on the first day of the demonstration, the next day students moved to a location a couple of blocks away.

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