The education of Jesse Hagopian.

• Author: Middlewood, Erin
• Position: Seattle school reform advocate

Pepper spray seared Jesse Hagopian's face and tears streamed from his eyes. He had just given a speech at this year's Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebration, on January 19 in Seattle. In keeping with tradition, the thirty-third annual event began in the gymnasium of Garfield High School, where Hagopian himself attended school and now teaches history. He presented plaques to students who were leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement. After the ceremony, 10,000 people marched toward downtown.

There, Hagopian delivered the event's final speech, demanding justice for Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, and other unarmed black males who died at the hands of police.

"I challenged people who celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. but denigrate his true legacy: a life of direct action against injustice," Hagopian recalls. "He would have been in the streets of Ferguson, demanding that black lives matter. Those who chastise Black Lives Matter as too strident but the next day celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. are doing his memory an injustice."

Applause rang in Hagopian's ears as he headed off to complete the day at a birthday party for his two-year-old son. Then, as he walked down the sidewalk, calling his mother on the phone to ask her for a ride, a police officer pepper-sprayed him in the face. A bystander caught the encounter on a cellphone video camera, footage Hagopian is using in a federal lawsuit against the Seattle police.

Hagopian, a nationally known school reform advocate who writes the blog "I Am An Educator," arrived at the birthday party with his eyes swollen and ear burning. His two sons, especially his six-year-old, were troubled.

"I didn't know what to tell them," Hagopian says. "For all the education I do about structural racism and inequality and police brutality, my tongue was tied when my son asked me what happened."

Jesse Hagopian's passion for social justice led him to the classroom, something that surprises him given his own struggles in school.

"Most of my life I would have thought of this as the last profession I would have had," says Hagopian, thirty-six, whose mother is of Armenian descent and whose father is African American. "School was a very arduous experience to me. It didn't seem like it was meant for me."

Yet Hagopian has become a leading voice for an end to high-stakes standardized testing, and has brought together civil rights activists with parents who fear that too many tests are creating a stripped-down, dull, and oppressive school environment, especially for kids who are already disadvantaged. In September, his work culminated in a historic Seattle teachers' strike, driven by the demands of his coalition of "social justice educators"--more recess, less testing, and race and equity committees in every school.

The 2001 No Child Left Behind Act requires schools to show "adequate yearly progress" on state-defined standards measured by testing. This spurred a wave of new tests--one national group found that students in large urban districts will take an average of 113 standardized tests between pre-kindergarten and twelfth grade. The massive increase...