Simulations uncover obstacle to harnessing laser-driven fusion: Under realistic conditions, hollow cones fail to guide energetic electrons to fuel

Mar. 26, 2013 ? A once-promising approach for using next-generation, ultra-intense lasers to help deliver commercially viable fusion energy has been brought into serious question by new experimental results and first-of-a-kind simulations of laser-plasma interaction.

Researchers at The Ohio State University are evaluating a two-stage process in which a pellet of fusion fuel is first crushed by lasers on all sides, shrinking the pellet to dozens of times its original size, followed by an ultra-intense burst of laser light to ignite a chain reaction. This two-stage approach is called Fast Ignition, and there are a few variants on the theme.

In a recent paper, the Ohio State research group considered the long-discussed possibility of using a hollow cone to maintain a channel for the ultra-intense "ignitor pulse" to focus laser energy on the compressed pellet core. Drawing on both experimental results from studies at the Titan Laser at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, and massively-parallel computer simulations of the laser-target interaction performed at the Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC) in Columbus, Ohio, the research team found compelling evidence that the cone-guided approach to Fast Ignition has a serious flaw.

"In the history of fusion research, two-steps-forward and one-step-back stories are a common theme," said Chris Orban, Ph.D., a researcher of the High Energy Density Physics research group at Ohio State and the lead theorist on the project. "But sometimes progress is about seeing what's not going to work, just as much as it is looking forward to the next big idea."

Since the ultra-intense pulse delivers energy to the fuel through relativistic electrons accelerated by the laser interaction, the Ohio State study focused on the coupling of the laser light to electrons and the propagation of those electrons through the cone target. Rather than investigating how the interaction would work on a high-demand, high-cost facility like the National Ignition Facility (NIF), which is also based at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and one of the largest scientific operations in the world, the researchers considered experiments just across from NIF at the Titan laser, which is much smaller and easily accessible.

These images from their simulations highlight the trajectories of randomly-selected electrons for a thin cone (left) and thick cone (right), each attached to a copper wire. Background colors show the strength of the electric fields pointing away from the cone and wire. For thin cones, the electric fields act to guide energetic electrons forward into the wire while for thick cones -- a more realistic case -- these fields are too distant to be effective. An animation of the simulation is available online at: http://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~orban/cone_wire_final5mJ_4_5ps.avi.

Despite its size and despite having lower total energy, for a brief moment the Titan laser is many thousands of times more intense than NIF, which makes it a decent stand-in as a second-stage ignitor pulse. The OSU-led experimental team focused the Titan pulse on hollow cone targets attached at the tip to copper wires and observed the burst of X-ray photons coming from the copper as a measure of the laser energy to relativistic electron conversion efficiency.

The X-ray signal was much lower from the hollow cones with thicker cone walls. "This was strong evidence to the experimental team that the typical approach to cone-guided Fast Ignition wouldn't work, since thicker cones should be more realistic than thin cones," said Orban. "This is because electrons are free to move around in a dense plasma, much like they do in a normal metal, so the thicker cone target is like a thin cone embedded in a dense plasma."

These intuitions were tested in simulations performed at OSC. Whereas earlier efforts to simulate the laser-target interaction were forced to simplify or shrink the target size in order to make the calculations more feasible, Orban used the LSP code to perform the first-ever, full-scale 2D Particle-In-Cell simulations of the entire laser-target interaction using fully realistic laser fields.

These simulations also included a sophisticated model for the pre-heating of the target from stray laser light ahead of the ultra-intense pulse developed by collaborators at the Flash Center for Computational Science at the University of Chicago.

"We were delighted to help Chris use the FLASH code to provide realistic initial conditions for his Particle-In-Cell simulations," said Don Lamb, director of the Flash Center. "This is an outstanding example of how two groups can collaborate to achieve a scientific result that neither could have achieved alone."

