What if they gave a high stakes test and nobody came? That’s the question being asked by United Opt Out National as well a growing number of parents and educators around the country. The organization’s three day Standing Up For Action Conference begins today in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.
Standing Up For Action is a working session for local and national activists, concerned parents, educators, students and all who have a general interest in equitable and quality public education. Attendees will leave equipped with plans of action to refuse, resist, and disrupt corporate and for-profit education reforms that have destroyed the democratic voice in public education decision making and have forced the implementation of policies damaging to students, educators, and communities.
If enough students opt out of the high stakes tests, test results become meaningless as a way of praising and punishing teachers, administrators and schools for their overall test scores. And that’s the main point for people who believe that the yearly tests are a destructive force for American education in general and students in particular.
Opting out of Arizona’s high stakes tests is tough, as it is in most states. I’ve been gathering information about the successes and failures of opt-outers in a number of states and plan to write about them in future posts.
This article appears in Jan 15-21, 2015.
Opting out has been the only way for parents to force a discussion about the harm vs. benefit of our current high stakes testing scheme. Until the opt out movement, it was steamrolled on us and no one would listen to parents. This discussion must happen and I’m glad Dave is covering it.
But the coverage must also spotlight the way that TUSD, following ADE directive, abuses children whose parents have tried to opt them out. People can disagree about testing, but don’t lose focus of what the government is doing to kids. When parents hold their children out of school on testing days and notifies administrators that they do not want their child tested, TUSD pulls the kids out of class upon their return and sits them down in front of the test three days in a row. Can you imagine the despair of an 8 year-old child forced to choose between disobeying parents and disobeying teachers? Can you imagine the despair of teachers who hate themselves for doing that to an 8 year-old child? Do you need any more evidence that the testing industry is making our educational system sick and that Arizona in particular is sadistic? (Other states treat students who opt out humanely.)
The testing debate is between grown ups. Leave those kids alone and please put pressure on state and local administrators to stop abusing kids.