Garfield High teachers won't give required test they call flawed | Local News | The Seattle Times

Garfield High teachers won't give required test they call flawed | Local News | The Seattle Times:

Garfield High teachers won't give required test they call flawed

Teachers at Seattle's Garfield High are refusing to give district-required tests known as Measures of Academic Progress, or MAP, saying they are flawed exams that waste time and don't help teachers or students.

Teachers at Seattle's Garfield High are refusing to give district-required tests known as Measures of Academic Progress, or MAP, saying they are flawed exams that waste time and don't help teachers or students.

By Linda Shaw

Seattle Times education reporter

ERIKA SCHULTZ / THE SEATTLE TIMES

English teacher Kit McCormick, left, discusses Garfield High School teachers' decision to refuse to give the MAP test to their students, during a Thursday news conference.

Teacher concerns about MAP tests

In refusing to give MAP tests, Garfield teachers listed nine concerns. Among them:

• They don't know what content the test covers.

• Ninth-graders who receive extra support are tested more than others, even though they are the very students who can't afford to lose classroom time.

• The time needed to give the test, which is administered online, ties up the school's computer lab for weeks.

• The results can be artificially low because many students don't take the test seriously.

• The district purchased MAP under the late Superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson, who was on the board of the company that sells the exam, which teachers consider a conflict of interest.

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Garfield High teacher Kit McCormick was supposed to bring her ninth-graders to the school's computer lab Wednesday so they could take a district-required reading test.

Instead, they stayed put, joining a schoolwide protest against that test and others that are known as the Measures of Academic Progress, or MAP.

MAP testing was scheduled to start at Garfield before the December holiday break, but so far not a single class has shown up at the lab to take it.

On Thursday, the teachers publicly announced their unhappiness with the test at an after-school news conference, saying it's a waste of time that doesn't help students or teachers.

Monty Neill, the executive director of FairTest, a national organization opposed to high-stakes uses of standardized tests, said he could remember only one other time that so many teachers at one school boycotted a test, and that was in Chicago