To conduct the simulations, the Ohio State researchers accessed OSC's flagship Oakley Cluster supercomputer system. The HP-built system features 8,300+ Intel Xeon cores and 128 NVIDIA Tesla GPUs. Oakley can achieve 88 teraflops, tech-speak for performing 88 trillion calculations per second, or, with acceleration from the NVIDIA GPUs, a total peak performance of 154 teraflops.

"The simulations pointed to the electric fields building up on the edge of the cone as the key to everything," said Orban. "The thicker the cone is, the further away the cone edge is from the laser, and as a result fewer energetic electrons are deflected forward, which is the crucial issue in making cone-guided Fast Ignition a viable approach."

With both the experiment and the simulations telling the same story, the evidence is compelling that the cone-guided route to Fast Ignition is an unlikely one. While other studies have come to similar conclusions, the group was the first to identify the plasma surrounding the cone as a severe hindrance. Thankfully, there are still many other ideas for successfully igniting the fusion pellet with current or soon-to-be-constructed laser facilities. Any future efforts to spark fusion reactions with these lasers using a two-stage fast-ignition approach must be mindful to consider the neutralizing effect of the free electrons in the dense plasma.

"We could not have completed this project without the Oakley Cluster," Orban noted. "It was the perfect combination of speed and RAM and availability for us. And thanks to the profiling I was able to do, the compute time for our production runs went from two weeks in November 2011 to three or four days as of February 2012."

"Energy and the environment is one of the primary focus areas of the center, and this research fits perfectly into that domain," said Brian Guilfoos, the client and technology support manager for OSC. "Many of our systems were designed and software packages selected to best support the type of computing required by investigators working in fields related to our focus areas."

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Ohio Supercomputer Center.

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Journal Reference:

1. K. U. Akli, C. Orban, D. Schumacher, M. Storm, M. Fatenejad, D. Lamb, R. R. Freeman. Coupling of high-intensity laser light to fast electrons in cone-guided fast ignition. Physical Review E, 2012; 86 (6) DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevE.86.065402

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_technology/~3/2LmJkrdgNbo/130326162340.htm

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Syrian opposition opens first embassy, says world lets it down

By Yara Bayoumy and Regan Doherty

DOHA (Reuters) - A Syrian opposition bloc recognized by the Arab League as the sole representative for Syria opened its first embassy in Qatar on Wednesday in a diplomatic blow to President Bashar al-Assad.

But opposition leader Moaz Alkhatib, who took Syria's seat at an Arab summit in Doha on Tuesday, used the ribbon-cutting ceremony to voice his frustration with world powers for failing to do more to help in the two-year-old struggle to topple Assad.

"There is an international willingness for the revolution not to triumph," he told reporters at the embassy, which was festooned with balloons in the red, green, white and black of Syria's national flag.

Alkhatib, a Sunni Muslim cleric who resigned this week as leader of the Syrian National Coalition, but who is staying on as a caretaker, also alluded to internal differences plaguing the opposition umbrella group formed in Qatar in November.

"The only way to victory is unity," he declared.

Damascus raged against summit host Qatar for helping the opposition into Syria's seat at the League, while Russia and Iran also criticized the move to delegitimize Assad's rule.

Yet although the 22-member Arab bloc lent its support to giving weapons to Syrian rebels, it is unclear how much impact the opposition's diplomatic advances will have inside Syria.

The Cairo-based coalition's control over insurgent groups is tenuous at best. Some of the most militarily effective, such as the al Qaeda-linked Nusra Front, openly reject its authority.

Alkhatib told Reuters in an interview he was surprised by a rebuff from the United States and NATO to his request for Patriot missiles based in Turkey to help protect rebel-held parts of northern Syria from Assad's helicopters and warplanes.

"I'm scared that this will be a message to the Syrian regime telling it 'Do what you want'," he said.

OPPOSITION DISUNITY

NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, speaking to students in Moscow via video link from Brussels, again said the Western alliance had no intention of intervening in Syria.

"We believe that we need a political solution in Syria," he said, noting there was no U.N. mandate for NATO action there.

Disunity among Syria's opposition in exile and the armed factions on the ground have long hindered the struggle against Assad and have contributed to Western reluctance to intervene.

