Listen and watch as these parents in New York City tell you why your children should opt out of the state tests.
The high-stakes standardized testing is a massive waste of time. The results come in long after your child has changed teachers.
The teachers learns nothing of value from the tests: just the scores.
The tests have no diagnostic value.
It is a horse race with no point other than to steal instructional time, to rob your child of the joy of learning.
The only way to stop it is to say NO.
Don’t feed the machine.
Remember that your child’s data is being mined even as he or she takes the test.
Say NO.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
the link does not work….
LikeLike
DEMAND that NYSED release the Pearson math and ELA tests after being scored.
Claims of test security are clearly bogus.
They don’t want you to see just how bad they really are.TRAPS not tests. Designed to TRICK, CONFUSE, FRUSTRATE, TIRE OUT, and WEAR DOWN young test takers into FAILING.
HS teachers in NYS have been reviewing with previously administered Regents exams for as long as anyone can remember. And these are the true high stakes tests as far as students are concerned because the scores determine graduation.
NYSED and Pearson know that these tests will not withstand the scrutiny of teachers, test writing specialists, and experts in cognitive learning.
However, DO expect test scores to improve. The political pressure is just too strong for NYSED to resist tweaking cut scores to show how great the CC is working. Boy aren’t those EnrageNY modules really getting your kids ready for college and career. Expect them to appease the outraged parents of Long Island and beyond with their statistical magic act. The scores will have NO VALUE.
LikeLike
Corporate Greed, Personal Wealth by World’s Billionaires, Profit$ and lack of Humanity is too big for any one person to fight or make an impact on. We have had plenty of time to figure out how to stop the Corporate EdReform – if stoppable. We have allowed too much time and too much harm to our children and teachers already. We must act quickly with assured purpose.
Parental National Movement of Opting Out is the only way to go. Never allow school administrators to harass children or shame them for the parental actions. Supervise, audiotape and expose their interrogations.
Increased numbers of Opted-Out Data will become its own Big Data. However, it will not profit the greedy. Save our teachers and children.
Worked for Ghandi, MLK Jr, Montgomery Bus Boycott, and others.
It will work here, too!
LikeLike
The Great New York Test Boycott of 2014.
Join Tuesday and take back your schools!
LikeLike
NY Teacher:
“They don’t want you to see just how bad they really are.TRAPS not tests. Designed to TRICK, CONFUSE, FRUSTRATE, TIRE OUT, and WEAR DOWN young test takers into FAILING.”
Thank you NY Teacher for sharing some professional insight. It sounds like their goal is actually to “abuse kids”! The fact that these perpetrators of Common Core and Pearson operate in such “secrecy” should raise the red flags for parents to ask,
“What are they doing to our kids behind closed doors?”
Thank God NY parents and teachers are gaining solidarity! We in Texas are watching with hope that we can follow your example with our growing Opt Out Movement: You can follow the Texas parent Kyle Massey’s blog with daily progress here:
http://kyledmassey.com/response-to-policy/
LikeLike
I worked as a consultant test writer for a company not named Pearson for years. I have administered middle level math and ELA since the inception of NCLB. The tests we saw last spring were pure garbage.The test schedule it self was also designed to promote tests fatigue. This year the schedule is somewhat improved. And as I said below, many of us fully expect improved scores only because they will be manipulated. We strongly urge the parents of Texas and all other states to join us in the Great Test Boycott of 2014. Its time to take back our schools. End the prepping and get back to teaching.
LikeLike
When teachers who administer the exams are instructed not to look at or discuss test items, you know something is very wrong. When teachers who are sent to score these exams are required to sign legal, non-disclosure agreements, you know something is terribly wrong. When the corporate big shots and political shills behind the testing reform movement refuse to have their own children subjected to these tests, you know that something very nefarious is taking place.
The Great New York Test Boycott of 2014.
NY parents will be making history in this strong showing of civil disobedience. Stop the testing; Stop the prepping and lets get back to teaching.
LikeLike
Tweet for Diane’s New York Review of Books piece. Just copy, paste and ReTweet. The short link was converted using Bitly and the link goes to the original piece.
Contrary to popular myth
charter schools are more racially segregated
& perform no better on recent NY state tests
http://bit.ly/P8TZjh
LikeLike
My friend is a 3rd grade NYC teacher and she shared this today.
” Test Prep Story of the day: practicing extended response one of my highest achieving students burst into tears. Usually not moved by student tears but here’s what I have to say: the “opt out” option isn’t enough. All I have done this year is get students ready for a test. I will still have to do that even if the whole class doesn’t have to take it. This is not teaching and it definitely is not learning.”
