What happens when parents say “No, not with my child”? They protect their child against state-sanctioned harm.
PRESS RELEASE
EMBARGOED UNTIL 9:15 AM APRIL 1, 2014
BROOKLYN, NY
Contact 1: Elizabeth Elsass, 917-605-3640, rinelsass1@gmail.com
Contact 2: Dani Liebling, 347-218-3107, daniliebling@yahoo.com
GROUNDSWELL OF BROOKLYN PARENTS FROM BROWNSVILLE TO CARROLL GARDENS REFUSE STATE TESTS
A grassroots opt-out campaign organized by Brooklyn parents has yielded a record number of test refusals for this year’s 3rd – 8th grade state-mandated math and English exams. The campaign is part of a national movement in which parents are rejecting high-stakes standardized tests as harmful to their children, teachers, and schools and as detrimental to creativity and deep learning. In a first for the borough, at least three public schools will have more students sitting out the exams than taking them.
Families of children in the testing grades at PS 446/Riverdale Avenue Community School (District 23, Brownsville), the Academy of Arts & Letters (District 13, Fort Greene), and PS 146/Brooklyn New School (District 15, Carroll Gardens) deluged their principals with “opt out” letters. Each school had a refusal rate of over 70 percent; at Arts & Letters the 3rd grade refusals topped out at 83%.
Administrators expect to continue to receive refusals, but as of March 31, the day before the start of the annual testing season, 225 of the 306 students in grades 3-5 at Brooklyn New School had submitted letters. (Last year, 4 families at the school opted out.) Parents of 48 of 60 children refused the tests at PS 446. At Arts & Letters, where the refusal effort focused on the 3rd grade, 44 of 53 3rd graders will not be taking the tests.
“The high stakes attached to these tests must go,” says PS 146 parent Elizabeth Elsass. “We refuse to take part in a test-score-driven education system that is hurting all children.” William Fletcher, whose son attends 3rd grade at PS 446, adds, “In third grade, children need music, art, and gym. But these get crowded out by the tests.”
The groundswell of parent protest is fueled by deep concerns over the length, cost, and content of the tests; their inappropriate use as the primary, and sometimes sole, evaluator of children, teachers, and schools; and their damaging effect on the direction in which public education is headed. Many parents stress that they are not against testing in general. Betsy Guttmacher, who is opting out her eighth-grade daughter at Arts & Letters, explains, “Parents want authentic, meaningful assessments of our children’s learning, and of their teachers’ effectiveness—not punitive, poorly designed, high-stakes testing.”
Parents who refuse the tests are outraged by:
• The length and content of the exams: Children as young as 8 are expected to sit for 6 days of 70-minute test sessions. 5th graders will spend 90 minutes a day taking the tests, longer than college graduates spend on the GRE, MCAT, or LSAT. School staff who saw last year’s exams report that questions were “tricky” and that some questions had no clear right answer. They did not see a chance for children to demonstrate deep thinking, even though the Common Core-aligned tests claim to measure exactly that. Only 5% of English Language Learners passed the state tests last year.
• Promotion decisions determined by one test score. (Recent state legislation may render this exact point moot, but parents remain uneasy since they do not know the extent to which this single score will figure in promotion and admissions decisions.)
• Teacher evaluations based on children’s test scores.
• The high stakes of the tests which force teachers to teach to the test and abandon rich, creative curriculum.
• The high costs of testing. For-profit testing companies receive millions while schools struggle to work with reduced budgets each year. This results in larger class sizes and reduced staff.
• The requirement that schools pay for the scoring of the tests out of their own budgets and/or send teachers out of the classroom for several grading days. (Doubly outrageous at schools where so few children are actually taking the test!)
• The collection and sharing, without parental consent, of children’s personal data (for the cloud-based inBloom database).
