About 50 Fort Collins high school students took time out of a gloriously warm Saturday to protest Colorado’s “corporate” testing system that they say relies too heavily on rote-memory “bubble” questions.
“They wanted to make a statement by coming on a weekend,” said Poudre High School history teacher Russell Brown. “It’s not like they wanted to get out of school.”
Brown said the students themselves organized Saturday’s rally on the west steps of the state Capitol. He said he didn’t help them draft a manifesto challenging Colorado’s CMAS and PARCC tests.
The students gave speeches and waved multicolored cardboard placards including one that read, “Good, Better, Best, We must Reform Our Test!” and “Analyze this: A, B, C, D.”
They passed out their seven-page manifesto asking for a three-year moratorium on standardized testing in Colorado so that flaws in the system can be fixed.
“We ask that standardized tests in Colorado be owned and operated by the state, written by teachers, and be transparent to those who design the standard, and to teachers, who must design curriculum to meet the standard,” the document says.
“We feel like student voices aren’t heard as much as they ought to be,” senior Leigh Francia said just before the rally began.
She later gave a speech, in which she said Colorado teachers should write state tests, not Pearson, a “giant corporation,” which has national rather than Colorado testing standards in mind.
“We are being sold a test,” Francia said. “I would argue that the reason capitalism works is that there are winners and losers, and therefore an incentive to succeed. But public education is meant to serve everyone; we don’t want winners and losers.”
Poudre High School student Anson MacKinney said studying for the CMAS and PARCC tests and taking the tests is too time-consuming.
“I witnessed firsthand how detrimental over 10 hours of testing spread over three days was,” MacKinney said. “For months I’ve been seeing how behind we are and only recently have we caught up.”
Jeffrey Mariner Gonzalez, a senior, said the CMAS tests require students to regurgitate facts and don’t test a student’s ability to analyze or create.
“It’s as if they are trying to make sheep rather than students,” Gonzalez said.
Aya Ahmad said that the state’s testing program doesn’t necessarily test what students have actually been studying.
“But what if you have been taking chemistry for the past year, and are asked a physics question about kinetic energy? Or a trigonometry question when all you’ve been doing is calculus?”
