Last week was School Choice Week, the privatizers’ national love fest for vouchers and charters, spiced up with a touch of scorn for “government schools.” I’m declaring this Opt Out Week on the Range, on my own. The Opt Out movement is growing in reaction to our national obsession with high stakes testing, and I figure interested Arizonans can benefit from knowing what’s going on around the country.
Over the past weeks, I’ve been downloading every article I can find on the Opt Out movement, which encourages parents to protest high stakes testing by refusing to allow their children to take the tests. I’ve found articles about opting out in 21 states. In some states like Florida, Illinois, New York, New Jersey, Colorado and, recently, Louisiana, it’s a pretty big deal. Here in Arizona, more articles have been written recently about people opting out of the measles vaccine than opting out of state testing, the one exception being articles that talked about the opt out bill in the legislature, HB 2246.
In coming days, I’ll focus on the way the opt out issue is playing itself out in a number of states, but today, I want to to take a more general look at the topic. But first, this, just in (last Friday) from Louisiana:
Jindal issues executive order on PARCC testing
Gov. Bobby Jindal issued an executive order this afternoon urging the state’s education board to offer alternatives to the controversial PARCC testing that starts in March.The governor’s order also asks that the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education protect school districts from being punished for students whose parents opt them out of the testing. Current policy would have a negative impact on school performance scores if students opt out of the test and receive a score of “0.”
That’s a first so far as I know: a governor issuing an order saying opting out is OK.
Which brings us to one of the most interesting aspects of the opt out movement. It brings together right wingers who are anti-Common Core but not necessarily against high stakes testing per se, and left wingers who are anti-high stakes testing but not necessarily against Common Core per se. Armed with different agendas, and often for different reasons, lefties and righties are fighting similar battles when it comes to high stakes testing. And that makes for a powerful, two-pronged attack.
Take, for example, this from Michelle Malkin on the right: Choose to refuse PARCC tests.
Moms and dads, you have the inherent right and responsibility to protect your children. You can choose to refuse the top-down Common Core racket of costly standardized tests of dubious academic value, reliability and validity.
Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
I’m reminding you of your right to choose because the spring season of testing tyranny is about to hit the fan. Do you object to the time being taken away from your kids’ classroom learning? Are you alarmed by the intrusive data-sharing and data-mining enabled by assessment-driven special interests? Are you opposed to the usurpation of local control by corporate testing giants and federal lobbyists?
You are not alone, although the testing racketeers are doing everything they can to marginalize you.
And on the left, there’s this from Diane Ravitch (though since she’s an educational, not a political, writer, “on the left” is an oversimplification): Opt Your Child Out of State Testing: Don’t Feed the Machine.
Testing is not teaching. It steals time from instruction. Making it so important leads schools to narrow the curriculum, cutting funding for the arts, eliminating social workers and counselors, cutting recess and physical education. Making testing so important leads to states and districts gaming the system, to schools shedding low-scoring students, to cheating, to teaching to the test, and to other anti-educational actions.
How to stop the machine?
Opt out.
Don’t let your children take the test.
Most states make it difficult for children to refuse to take the tests. Opt-outers recommend two main strategies. Harkening back to slogans from the 60s, they can be called “What If They Gave a Test and Nobody Came?” and “Hell No, I Won’t Test!”
What If They Gave a Test and Nobody Came? The idea here is, you keep your child out of school on test day. The problem with this strategy in Arizona and many other states is that the child has to miss the entire 3-4 week testing window, otherwise they’ll be made to take the test when they return. That’s a whole lot of school for a student to miss out on.
Hell No, I Won’t Test! Here, the child attends on test day, signs in on the test but doesn’t answer any questions. On a paper test, that means breaking the seal, filling in the necessary identifying information, then either handing it in or sitting quietly until test time is up. On a computer-based test, the child logs on, then doesn’t take the test. A problem with this could be that the child’s “zero” brings down the classroom and school test average. However, advocates of this method say the zero on an unmarked test will be thrown out and not affect the total score of the classroom or the school.
A third legal option that’s being explored is using the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), which is designed to stop online companies from collecting information from children under 13. Parents of children 12 or under might be able to invoke this act to opt out if the test is given on a computer.
If you want to know more about the national Opt Out movement, go to United Opt Out and FairTest.
This article appears in Jan 29 – Feb 4, 2015.
Three comments. First, as an experienced public school teacher, I heartily endorse the Opt-out movement. Parents, opt your kids out of AZMerit. One size doesn’t fit all. There are much better ways to gauge student progress. Don’t let private, test-making corporations waste your kids’ instructional time while collecting data on them and rendering them nothing more than assessment guinea pigs.
Second, HB 2246 is important not only for its opt-out provisions but also in that it protects schools from being penalized should parents choose that option. Currently, if <95% of students take the state standardized test (AIMS, etc.), the school would be in jeopardy of not making AYP (adequate yearly progress). HB 2246 would protect schools should parents exercise their opt-out rights.
