A grassroots opt-out campaign organized by Brooklyn parents has yielded a record number of test refusals for this year’s 3rd – 8th grade state-mandated math and English exams. The campaign is part of a national movement in which parents are rejecting high-stakes standardized tests as harmful to their children, teachers, and schools and as detrimental to creativity and deep learning. In a first for the borough, at least three public schools will have more students sitting out the exams than taking them.
Families of children in the testing grades at PS 446/Riverdale Avenue Community School (District 23, Brownsville), the Academy of Arts & Letters (District 13, Fort Greene), and PS 146/Brooklyn New School (District 15, Carroll Gardens) deluged their principals with “opt out” letters. Each school had a refusal rate of over 70 percent; at Arts & Letters the 3rd grade refusals topped out at 83%.
Administrators expect to continue to receive refusals, but as of March 31, the day before the start of the annual testing season, ¬¬¬¬ 243 of the 306 students in grades 3-5 at Brooklyn New School had submitted letters. (Last year, 4 families at the school opted out.) Parents of 48 of 60 children refused the tests at PS 446. At Arts & Letters, where the refusal effort focused on the 3rd grade, 44 of 53 3rd graders will not be taking the tests.
“The high stakes attached to these tests must go,” says PS 146 parent Elizabeth Elsass. “We refuse to take part in a test-score-driven education system that is hurting all children.” William Fletcher, whose son attends 3rd grade at PS 446, adds, “In third grade, children need music, art, and gym. But these get crowded out by the tests.”
The groundswell of parent protest is fueled by deep concerns over the length, cost, and content of the tests; their inappropriate use as the primary, and sometimes sole, evaluator of children, teachers, and schools; and their damaging effect on the direction in which public education is headed. Many parents stress that they are not against testing in general. Betsy Guttmacher, who is opting out her eighth-grade daughter at Arts & Letters, explains, “Parents want authentic, meaningful assessments of our children’s learning, and of their teachers’ effectiveness—not punitive, poorly designed, high-stakes testing.”
Parents who refuse the tests are outraged by:
– The length and content of the exams: Children as young as 8 are expected to sit for 6 days of 70-minute test sessions. 5th graders will spend 90 minutes a day taking the tests, longer than college graduates spend on the GRE, MCAT, or LSAT. School staff who saw last year’s exams report that questions were “tricky” and that some questions had no clear right answer. They did not see a chance for children to demonstrate deep thinking, even though the Common Core-aligned tests claim to measure exactly that. Only 5% of English Language Learners passed the state tests last year.
– Promotion decisions determined by one test score. (Recent state legislation may render this exact point moot, but parents remain uneasy since they do not know the extent to which this single score will figure in promotion and admissions decisions.)
– Teacher evaluations based on children’s test scores.
– The high stakes of the tests which force teachers to teach to the test and abandon rich, creative curriculum.
– The high costs of testing. For-profit testing companies receive millions while schools struggle to work with reduced budgets each year. This results in larger class sizes and reduced staff.
– The requirement that schools pay for the scoring of the tests out of their own budgets and/or send teachers out of the classroom for several grading days. (Doubly outrageous at schools where so few children are actually taking the test!)
– The collection and sharing, without parental consent, of children’s personal data (for the cloud-based inBloom database).
Parents who are refusing the tests reflect the diversity of Brooklyn’s opt-out movement, cutting across class and color lines. Many of them have been educating and organizing their fellow parents for months—attending meetings, producing literature, and researching opt-out related questions. For example, when 4th grade parents at Brooklyn New School wondered whether opting out would affect their children’s middle school applications, parent organizers surveyed 19 middle schools. Their findings: there is no ironclad connection between test scores and middle school admissions in the consulted schools. (These were mostly District 15 and citywide middle schools.) The results of this parent survey are available to the press.
The conviction of the parent activists is infectious. Mother of 3, Johanna Perez, relates, “Learning about the tests has been eye-opening. I shared what’s going on at our school with my sister, whose kids go to school in the Bronx; now we’re both opting our children out.” Says parent Marvin Piqué, “We need a system that works for all children. The obsession with testing is hurting the children it is designed to help the most. Stop this and fix it.”
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For More Information Visit:
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http://www.parentvoicesny.org
http://www.changethestakes.org
http://www.timeoutfromtesting.org
http://www.nysape.org
http://www.unitedoptout.com
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Watch Video Coverage Below:
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