Students at Stuyvesant High School in New York City, a school that accepts only students that have high scores on their entry examinations, boycotted the latest tests to protest their purpose. The students knew that the tests had no purpose other than to evaluate their teachers, and they thought the tests were not only a waste of students’ time but unfair to their teachers.
Geoff Decker of Gotham Schools writes:
A group of students at the elite high school in lower Manhattan pledged to opt out of the English tests that were administered today, saying they’re opposed to the exam’s purpose. The tests are low-stakes for students, but they’ll be used to grade teachers on new evaluations being rolled out this year.
“This movement is meant to support Stuyvesant teachers in opposing an unfair teacher evaluation system,” Senior David Cahn wrote on the Facebook page he created to encourage other students to join in.
Students across the city are taking formal baseline tests this year in many subjects because of new teacher evaluation rules. The rules require teachers to be rated in part by how much their students improve over the course of the year, and schools are using tests this fall as the baseline for determining student proficiency at the beginning of the year.
The extra testing has eaten into class time and taken teachers out of classroom for grading. “
The students at Stuyvesant High School proved that they understand more about teaching and learning than policymakers in Washington and Albany.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“The kids were really bored and demoralized. It was sort of like this resigned ‘oh, another test’ attitude,” she said.
More child-centered ed reform!
It’s such a crazy idea to shanghai kids into working to evaluate their teachers. The ed reform adults need a “baseline” score for their experiment, but the kids will be doing all the work providing “data”. What’s the benefit to them for this unpaid labor? The hedge funders should at least pay them a stipend for serving as involuntary data collectors.
This is what these parents and
students who oppose Common
Core curriculum and testing are
up against… told in a parody
of John King talking to his advisors:
Interestingly, I posted that video on the national BATS site after a colleague in NYC sent it to me. It was pulled by the moderators who said it was “too provocative” for that group. After a fruitless attempt at dialogue (I had posted it on a host of Facebook education-related sites with nothing but “Likes” and positive comments), I resigned from the group. I’ve seen this video used to satirize a lot of things, but I can’t think of a better use than this one.
The BATs lost my support and the ability to count me among their members for just that sort of arbitrary attempt to control what is said on their site and on their Facebook page. They appear to have a metric boatload of moderators, far too many of whom act as if they are new to the task and new to the Internet. I got tired of newbie moderators and the national BAT leaders talking to me as if I were a disruptive 4th-grader who needed to take his seat, fold his hands, and shut up.
This is perhaps the best strategy we have, just teach the kids what high stakes testing will do to their schools, show them how it diverts their parents hard earned money out of the class room and wastes everyones time in the class room. Explain how field tests treat students as unpaid guinea pigs. The kids at our top schools will get this in a heartbeat and might even do math projects on such nonsense.
If this is a baseline and it’s given two months into school, wouldn’t that encourage little learning the first two months – which studies are actually the most productive for students.
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Peter, students at Stuyvesant are motivated to learn, not for a test.
All students should be. Standardized tests are overused and misused. The students get it. How did we ever educate our population before standardized testing? If a baseline is needed, why don’t private schools do it? This is mechanistic thinking, appropriate for widget production.
Yeah! The students know.
And one of those Stuyvesant students–the one who lives in my house–is dressing up as a NY State standardized test tonight. He’s too old for trick or treat but says that by dressing this way to hand out candy to little ones, he’s embodying, literally, trick or treat!
Post a picture here..would love to see it.
Sorry, I don’t want more data for this kid in the cloud. But the costume was a hit!
I’m a teacher at the school and all 35 of my freshmen took the test. If I had to estimate, I’d say about 15% of the seniors refused the test, maybe 5% of juniors. 0% of sophomores and freshmen.
are you saying that article is misleading? – Stuy ’72