Finally, merely a clarification. Some lefties are against both high-stakes testing and Common Core. Ravitch is one. I’m another.
Oppose Common Core and then opt out….that says that education was just fine somewhere in the past.
Where might that be?
Don’t expect Supt. Diane Douglas to protect children from being forced to take the test against parents’ wishes during the testing window. In response to my query regarding her position, I received the message below. It’s pretty ironic that Michelle Malkin was the only endorsement Douglas had last fall.
“The Arizona Department of Education must follow the State Board-established standards for students and Arizona State Statutes. At this time, all students eligible for testing in grades 3 – 8 and those taking the high school level English language arts courses and Algebra I, Geometry, and Algebra II will be required to take the test this spring.
Margaret Bowerman
Program Project Specialist II – Communications
Assessment Section
Arizona Department of Education
602-542-4101
http://www.azed.gov/assessment/azmerit/“
I do not support this the way it is set up. I also am an experienced teacher and charter schools already have very little accountability. I see it as another way that they will have none. If regular public schools have again different standards(which I see could very well happen), people will want more charter schools. People making a profit off of children’s education is a crime. All education money should go for salaries, books, supplies, etc. I think 1 test a year is adequate and any other testing should be done by the classroom teachers to see if their teaching is effective. This is how we measured children for decades. On the Common Core ‘controversy’ … this is started by the Republicans. I have taken multiple classes on the Common Core and have taught them. THey are actually wonderful but many school systems have not had adequate training and a good timeline to institute them. Consequently many people including educators think they are bad. Please read them. They are posted on the Arizona State Dept. of Education for all to see. Most people who oppose them have never seen them and listen to the propaganda. THey teach critical thinking which is taught less and less as a result of too much testing. We do not want to ‘dummy down’ our education of our children any more. Please support public schools as they have been in the past. There are very few charter schools in Arizona that even have teachers that are all certified. There are some that are very good and they do not need to be closed. Many if not most do not meet the standards of a good education .
Robin, currently charter schools are required to take the same standardized tests as district schools. Unless that changes, new rules will apply to both types of schools. But it’s interesting that children using state voucher money to go to private schools, via School Tuition Organizations (private school tax credits) and the newer Empowerment Savings Accounts, aren’t required to take the tests that other students getting state education money and going to publicly funded schools have to take. The same people who demand accountability for our schools make sure private school students whose educations are paid for by state voucher money aren’t subject to the same accountability.
That is because the private schools and the state have given the parents their freedom to actually make decisions without interference. There are some parents that actually can accomplish that on their own. I am glad the voucher system allows for choice in education. The taxpayers are reaping the savings.
So David W, should a parent be allowed to send a child to a school district or charter school that has the freedom not to give state tests, just like parents who use state money to send their kids to private school?
David originally charter schools were suppose to not have their charters renewed if the students did not do well. That has not happened. The whole purpose of people making money off of education was to improve education. They were suppose to do at least as well or better than the regular public schools to justify having this drain off of regular public schools and have people make money. That has not happened at all. I have looked at many stats and they generally do worse. That is what I meant by not being held accountable and no oversight. The system is not a good one and I do not like to see it promoted. It should be stopped unless they do better than regular public schools to justify the for profit. Opting out of testing completely is really a joke. I want to see how this is even possible and hold schools accountable. They must justify how they are using taxpayer money… no matter what kind of school they are. What I do support is having a much simpler system so testing is not so intensive. Regular public schools are constantly watched and any mistakes are all over the news. Nobody writes about what is going on in charter schools or very little. To the best of my knowledge charter schools only close when they are out of money(who knows how much was pocketed) not because of poor test scores…. I am all for the few that are doing very well staying open. There are only a few and our governor wants to use more money to give those that are in financial difficulties low interest loans. This is not a good system we have. We are 48th in the nation in what we spend on education and how we are achieving. This is worse than our ranking when they were originally opened. I know your article was about being able to opt out of testing but I cannot talk about testing without looking at the whole system .. And many people in Arizona do not know what is going on. I believe we must have mandatory testing to a small degree. We are spending a lot of money and we better show the public what we are using the money for and that children are achieving. That is why the whole charter school business came up for me ….
“. . .On the Common Core ‘controversy’ … this is started by the Republicans. I have taken multiple classes on the Common Core and have taught them. THey are actually wonderful but many school systems have not had adequate training and a good timeline to institute them.”
Many Democrats are also against Common Core. (Google “badass teachers association.”) As for the standards themselves, if you are seriously college-bound, they are laughably low. Meanwhile, for many non-college-bound kids, they are way too high/irrelevant. Moreover, if they were that great, why were they pushed through by corporate money behind closed doors? Why were there no early childhood development experts involved in the process? Why did the only ELA and math experts on the validation committee refuse to sign off on them? The list of questions goes on. Check out this documentary. . . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjxBClx01j…
That said, I fully support the freedom of your school/district to adopt CC. But to say that, therefore, they are also appropriate for every other school/district in the country is not just unrealistic but undemocratic.