Alkhatib has cited the West's failure to do more to help the opposition, as well as the coalition's internal divisions, as reasons for announcing on Sunday that he would quit as leader.

He offered no clarity on his own political future in his interview with Reuters. "I have given my resignation and I have not withdrawn it. But I have to continue my duties until the general committee meets," the former mosque imam said.

The Arab summit's support for Assad's foes may prove more symbolic than practical, but Syria vented its wrath at Qatar for its pro-opposition actions at the annual gathering.

"The emir of Qatar, the biggest bank for supporting terrorism in the region, began his presidency of the Arab League by hijacking it with tainted oil and money," said state news agency SANA, a mouthpiece for Assad's government.

Qatar's Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani "committed a flagrant violation of the League's pact by inviting the deformed body, the 'Doha Coalition', to usurp Syria's seat in the League", SANA said, in a scathing reference to the opposition.

Qatar has funded political opposition groups and is believed to be funneling money and weapons to rebels in Syria.

Russia, which gives Damascus military and diplomatic support, scolded the Arab League for taking "another anti-Syria step" by giving Syria's seat to the opposition.

Arab nations are far from united on Syria, with Algeria, Iraq and Lebanon often opposing any action against Assad's rule.

Saudi Arabia, Qatar and some others have thrown their support behind the mostly Sunni Muslim rebels in Syria, partly to weaken Shi'ite Iran, the main regional ally of Assad, whose minority Alawite sect is distantly derived from Shi'ite Islam.

Iran, which has sent advisers, money and weapons to help Assad stay in power, also lambasted the Arab League for allowing a foe of Assad to take Syria's seat at the summit, calling this "a pattern of dangerous behavior".

Iran views Assad as a pillar of an "axis of resistance" against Israel and a bulwark against Sunni militants in Syria, a country which for three decades has been the main conduit for Iranian arms supplies to Lebanon's Shi'ite Hezbollah movement.

(Additional reporting by William Maclean in Doha, Oliver Holmes and Erika Solomon in Beirut, Marcus George in Dubai and Gabriela Baczynska in Moscow; Writing by Alistair Lyon; Editing by Jon Boyle)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/syrian-opposition-opens-first-embassy-says-world-lets-135557453.html

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Stocks slide, following European markets lower

NEW YORK (AP) ? Worries about Europe rattled the stock market Wednesday, a day after the Dow Jones industrial average had its biggest gain in three weeks.

Investors are watching to see if Cyprus can restore confidence in its banking system. They are also keeping an eye on Italy, where political parties are struggling to form a new government.

The Dow Jones industrial average was down 63 points, or 0.4 percent, at 14,494 an hour after the opening bell Wednesday. The decline erased the Dow's gain for the week. The index had rallied 111 points Tuesday on better U.S. housing news.

Cyprus is working out details for how to reopen its banks after a nearly two-week shutdown. An international bailout agreement calls for large deposits to be used to help pay for the rescue of its banking system.

In Italy, center-left leader Pier Luigi Bersani failed to get support from the anti-establishment 5 Star Movement to form a new government. Political gridlock in Italy has been a major concern for investors following inconclusive results of elections in late February. Investors worry that the country won't follow through with unpopular budget cuts, potentially undermining confidence in the euro.

European markets fell. Benchmark indexes were down 1.2 percent in Germany and 1.4 percent in France. Italy's main stock index slumped 1.2 percent.

The worries hit Europe's bond markets especially hard. Borrowing rates for Italy and Spain shot higher, which means investors' confidence in the financial stability of those countries is weakening. Rates for more stable European countries like Germany and France fell as investors bought their bonds.

In the market for U.S. government bonds, the yield on the 10-year Treasury note dropped to 1.85 percent. That's a sharp fall from 1.91 percent late Tuesday and suggests investors are moving money into ultra-safe assets.

The Standard & Poor's 500 index was down seven points, or 0.5 percent, to 1,556. The Nasdaq composite was down 18 points, 0.6 percent, at 3,234.

