Rebecca Mead has written a brilliant blog post for “The New Yorker” explaining why parents plan to opt their children out of NewYork’s Common Core testing in 2014.
It Is as succinct an explanation as I have read, and it is vivid because the writer is a parent in a progressive public school that teaches students to think for themselves. The principal of the Brooklyn New School has spoken out against the cruel and unusual demands of the tests but she must comply, by law.
The parents, however, have a special interest: their children.
Mead begins:
“Anna Allanbrook, the principal of the Brooklyn New School, a public elementary school in Carroll Gardens, has long considered the period of standardized testing that arrives every spring to be a necessary, if unwelcome, phase of the school year. Teachers and kids would spend limited time preparing for the tests. Children would gain familiarity with “bubbling in,” a skill not stressed in the school’s progressive, project-based curriculum. They would become accustomed to sitting quietly and working alone—a practice quite distinct from the collaboration that is typically encouraged in the school’s classrooms, where learners of differing abilities and strengths work side by side. (My son is a third grader at the school.) Come the test days, kids and teachers would get through them, and then, once the tests were over, they would get on with the real work of education.
“Last spring’s state tests were an entirely different experience, for children and for teachers. Teachers invigilating the exams were shocked by ambiguous test questions, based, as they saw it, on false premises and wrongheaded educational principles. (One B.N.S. teacher, Katherine Sorel, eloquently details her objections on WNYC’s SchoolBook blog.) Others were dismayed to see that children were demoralized by the relentlessness of the testing process, which took seventy minutes a day for six days, with more time allowed for children with learning disabilities. One teacher remarked that, if a tester needs three days to tell if a child can read “you are either incompetent or cruel. I feel angry and compromised for going along with this.” Another teacher said that during each day of testing, at least one of her children was reduced to tears. A paraprofessional—a classroom aide who works with children with special needs—called the process “state-sanctioned child abuse.” One child with a learning disability, after the second hour of the third day, had had enough. “He only had two questions left, but he couldn’t keep going,” a teacher reported. “He banged his head on the desk so hard that everyone in the room jumped.”
Mead gets it. Read the whole article. Testing has spun out of control. It is consuming time and resources needed for teaching and learning.
This can’t continue. When little children are tested more than those who take the bar, you must know something is terribly wrong.
The school asks its fifth-grade students: “What are we willing to stand up for?”
The parents will answer this spring, not only at the Brooklyn New School, but in many schools and districts and states.
” if a tester needs three days to tell if a child can read you are either incompetent or cruel.”
Absolutely dead on. This is a powerful piece.
I work in a school district in Florida. We calendared out all of the remaining tests for the year from December to June. Other than the last week of school in June, at least one grade level (usually all) have a mandated ‘assessment’ to take every week of the year from December to June. They had already taken many assessments throughout August, September and December.
Our district uses the state’s reading assessment FAIR which is given 3 times a year, plus math and science two day district assessments 3 times a year (for all grades K-5). We also have a new two day E/LA assessment aligned to PARCC given 3 times a year. This test also has a pretest added to the third administration of it. All third graders must also take a 2 day reading test 4 times a year (these scores are used to pass them to fourth grade in case they fail FCAT). All first and second graders must take the SAT10. This is all in addition to the three weeks of FCAT testing (it takes that long because parts of it are taken on line and we do not have enough computers for all students to take it at once, or even for an entire grade level to take it at once.). Teachers can’t even schedule field trips because they can’t find a day that somebody isn’t testing.
A teacher wanted us to count up the days of testing. What we found was it was quicker to count up the days of non-testing. How does anyone expect children to improve and learn if all they do is test? This has gone way beyond craziness, it is state sanctioned child abuse, as someone said in the post above. Kids have said to us they don’t want to come to school anymore because all they do is take tests.
This has to stop.
This is one of the best comments ever. You can determine if a child can read in 15 minutes, and then take it to the classroom for the rest of the year and beyond.
Putting kids through this torture is child abuse. I have seen the tears myself and the anxiety.
What is exciting is the school is moving forward with their own curriculum and what appears to be their own built in assessment. The actual demonstration of proficiencies is the assessment and can easily built into everyday activities. The thought that assessment must be separated from the daily classroom routine is naive.