“I believe we must have mandatory testing to a small degree. We are spending a lot of money and we better show the public what we are using the money for and that children are achieving.”
While we agree that “other testing should be done by the classroom teachers to see if their teaching is effective,” I simply don’t think AZMerit is necessary. We already have SAT/ACT for college-bound kids, ASVAB for military-bound kids, and NAEP to compare states, along with many formative and summative classroom assessments. With AZMerit, we are paying $19 million (for this school year alone) to measure little more than zip codes. Kids are human beings, not widgets on a conveyor belt. They learn at different times and rates depending on a host of factors. If we want to stop people from “making money off of education,” then, in my opinion, test-making corporations pumping out unnecessary assessments ought to be first to go.
Cathy I understand the arguments put forth for they have been talked about in depth in my classes and workshops. I didn’t say they were perfect but I saw our texts and instruction being ‘dummied down’ throughout our country since at least the early 80s. I have taught in 5 states. All states and children are not alike. But they never have been. My point was that school systems can institute them in ways that is palatable and healthy for the teachers and children with systematic training so that the children are introduced from kinder on and not slammed in 4th for example. I no longer accept that it is okay that students who are in the 8th grade now are nationally reading texts written on the 4th grade level. 4th graders in the early 80s could read them. I saw this happening and I often thought somehow I was mistaken. I was not at all. We do need standards that are national because children in our world move more than they every did before. It is very difficult for children when the standards are so different from state to state. So you prefer children having to do all the adjustments instead of the teachers and systems? Again they are not perfect but they are a step in the right direction for our children. We want critical thinkers. We want healthy states and country. Continually dummying down? Not okay….. If you could look at them with eyes to see what is right instead of what is wrong, possibly you might see this differently. I don’t know. I didn’t like them at first and the more I learned and discussed, well… obviously I like them now.
So you know, I’ve been teaching since the early 90s and have experience across regions (Midwest, Texas, southern Arizona), and my southern Arizona experience has been mostly (although not exclusively) in low SES schools. (I’m HQ in both secondary English and math, and have taught both extensively in southern Arizona.)
On to the thing: we had the same standards and assessments in Arizona for 10 whole years, and it did nothing to close achievement gap. Heck, by 2010, we had A-schools and D-schools in the same district, 14 miles apart. (Can you guess which school was located in the affluent neighborhood?)
So after ten years of proving common standards/assessments don’t “standardize,” we are now ready to implement the program on a national level? How does this make sense? (In my opinion, it only makes sense if you are a test-making corporation, as more standardization = less differentiation = more revenue.)
I think we’d agree that today’s educational world loves data. So I’m just asking a simple question: where is the data proving Common Core achieves what it claims, which is that students will be ready for college and careers, and “to compete globally”?
Cathy I understand what you are saying. However standards are goals and I don’t think anyone expects everyone to be at the same place. I don’t think a standard means that. However, I wish we could have this discussion somewhere else which I thought might be possible if I befriended you but I didn’t see any private place we could chat. I think this is a healthy discussion and maybe we can resume it some day when the topic isn’t ‘opt out’.
I’m glad I found David Safier’s article in a “Fairtestest” posting, at Diane Ravitch’s blog (17,000,000 views). It’s estimated that Gates spent $1.5 to $2 bil. on Common Core. The PTA, unions, the National Council of Social Studies, the Chamber of Commerce, school systems like Cleveland’s , etc. took grants from Gates. Meanwhile, Microsoft announced a deal with Pearson (“3rd largest shareholder, government of Libya ” -Mother Jones) to develop curriculum for the copyrighted Common Core. The school Gates selected for his children reportedly rejects high-stakes testing.
Both political parties are working to privatize and corporatize public schools, which will enrich the hedge funds and tech companies that make contributions to political campaigns. Mercedes Schneider wrote a recent book, “Who’s Who in the Implosion of Public Education”. It’s an important read.
I saw this great article on Common Core standards and I encourage all to read it. I think there are many reasons people don’t like them and some of them could be because the district you work in or have children in did a poor job of introducing them or even they used them like a hammer which are both very unproductive and scary tactics in introducing anything new. I also think they were used by some districts to almost be used as a means of controlling the teachers more by suggesting that they have now a lot more work. THe teachers could have also thought as they viewed them how much more work there would be and we all know there is enough to do now . However that is not how I learned them and my apprehensions were addressed in one class or another. I hope the article is helpful. I think they are very good standards and I hope we keep them as a nation. And one more time, testing is a different issue for me. I still think 1 standardized test a year and regular testing by the teachers(which they have always done to follow units, etc.)is adequate. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-keith-dev….