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California Petition Calling for a Moratorium…

California Petition
Calling for a Moratorium…
On punitive, improper, biased, and harmful use
of high-stakes standardized test scores in
California public schools

• Agreeing that all children deserve a
quality education that respects them as
individuals and empowers them to develop their
full potential,
and;

• Recognizing the enormous inequality of
educational opportunity
and resources between high and low income
school districts; and

• Understanding that schools with the
poorest resources are damaged the most by No
Child Left Behind policies—such as sanctions
and privatization— producing a fear-based,
test-score driven school culture; and

• Realizing that English-only
standardized testing discriminates against
students whose home language is not English;
and

• Questioning the validity of the
California High School Exit Exam (CAHSEE)
that:
-Denied diplomas to 44,000 seniors in
2006 dismissing their satisfactory
completion of 4 years of course work, thereby
invalidating their teachers’
professional judgment;

-Forces students to memorize and
regurgitate useless material, and
superficial facts to raise their scores on
multiple-choice tests;

-Ignores students’ portfolios,
grades, awards, personal characteristics
and higher order thinking skills that cannot be
measured by multiple
choice tests; and

• Knowing that high-stakes uses of
standardized test scores— systematically
discriminate against students from low income
school districts and young people with special
needs; and

• Recognizing that California’s punitive
uses of standardized test scores increases the
number of students dropping out of high school
and the rate of youth incarceration; and may be
contributing to the growing numbers of teen
suicides…

We call on our California state
representatives:

1. to institute an immediate moratorium on
high-stakes uses of standardized test scores
for all grade levels; and

2. to implement multiple forms of
assessments to evaluate learning
& teaching in all of our public schools (as
Nebraska has done); and

3. to invest more public education funds
to promote quality education, i.e. smaller
class size, student mentoring, professional
development for teachers, hands-on art and
science programs, rather than the current
quantitative, test-score- driven, “test-prep”
curriculum which insults the intelligence of
our students and their teachers.

California Petition for a Moratorium on High
Stakes Standardized Testing

Signature E-mail
address Print Name Zip
code
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Please send completed petitions to:

• Adrienne Jerman:2410 A North Main St.
Salinas, 93906 or

• Phyllis Greenleaf:1555 Merrill St.#75,
Santa Cruz, 95062

• Questions? E-mail ajmaestra@msn.com or
phyllisgreenleaf@gmail.com

FYI: Eliminating CAHSEE will save taxpayers
$550 million+ every year.

Instead of school districts spending
thousands of dollars on corporate produced
test-prep curriculum, and corporate-trained
testing consultants, --simply to raise scores
on corporate produced standardized tests, our
districts can invest funds in quality education
that supports meaningful learning, i.e. the
Reading Recovery program that is not approved
by No Child Left Behind administrators.




— educator-activists
Petition
2008-12-10


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