SYPP’s Education Justice Campaign

Our Analysis:
1. High Stakes standardized tests hurt our communities and the lives of young people of color, low income youth, immigrant youth, young people with disabilities, and other marginalized youth. They aggravate and support inequities, and institutional and cultural oppressions that already exist within the education system and do not motivate marginalized students to do better in school.

2. If the WASL test gets used as a high school exit exam, what will happen to the hundreds and thousands of students that will be denied their diploma? Having a high school diploma is critical to having opportunities for higher education and finding living wage work. Exit exams separate students and predetermine their likely roles in society. They track high performing students into an elite group and track low performing students into a disposable societal class that fill our military, prisons and criminal justice system, and create a low wage labor force.

3. The WASL is an unfair measure of assessment. Conditions that encourage good performance are not equitable or accessible to all students or even all schools. Obvious examples of this are English Language Learner students who are expected to take the WASL test in English but clearly have a language barrier that prevents them from being able to accurately reflect their knowledge and severely diminishes their chances of passing the test.

4. High stakes standardized tests are not a real solution to the low academic achievement of our public education system. They use punitive motivation that increase the barriers for marginalized students to succeed in school while at the same time redirecting resources from our already depleted educational funding to support the tests. Funding based on test performance also hurts schools – tests do not generate new resources, instead they take funding away from low performing schools which puts them in cycles of poverty that might lead to closure or privatization.

Our Vision:
We envision a school system that:
 Provides quality education to all students by offering a broader curricula that encourages critical thinking instead of ‘teaching to the test’, uses a multicultural perspective & is relevant to students’ experiences, allows students to access courses that correspond to their career goals and interests and holds all students to high academic standards (No TRACKING);
 Is a safe environment for all students, especially those students who are targeted because of their gender, sexuality, ability, class, ethnicity or religion; and protects student privacy;
 has protected funding so that schools can remain free and public, keep a variety of electives and bilingual education, continue to offer college prep programs like running start, find and retain qualified and diverse teachers and staff, offer smaller classes, maintain clean and safe environments, and provide up-to-date technological resources and equipment;
 encourages student success by providing teachers and counselors of color, encouraging all students to reach for high standards, and encouraging parent involvement, and;
 represents students’ opinion by allowing students to have equal power in decision-making.

Our Strategies:
Organizing Strategy:
Build a base of support in the community that brings together the important/ affected unorganized groups to the campaign, including mobilizing 500 youth across 10 schools.

Campaign Strategy 1:
To put pressure on the Seattle School board through grassroots lobbying to meet our attainable demands and pass a resolution against the WASL exit exam.

Campaign Strategy 2:
To leverage the SSB to influence legislators to support and follow through with new legislation that will change the WASL to not be an exit exam and implement other proactive demands.