God bless those who are close to retirement, for they often speak truth to the powers that be.
The education magazine Teacher reports that Carl Chew, a middle-school science teacher in Seattle, has been suspended without pay for refusing to “perpetrate” Washington state’s high-stakes achievement test on his students.
“Every year, I said to myself this is the last time I’m going to do this,” said Chew, 60, who has been teaching for about eight years and said he has seen kids struggle through the test with few positive results to show for the time and effort expended over two weeks each spring.
In a written statement, Chew says the “WASL” test is “biased, culturally insensitive and irrelevant and not a real measure of anything” due to poor test construction and misleading or inaccurate reporting and interpretation of results, to everyone concerned — parents, teachers, children, and the public. He says that
“Instead of safe, exciting and meaningful places for our children to spend half of their waking hours, schools have become … test mills bent on churning out students who are trained to answer state-approved questions in a state-approved manner.”
