“We’ve been raising our voices about this deeply flawed test for a long time,” said Jesse Hagopian, who teaches history at Garfield High School, where teachers initiated the boycott by voting this month not to give the exam. But now that the district is using the test for evaluations, he said, “we’ve drawn our line in the sand.”
The spat in Seattle comes as districts nationwide wrestle with how best to use student test scores to rate teachers. In the past three years, more than 25 states have passed laws to link scores to teacher evaluations, because officials think it is a more effective way to gauge performance than traditional reliance on observations by school principals.
But as local districts are trying to implement those policies, they are running into some resistance. New York City has forfeited hundreds of millions of state and federal dollars because union and city officials haven’t agreed on a new evaluation system that would judge teachers, in part, on student test scores. The Los Angeles teachers union agreed earlier this month to use test scores in evaluations after a protracted fight with the district, and Chicago teachers staged a seven-day strike this past fall, in part, over efforts to judge them on students’ test results.