Before completing this project, I only had a vague notion of high stakes testing and its impacts. I knew that it was a controversial practice, but I hadn’t considered the nuances of testing in different school environments. It’s easy to see that high stakes testing creates problems in any classroom, but it’s important to unpack how urban classrooms are uniquely affected. Urban classrooms face difficulties that those in wealthy, White suburbs do not. On average, they are less resourced, under staffed, and made up of proportionately higher rates of low-income, minority students. High stakes testing in these environments serves to reinforce achievement gaps between the historically disadvantaged and the historically privileged as those in urban schools are set up to fail. It’s not fair to compare students living on food stamps to those growing up in financially stable environments given the barriers poverty adds to educational success. Yet, schools with these demographics are the ones most likely to be shut down due to low test scores. High stakes testing, as it stands, is not a way to ensure accountability and equitable education for all; it’s a way to perpetuate the status quo.

Throughout the semester, we’ve focused a lot on the problems facing urban education. As I mentioned above, urban schools are often under funded even though they would benefit the most from robust extra curricular opportunities, well-trained teachers, expansive counseling services, and accessible lunch options. In addition to being under resourced, the privatization of public education has eliminated a lot of neighborhood schools in urban areas and left students feeling disconnected from their communities. Add to this a lack of teacher diversity, the school-to-prison pipeline, and ELL education and you get a seemingly insurmountable problem. The one ray of hope? Grassroots organizing!

Grassroots organizations are an extremely powerful tool. They attack local problems with local people and can achieve real progress in the process. Unlike some distant, well-meaning entity, grassroots organizing is brimming with the passion, anger, and hope of the people on the ground. These are the people that truly understand the importance of the issue; they are living it everyday. From my research into grassroots organizing around high stakes testing, I saw the power of a community united under a common goal. By combining forces with a variety of perspectives, students successfully opted out of tests, parents communicated their grievances with local government bodies, educators staged protests, and the negative sentiments around high stakes testing spread across the nation. With an issue as big as this, grassroots organizations can’t fix the problem, but they can certainly generate conversation and, hopefully, inspire some bigger fish to care too.