For four years public high school teachers have been saying that the twice-a-year standardized tests the Board of Education requires freshmen and sophomores to take are a waste of time and money. And for four years the board has essentially told the teachers to pipe down and keep giving the test.
For a few years McGreal taught at a southwest-side elementary school. In 1998 he came to Curie, where he discovered the CASE. The test, strongly endorsed by Mayor Daley, was grounded in the notion that too many low-achieving students were being allowed to graduate through the kindness or indifference of their teachers. By instituting a stringent standardized achievement test, the system would hold teachers accountable while guarding against social promotion and preserving the integrity of a public school diploma. Or so the thinking went.
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But from the outset the test–which is given in English, social studies, science, and math–was harshly criticized by teachers. “For one thing, it takes up too much time,” says McGreal. “It stretches out over four days of each semester–that’s eight days a year devoted to it. And that doesn’t take into account all the preparation time. That’s another two or three weeks.”
His complaints have been echoed by many other teachers, most notably George Schmidt, who used to teach English at Bowen High School. In January 1999 Schmidt published portions of the CASE in Substance, a monthly newspaper on school issues that he edits. A few weeks later the board sued Schmidt for over $1 million, charging that he’d “misappropriated” their “trade-secret rights of confidentiality and security.” Later that year the board dismissed Schmidt from his classroom without pay and eventually fired him.
“Our primary concern is that the CASE does not reflect the standards for which it was designed,” the letter began. Students “do not only need to acquire basic skills such as recall and memorization, but also higher order thinking skills, including inference, synthesis, and analysis. The CASE, however, only evaluates students on recall and simple comprehension skills.” After detailing other problems with the test, including “inaccurate test questions and answer choices,” they got to the point, announcing, “We will not be administering the CASE this year.”
Cunningham said he didn’t know enough about the CASE to comment on the teachers’ criticisms. He directed all questions on that matter to Eason-Watkins, who declined to discuss specifics. “We had a meeting last week, and we decided that we would meet again,” she said. “I agreed we would be open-minded in terms of what needed to be done to make appropriate modifications to the test. We were already in the process of reviewing the CASE. We had always intended to engage teachers in the conversation as well.”
Schmidt knows a thing or two about taking a stand. Within a few days of his publishing large portions of the CASE in the January 20, 1999, Substance, Mayor Daley, Paul Vallas, and school-board president Gery Chico had lambasted him in the press. “What kind of teachers are they?” Daley asked reporters. “Do they want kids to cheat and get a phony grade and move on?” On January 26 the board filed its suit against Schmidt.