The declines were broad. All 10 industry groups in the S&P 500 index fell, led by banks and industrial companies. The groups with the smallest losses were utilities and health care, which investors tend to buy when they're feeling risk-averse.

The S&P 500 closed within two points of its all-time high of 1,565 on Tuesday, helped by rising home prices and orders for manufactured goods. The stock index hit that peak on Oct. 9, 2007, before the Great Recession and a financial crisis roiled financial markets.

Cliffs Natural Resources, an iron ore mining company, plunged 13 percent, the biggest loss in the S&P. The stock fell $2.78 to $18.65.

Science Applications International Corp. jumped 4 percent after the security and communications technology provider reported a fourth-quarter profit that was better than analysts were expecting. SAIC also announced a special dividend of $1 per share. The stock rose 65 cents to $13.47.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/stocks-slide-following-european-markets-lower-134649261--finance.html

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Choose The Right Online Marketing Strategy Using ... - We Want CSG

You likely don?t know everything that can be learned about Web marketing. Every day new information emerges on how to effectively market over the internet, and it is always best that when you do have a company that relies on this type of marketing to always keep up to date with the latest trends. This article will give you a few quick tips for improving your affiliate marketing efforts.

Offer a free, branded promotional item in venues that promote such items. If you?re offering an e-book for free, give it to sites that list free e-books. There are many sites that offer free items that you can submit.

TIP! You should know a good bit about the products or services available on your site. This is important because not only will you gain credibility by providing a vast amount of correct and pertinent information, but it is extremely easy to lose credibility if people can see through your attempts to dishonestly claim to be an expert.

If you are interested in having more visitors to your site, it is vital that you rank higher and employ SEO tactics. This is very essential if you are a online business that markets the same thing as a lot of different sites, they will also use the description the manufacturer uses. When you have unique and original product descriptions, your site will stand out in the search engines and lead you to higher rankings.

Luck is not enough for your web marketing venture, rather you should always work hard. You do not see large, successful businesses that got where they are by luck alone. Was Coke lucky when their soda became a hit? Not really! They did a superb job of marketing their product.

For more effective marketing, try mentioning guarantees in your promotional content. Although the term ?guaranteed? is dependent on how good the company is, people like hearing that they aren?t taking risks if they choose to buy your product. Consumers often feel safer parting with their hard-earned money when they know there is a guarantee.

TIP! You should keep an eye on your competitor?s strategies and learn from both their successes and failures. If they look like they are a site that you would purchase product from, then they might be a very good role model for you.

Technology moves fast, and if your company wants to keep up, you are going to have to take advantage of all the technology available for marketing success. If you or your company falls behind the curve, your potential customers will catch on and begin to doubt your abilities. Impress your clients by proving that you are up-to-date with technology and software.

There is a lot of information available concerning Web marketing. What is great is Internet marketing isn?t a topic that needs an insane amount of attention to become successful in. Small useful hints will give you success to help you learn more and give you valuable experience in success. You can make quick improvements in the way you market your business online. Open your eyes and you will consistently improve your Affiliate marketing skills.

Source: http://www.wewantcsg.org/choose-the-right-online-marketing-strategy-using-these-ideas

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Victoria Stilwell Tells Steve Dale She's Positive e-Collars are ...

By Steve Dale, today at 9:32 am

On Steve Dale's Pet World on WGN Radio, listen HERE to dog trainer Victoria Stilwell from Animal Planet's It's Me or the Dog. I asked her about actress Eva Mendes fancying a shock or electronic collar. "It's one thing about putting one around your hand to try to test them, it's another thing to put it around your neck," she says. Mendes explained to David Letterman that she went ahead and gave the collar a try.

"If you use one (an e-collar) ?long enough, you could change the electrical energy in the brain," Stilwell adds. ?Never one to mince worlds, Stilwell says these collars are abusive and have no place in her world. Why is this equipment abusive to even suggest to use on children and acceptable for dogs, she wonders.