This is a crisis as important as hunger. Why isn’t everybody outraged?
LikeLike
Tell your friend to stop prepping and start teaching again. Theses Pearson tests are test-prep-proof. All the prep efforts are not only wrong on an ethical/professional level, they are being made in vain.
LikeLike
Tell your friend: “Refuse to be a GAGA*er!”
*Going Along to Get Along (GAGA):
Nefarious practice of most educators who implement the edudeformers agenda even though the educators know that those educational malpractices will cause harm to the students and defile the teaching and learning process. The members of the GAGA gang are destined to be greeted by the Karmic Gods of Retribution upon their passing from this realm.
Karmic Gods of Retribution:
Those ethereal beings specifically evolved to construct the 21st level in Dante’s Hell. The 21st level signifies the combination of the 4th (greed), 8th (fraud) and 9th (treachery) levels into one mega level reserved especially for the edudeformers and those, who, knowing the negative consequences of the edudeformers agenda, willing implemented it so as to Go Along to Get Along. The Karmic Gods of Retribution also personally escort these poor souls, upon their physical death, to the 21st level unless they enlighten themselves, a la one D. Ravitch, to the evil and harm they have caused so many innocent children, and repent and fight against their former fellow deformers. There the edudeformers and GAGAers will lie down on a floor of smashed and broken ipads and ebooks curled in a fetal position alternately sucking their thumbs to the bones while listening to two words-Educational Excellence-repeated without pause for eternity.
LikeLike
what he said
LikeLike
This is our best hope at stopping common core. We have 80 students out of 1300 with letters of refusal. Hoping for more by Tuesday.
LikeLike
YES! That’s 6%
LikeLike
Reblogged this on Pilant's Business Ethics Blog and commented:
I’ve been saying these same things for some time now.
LikeLike
And now the NYTimes has also recognized how significant this movement is without insulting parents. If you recall not too long ago Thomas Friedman and other articles covered Duncan’s disparaging remarks on the parents who took John King to task and were in agreement. Glad to see they are now examining the viewpoints of parents.
LikeLike
The powers that be will always respond to vocal parents. Maybe down deep they know that parents have only one true agenda.
LikeLike
From the NYT 03.28.14
>In the coming weeks, children in New York City and across the state will begin taking annual standardized tests in math and language that will run over the course of many hours and days, assuming a kind of onerousness once exclusive to the bar exam. Last year, the first in which the tests were aligned with the Common Core, a set of standards intended to determine whether a child is on track to becoming prepared for college, a number of parents, here and nationally, maintained an activist stance against them. About 270 children in the city’s public school system did not sit for the tests, their parents believing that the burdens imposed were hardly offset by the tests’ highly debatable value.
This movement of refusal does not evolve out of antipathy toward rigor and seriousness, as critics enjoy suggesting, but rather out of advocacy for more comprehensive forms of assessment and a depth of intellectual experience that test-driven pedagogy rarely allows. In the past year, the movement has grown considerably among parents and educators, across political classifications and demographics.
At the Brooklyn New School, a highly regarded elementary school in Carroll Gardens that prides itself on academic independence, over 210 students in third through fifth grades — two-thirds of the relevant students — will not take the state-mandated tests this year. This figure includes children in fourth grade for whom state test scores are typically used for middle-school admission. When parents called those schools to which B.N.S. graduates typically go, they were told that opting out of the tests would not damage their children’s chances for acceptance.
The website for the Institute for Collaborative Education, in downtown Manhattan, specifically invites parents of middle-school students to join the opt-out initiative, asking them to demonstrate support for the kind of teaching and learning the school provides, an approach that is antagonistic to rote test preparation. ICE, as it is known, is not the sort of place where students create visual memoirs out of pipe cleaners, but rather one that fosters the knowledge and the style of critical thinking that the Common Core and most sane, intelligent people understand as essential. In sixth grade, the year of entry, children currently combine a study of ancient Rome with an analysis and performance of elements of “Julius Caesar.” In seventh grade, a mock trial is conducted around “Macbeth.”
The most significant aspect of this wave of testing dissent is its expansion beyond the world of affluent white parents and celebrated schools, where children are largely destined to succeed. On Thursday, parents in Harlem gathered to announce their displeasure with a system that has forsaken meaningful education for a culture of obsessive examination. More than 100 families at Hamilton Heights School, an elementary school where 80 percent of students receive free lunch, had sent letters alerting the principal that their children would decline to take the tests. At Public School 446 in Brownsville, Brooklyn, Latoshia Wheeler said her son, a third grader, would not be taking the tests, nor would a majority of his classmates.