It’s time for schools to opt out. As this school has done, develop your curriculum with your built in assessment. Go to http://www.wholechildreform.com for more thoughts
Testing is Out of Control……
CCSS …not the real problem…
Too Much Testing is the Problem…
agree that the ral problem is testing. It is time to take a stand. Develop our own assessment and follow it. Let it drive your curriculum. Go to http://www.wholechildreform.com for specific suggestions. The things I blog about, I did
Two points stood out as I read through the post:
“A paraprofessional—a classroom aide who works with children with special needs—called the process “state-sanctioned child abuse.”
“They are, in many cases, driven by a conviction that a child’s performance on a standardized test is an inadequate, unreliable measure of that child’s knowledge, intelligence, aptitude, diligence, and character—and a still more unreliable measure of his teachers’ effort, skill, perseverance, competence, and kindness.”
I think Mead omitted a few important details, both journalistic and personal, from this piece.
There are about 400,000 children in grades 3-8 in New York City public schools. 320 of those children, or 0.08%, opted out from the 2013 state tests. Opting out is a far less widespread practice than the piece would have you believe.
These numbers are likely so small because many of the city’s most popular and successful middle schools and high schools will not consider a child’s application if she has not taken the state tests (4th grade for MS, 7th for HS). While a growing number of quality middle schools do not require test results, these tend to be concentrated in a small number of districts, including the one where Mead’s child attends elementary school, and they are off-limits to children from outside the district.
Last but certainly not least, she does not bring up the fact that the Brooklyn New School is an unzoned lottery school with an admissions process that is exactly the same as that at a charter school. BNS serves far lower proportions of ELL and free-lunch eligible students and is significantly whiter than its home district’s averages. If the author still lives near Fort Greene Park (as she has mentioned in other articles), she resides in an entirely different district and is zoned for one of three elementary schools with student populations that are overwhelmingly black and Hispanic and free-lunch eligible. One is the zoned elementary school for the homeless shelter where Dasani and her family lived.
No parent likes poorly constructed tests and (especially) test prep. And I strongly support the existence of all choice schools, including unzoned progressive DOE schools like BNS and the Central Park Easts. However, If Mead isn’t being disingenuous in her last paragraph, where she argues that it’s not about the opting-out families’ own kids, but rather the children of the poor and powerless, I can recommend two measures that would be far more helpful to those families than encouraging them to opt out: 1. Lobby to make those quality test-less middle schools open to all kids, not just kids lucky enough to live in or get into a lottery school in a particular district; and 2. if you are not at your local zoned school, stabilize it and improve it by sending your own kids there.
Yes, it is a form of child abuse. In Los Angeles until this school year second graders also had to take the state-mandated tests (the local school district’s call). Teachers cannot by law discuss opt-out with parents. Any school with less than 97% participation will not get a state or AYP ranking. Quite a conundrum for the teacher. Pressure from above and possible parental pressure from those sold on the value of wanting to know “how their child is doing”.
In a discussion-list post “Re: The Defiant Parents: Testing’s Discontents” http://bit.ly/1mYwWoa, I wrote:
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John Denker, in his PhysLrnR post “The Defiant Parents: Testing’s Discontents” called attention to Rebecca Mead’s “New Yorker” article of the same name at http://nyr.kr/M6qz4j. Mead wrote: “. . . . there is a burgeoning opt-out movement, with parents, teachers, and administrators questioning the efficacy of the tests as they are currently administered, in measuring both the performance of teachers and the progress of students.”
Denker wrote (paraphrasing): “There’s a medium-sized revolt going on. But it’s not a huge revolt because of weak messaging and weak leadership. Specifically the anti-testers haven’t come up with a crisp description of what they are revolting against . . . . or where they would like to go instead.”
Denker is either oblivious or dismissive of the vigorous leadership, voluminous messaging, and pro-public-/anti-private-education positions of (a) Diane Ravitch and (b) FairTest http://www.fairtest.org/ with its discussion list ARN-L with OPEN! archives at http://bit.ly/jeiTPm.
Unfortunately, both Ravitch and FairTest appear to be uninformed regarding the virtues of rigorous measurement of students’ higher-order learning by means of zero-stakes *FORMATIVE* (i.e., “designed and used to improve an object, especially when it is still being developed”) pre/post testing utilizing Concept Inventories http://bit.ly/dARkDY which are constructed by disciplinary experts through arduous qualitative and quantitative research – see e.g., (a) “The Impact of Concept Inventories On Physics Education and Its Relevance For Engineering Education” (Hake, 2011) at http://bit.ly/nmPY8F (8.7 MB); and (b) “Can the Cognitive Impact of Calculus Courses be Enhanced?” (Hake, 2013) at http://bit.ly/1loHgC4 (2.7 MB).
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