In her new book "Train Your Dog Positively," Stilwell writes about how to help dogs with a long ?list of behavioral issues, including separation anxiety. She even suggests playing background music to help calm anxious dogs. Ever one to help, I offered various types of music. Hear which one Victoria chooses.
Type your email address in the box and click the "create subscription" button. My list is completely spam free, and you can opt out at any time.

Filed under: dog training, dogs

Tags: dog training, dog walking, e collar, electronic dog collars, It's Me or the Dog, leash training, separation anxiety, Steve Dale archives, Steve Dale's Pet World, Through a Dog's Ear, Training Your Dog Positively, Victoria Stilwell

Source: http://www.chicagonow.com/steve-dales-pet-world/2013/03/victoria-stilwell-tells-steve-dale-shes-positive-e-collars-are-abusive/

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Pa. groundhog's handler taking blame for forecast

FILE - This Saturday, Feb. 2, 2013 file photo shows Groundhog Club Co-handler Ron Ploucha holding the weather predicting groundhog, Punxsutawney Phil, after the club said Phil did not see his shadow and there will be an early spring during the Groundhog Day ceremony in Punxsutawney, Pa. Bill Deeley, president of the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club's Inner Circle, told The Associated Press on Monday, March 25, 2013 that the animal rightly predicted six more weeks of winter last month, but he mistakenly announced an early spring because he failed to correctly interpret Phil's "groundhog-ese." (AP Photo/Keith Srakocic, File)

FILE - This Saturday, Feb. 2, 2013 file photo shows Groundhog Club Co-handler Ron Ploucha holding the weather predicting groundhog, Punxsutawney Phil, after the club said Phil did not see his shadow and there will be an early spring during the Groundhog Day ceremony in Punxsutawney, Pa. Bill Deeley, president of the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club's Inner Circle, told The Associated Press on Monday, March 25, 2013 that the animal rightly predicted six more weeks of winter last month, but he mistakenly announced an early spring because he failed to correctly interpret Phil's "groundhog-ese." (AP Photo/Keith Srakocic, File)

PITTSBURGH (AP) ? An Ohio prosecutor who light-heartedly filed a criminal indictment against the famous Pennsylvania groundhog who fraudulently "predicted" an early spring said he may consider a pardon now that the animal's handler is taking the blame.

Bill Deeley, president of the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club's Inner Circle, told The Associated Press on Monday that the animal rightly predicted six more weeks of winter last month, but he mistakenly announced an early spring because he failed to correctly interpret Phil's "groundhog-ese."

"I'm the guy that did it; I'll be the fall guy. It's not Phil's fault," Deeley said.

Butler County, Ohio, prosecutor Mike Gmoser told the AP that he's reconsidering the charges in light of the new evidence and may issue a full pardon.

"Frankly, he is a cute little rascal, a cute little thing," Gmoser said. "And if somebody is willing to step up to the plate and take the rap, I'm willing to listen."

The Groundhog Day celebration in Punxsutawney, a borough about 65 miles northeast of Pittsburgh, attracts worldwide attention each year. But the attention stretched well beyond Feb. 2 when Gmoser last week issued an indictment as winter-like weather continued across much of the nation even as spring began.

"Punxsutawney Phil did purposely, and with prior calculation and design cause the people to believe that spring would come early," Gmoser's indictment said. The penalty? Death, Smoser said, tongue firmly in cheek.

Deeley said this is the second year in a row he's misinterpreted Phil's forecast. "Remember, last year at this time it was 80 degrees and Phil had predicted six more weeks of winter," Deeley said.

Under normal circumstances, Deeley's interpretation of the forecast is infallible, as long as he clings to the gnarly, magical "Arcadian" cane while the rodent whispers the forecast into his ear. Deeley still doesn't know what went wrong, but he said the borough is nonetheless pleased to still be in the news more than six weeks later ? although there's more snow on the ground, and local schools were closed Monday.

"We couldn't have generated this much publicity with a $10,000 ad campaign," he said.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/aa9398e6757a46fa93ed5dea7bd3729e/Article_2013-03-25-Groundhog's%20Fallible%20Forecast/id-21922d68fe704c6ab34492ab9b936a59

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Pencils Down: Will a Testing Revolt Challenge School Closings ...