“We didn’t know that we had the right,” she said.
What is happening is a revolution not simply against a methodology but in some sense against a class system that to a great extent has left progressive education — with its excited learners immersed for months in astronomy or medievalism or Picasso — the province of those able to send their children to some of the best private schools, or with the means to live in places with leading public schools.
In the early 1920s, when Helen Parkhurst developed the plan on which the Dalton School, a private school on the Upper East Side, is based, she did so with the idea that learning should be intimate, self-directed and thrilling. (“How many class lessons have children to listen to which are boring and useless,” Miss Parkhurst wrote, “and others where they are not sufficiently interested to ask a question?”) And thus it has been for a certain segment of New Yorkers.
As Rosa Perez-Rivera, a mother in the Bronx who is opting out, explained it, her daughter was thrilled by school last year, when work around oceans sparked a love of science. This year, in third grade, as the focus has moved to test preparation (state tests are administered in third through eighth grade), her confidence and enthusiasm have lagged. “Just as she is getting interested in a subject and grasping it, they’re moving on to the next,” Ms. Perez-Rivera said. “She is learning not to trust herself, and it is killing her creativity.”
A mother on Staten Island who has also chosen to opt out lamented that her son had been given little instruction in history since he aged into the universe of mandated testing. It is one of the principles of the Common Core that reading comprehension is foundational, that you cannot, for example, sufficiently understand “Gulliver’s Travels” without knowing something of 18th-century British political history. The irony is that once the grounding subjects are sacrificed to the time-sapping exercise of test preparation, the broader purpose of the philosophy is eviscerated.
Even the tests’ vocal advocates cannot entirely embrace the kind of instructional sentiment the exams have unleashed. In a recent letter to school superintendents, John B. King Jr., the state’s education commissioner, discouraged administrators from making placement and promotion decisions based solely on the tests. Speaking by telephone last week, Dr. King told me, “I worry that there’s a pedagogical mistake made in believing that if there’s more test prep, students will do better on the test.” Dr. King told me. In those fears, he hardly stands alone.<
PARENTS of NY, YOU ARE URGED TO
JOIN THE GREAT NEW YORK TEST BOYCOTT OF 2014
Civil disobedience is the only way to stop the testing madness.
The powers that be will not listen to teachers or administrators.
THEY WILL LISTEN TO YOUR OUTRAGE.
THEY WILL RESPOND TO THE LOVE YOU HAVE FOR YOUR CHILDREN
YOU AND YOU ALONE CAN STOP THE MADNESS
LikeLike
Kudos to NYT reporter Ginia Belafante for this superb and refreshingly honest article. Wondering hoe she was able to sneak this by her editors? Or maybe just maybe, the old gray lady is starting to see the light. They got the guns, but we got the numbers.
LikeLike
Reply All Email to: Chancellor Tisch, Commissioner King, the New York State Education Department, Pearson, the charters, the vulture capitalists and their political henchmen:
You can hide the data, but you can’t hide the truth!
LikeLike
There is something very “sinister” about Pearson and how they have designed the test to “break the will” of a child.
This is called Schwarze Pädagogik,
LikeLike
Don’t forget to opt-out of the field tests. These are no-stakes for the students. NYSED hasn’t released the 3-8 field test assignments but here is the list of High Schools that have been assigned field tests:
http://www.p12.nysed.gov/assessment/fieldtest/regentsftassignments-14.xls
LikeLike
HB,
What do regents field test assignments mean? Are they regular regents tests? Are they extra tests? Are “field test” questions embedded in the “regular test”?
Thanks.
LikeLike
I looked it up
Click to access transitionccregents1113rev.pdf
Under Field Testing-
Field Testing
The Office of State Assessment has notified school principals or designated assessment directors regarding field testing of questions by students in May 2013 for the
Regents Exam program. Schools must participate in field testing to ensure that the field tests are administered to a representative sample of students from across New York State. Field testing provides the data and feedback necessary to develop exams that are fair and valid. In New York State, Regents Exams are shared with the public after they have been administered. This makes it necessary to develop new secure exams for each administration. More field test forms than are typical will be necessary this May, in order to develop the new Common Core Regents Exams. The list of Regents field test assignments can be found at http://www.p12.nysed.gov/assessment/fieldtest/.
LikeLike
They are stand-alone tests that are given to students. They a basically an extra test that the students take. The test doesn’t count. It is simply used to “test out” questions and to see if the questions are good. The students don’t get scores on them. They(students) are basically unpaid labor for the testing companies.
LikeLike
Great idea, if no one takes the tests then the system will collapse. Hopefully they will do this all over..
LikeLike