Back To School in a Season of Revolt

(The Progressive) All over the United States, it’s a tumultuous back-to-school season.

In Seattle, 5,000 teachers in Washington State’s largest school district began the year by going out on strike. At issue are not just pay and working conditions, but core values including “more recess, less testing, and race and equity committees in every school,” says Jesse Hagopian, the teacher, author and civil rights leader. Hagopian led a successful boycott of the major standardized test—the Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) test—at Seattle's Garfield High School, leading to the cancellation of that test for the whole district, and bringing together the movement to opt out of standardized tests with Black Lives Matter.

(Read our full profile of Hagopian appearing soon in the October issue of The Progressive.)

The Seattle teachers’ union has adopted the platform of the “social equity educators”—the coalition Hagopian and his colleagues formed through the test boycott.

“This is the culmination of a lot of our work,” Hagopian told me on the phone Wednesday morning on his way to join the picket line.

From Washington, DC, NEA President Lily Eskelsen Garcia announced that she is “proud that Seattle educators are standing up for the schools students deserve. Unfortunately, the School Board has failed to address issues raised by educators, such as ensuring opportunity for every student, regardless of zip code; providing the one-on-one attention that students need; and creating more time for students to learn with less focus on harmful standardized tests.” ..................(more)

- See more at: http://progressive.org/news/2015/09/188304/back-school-season-revolt#sthash.XSor8vIO.dpuf