As the battle lines over one of the largest school shutdowns in U.S. history are drawn, Rebecca Burns reports on the role played by high-stakes standardized testing.

Members of the group Parents 4 Teachers hold a banner outside City Hall on Friday, March 22. (Photo: Sarah Jane Rhee/Chicago Indymedia, Creative Commons)

?

Originally published at In These Times.

Chicago Public Schools (CPS) officials announced on Thursday that they are preparing to close 61 schools this year, mostly in majority black and Latino neighborhoods. The battle lines over one of the largest school shutdowns in U.S. history are drawn?and one of the key factors that determines where they fall, Chicago school activists emphasize, is the data from high stakes standardized tests. As Chicago teachers and school activists ramp up their efforts to stop closings, a campaign of student testing opt-outs could be one of the tactics they employ against corporate-backed education reforms.

Before this year, there was little precedent for such a move. But the question of teacher and student resistance to standardized testing has taken center stage following a successful testing boycott in Seattle. In January, teachers at Seattle?s Garfield High School lit a spark in the tinderbox of teacher frustration when they announced that they would refuse to administer the district-mandated Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) test. Soon, the revolt spread to five other schools in the city. National Education Association President Dennis Van Roekel has called the Seattle boycott ?a defining moment? for the teaching profession. Though Seattle?s superintendent threatened in February to suspend the boycotting teachers for 10 days without pay, they?ve thus far escaped disciplinary action by the school district, likely due to an outpouring of support nationwide. Now, Seattle teachers are gearing up to boycott the next round of the MAP in April?and taking nationwide the message that educators, students and parents must unite to beat back high-stakes testing.

That message found easy resonance this week in Chicago, where striking teachers with signs proclaiming ?Testing =/ Learning? filled the streets last fall. At a community forum on Tuesday night, visiting Garfield High history teacher Jesse Hagopian and Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) President Karen Lewis together made the case that standardized testing is a key element of the assault on public education.

?What?s the purpose of standardized testing? It?s to rank and sort our children,? Lewis told the crowd. Test scores are used to rank Chicago schools academically, and those designated ?high performing? are exempt from closure. The CTU contends that high-stakes testing amplifies racial disparities in education. ?Standardized testing grew out of the American tradition of using quantitative attempts to measure ?intelligence? as a pretext for racist and exclusionary policies,? it asserts in a recently-released position paper.

The union argues that time spent on testing preparation interferes with classroom learning, but Chicago teachers are particularly rankled by MAP because it factors heavily into their performance evaluations. MAP, a computerized test given multiple times a year by more than 5,000 school districts to track student growth in reading and math, is used widely in ?value-added? models of evaluation meant to measure teacher impact on student improvement. Teachers in Seattle and Chicago alike call this method ?pseudo-scientific;? tests like the MAP don?t follow classroom curriculum, but can nevertheless be used to punish teachers. A 2010 study from the U.S. Department of Education examining error rates in the use of student test score gains to evaluate teachers concluded: ?More than 90 percent of the variation in student gain scores is due to the variation in student-level factors that are not under control of the teachers.?

In February, the CTU announced that it had ?launched a campaign in support of local and nationwide efforts? to eliminate non-state-mandated tests such as the MAP. More Than a Score, a new coalition of teachers and parent groups that co-sponsored Tuesday?s forum, says it has gathered thousands of signatures on a petition against high stakes testing since February. The group is calling on the Chicago Board of Education to disclose the cost and purpose of each of the 22 tests currently administered in the school district. It?s also pushing for the elimination of standardized testing for children from pre-school through second grade. The Chicago Reader?s Ben Joravsky noted last year that Chicago kindergarteners now spend up to a third of their school year taking tests, a situation that More Than a Score intends to highlight by staging a ?play-in? with young students at the Board of Education on March 30.

Though dissent over standardized testing has been brewing across the country among teachers and some superintendents, this year appears to be the first time that educators have openly refused to follow testing edicts, the Christian Science Monitor reported in January. Jesse Hagopian, who traveled to Chicago to share lessons from the testing boycott, noted that Garfield High has a ?tradition of struggle? that has propelled teachers to take action. (Both Martin Luther King, Jr. and Stokely Carmichael spoke there in the 1960s, a legacy that has left an impact on the black student union that Hagopian advises.) But Garfield also faces the same challenges as other schools, he emphasized, and the testing boycott there started out small before it began to spread.

Earlier this year, Hagopian, who is also a teachers union representative, got a call from a teacher who was considering not administering MAP. A few faculty members began holding meetings on the idea, and realized that one teacher?s stand wouldn?t be enough. ?Courageous as that would be, they could target one teacher,? he said. ?But soon we realized every teacher in the school already thought this test was a waste of time.?

After Garfield High teachers announced their boycott, the school?s Parent Teacher Association voted to support them, undercutting claims that teachers were acting contrary to students? best interests. Next, following deadlocked talks with teachers, Seattle Superintendent Jose Banda announced that the MAP test would continue as planned, given by school administrators. ?That was when the students stood up and started to fight for themselves,? said Hagopian. Students have the right to opt out of MAP with parent permission, and less than one-fourth of the ninth graders who were scheduled to take the test at Garfield High did so, according to the Seattle Times.

Could Chicago schools be next to join the boycott? ?I think you take baby steps towards these things,? parent Julie Fain, who has helped spearhead petition-gathering at schools with More Than a Score, told In These Times. But as the battle to keep neighborhood schools open heats up, she noted, ?We want to remind people that the closings depend on test scores.?

Student and parent anti-testing efforts, which Hagopian credits as key in bolstering Seattle teachers? rebellion, are already picking up in Chicago. Earlier this month, a group of students at Gage Park High School staged a boycott of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), another optional test, to protest two recent incidences of alleged sexual assault at the school. Gage Park High senior Lesley Leon said that school administrators have continued pressuring students to take high-stakes tests, on which they are unable to focus, rather than opening a dialogue on student safety. Young Chicago Authors, a youth writers? workshop, is planning meetings this month to help proliferate student test boycotts.

Daisy Mass, an eighth grader in Chicago Public Schools who opted out of the MAP test after attending meetings on school closings with her mother, believes that more students would opt out of testing if they knew they had the right to. ?Everyone would jump at the chance not to take this test,? she told In These Times, ?It doesn?t factor into your grade, so there?s no incentive to do well, but it?s still stressful and makes you feel awful.?

Garfield teachers have also met with education justice advocates in Portland, where students last month launched their own opt-out campaign. Curbing the use of high-stakes testing is likely to prove an uphill battle, however: Standardized testing was estimated to be a $2.7 billion industry in 2009. In Seattle, former superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson acquired the MAP test for $4 million while she sat on the board of the Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA), which sells the MAP. A 2011 state audit determined that not disclosing this information represented an ethics violation, but the school system has continued use of the test.

Still, Hagopian is hopeful that the fight to ?Scrap the MAP? can lead to a broader struggle against ?norm-reference testing? that disadvantages minority and special education students. ?These tests do measure something,? he said. ?What they measure is your zip code and how many books you have in your house.? Seattle teachers have formed a citywide committee of boycotting schools, he told In These Times, and hope ultimately to pressure the school district to cancel its contract with the NWEA, which must be renewed this year.

The possibilities for building broader solidarity around this issue are many, be believes: ?Garfield can be the first step in a process where students, teachers and parents unite to insist that our kids are more than a score.?

Rebecca Burns is Assistant Editor at In These Times and a research assistant for a project examining violence against humanitarian aid workers.

Tagged as: Barbara Byrd-Bennett, chicago public schools, Chicago teachers, Chicago Teachers Union, CPS, karen lewis, protests, school closings, schools, students, teachers

Source: http://occupiedchicagotribune.org/2013/03/pencils-down-will-a-testing-revolt-challenge-school-closings/

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