Parents who are refusing the tests reflect the diversity of Brooklyn’s opt-out movement, cutting across class and color lines. Many of them have been educating and organizing their fellow parents for months—attending meetings, producing literature, and researching opt-out related questions. For example, when 4th grade parents at Brooklyn New School wondered whether opting out would affect their children’s middle school applications, parent organizers surveyed 19 middle schools. Their findings: there is no ironclad connection between test scores and middle school admissions in the consulted schools. (These were mostly District 15 and citywide middle schools.) The results of this parent survey are available to the press.
The conviction of the parent activists is infectious. Mother of 3, Johanna Perez, relates, “Learning about the tests has been eye-opening. I shared what’s going on at our school with my sister, whose kids go to school in the Bronx; now we’re both opting our children out.” Says parent Marvin Piqué, “We need a system that works for all children. The obsession with testing is hurting the children it is designed to help the most. Stop this and fix it.”
PRESS ALERT
Contact 1: Elizabeth Elsass, 917-605-3640, rinelsass1@gmail.com Contact 2: Dani Liebling, 347-218-3107,daniliebling@yahoo.com
GROUNDSWELL OF BROOKLYN PARENTS FROM BROWNSVILLE TO CARROLL GARDENS REFUSE STATE TESTS
WHAT:
To mark the first day of State-mandated standardized tests, Brooklyn parents from schools with unprecedented rates of test refusal will hold a playground press conference to announce how and why they have embarked on a civil disobedience campaign.
WHEN:
Tuesday,, April 1st at 9:15 AM
WHERE:
DiMattina Playground (between Rapelye and Woodhull Streets & Henry and Hicks Streets), adjacent to the Brooklyn New School in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn
WHO:
Parents from a diverse group of Brooklyn public schools including host schools PS 446/Riverdale Ave Community School (Brownsville), Arts & Letters (Fort Greene), and PS 146/Brooklyn New School (Carroll Gardens); elected officials or their representatives. (Confirmed: Brad Lander,
City Council Member; Daniel Wiley, Community Coordinator for Congresswoman Nydia Velazquez; Representative from Community Education Council 15. List in formation.)
WHY:
Brooklyn parents organized a grassroots opt-out campaign that yielded a record number of test refusals for this year’s 3rd – 8thgrade state math and English exams. In a first for the borough, more students at the host schools will sit out the tests than will take them.* The campaign is part of a national movement in which parents are rejecting high-stakes tests as harmful to their children, teachers, and schools and as detrimental to creativity and deep learning.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
What happens to kids whose families don’t want to wear the ribbon, so to speak? I’d be pretty upset if I had a kid who wanted to attend a selective school where 4th or 5th grade scores are a non-negotiable requirement for admission and he was placed under immense pressure to opt out, then had to deal with his classmates protesting next to the school as the tests begin.
Test scores (or lack thereof) CANNOT be used for or against any student applying to a selective school.
If a child was enrolled in a New York State public school for fifth grade and didn’t take the state test, he or she cannot apply to Hunter High School. The same is true for fourth grade scores and selective middle schools that have their own admissions test, like Anderson or NEST.
Some selective district middle schools and high schools do not require scores, but there are many, many others, including those that are among the most popular and desirable in the city, that as of this admissions cycle will not consider the application of a child who was enrolled in a state public school and does not have 4th or 7th grade test scores.
This may change in the future, but it is absolutely untrue that the scores aren’t necessary to apply to all schools.
I stand corrected.
“Although the bill puts some restrictions on the use of grades 3-8 tests for retention and placement decisions, the legislature did not have the courage to put an absolute ban on the use of scores. Instead the bill allows schools to use the test scores for placement and retention decisions, as long as other factors are used as well. This is no small matter.”
Tim, no child had to “deal with his classmates protesting next to school as the tests begin.” A) There was no protest, but a press conference. B) There were no classmates–kids were in school. Adult parents spoke to adult reporters. C) The event was purposefully planned so that it began nearly an hour after school started, when any child attending school that day would have already been in the building, with no sight line to the playground.
Where are your sympathies for the many millions more of children who cease going on field trips because of tests, who no longer have art or science because they are not tested, whose teachers’ autonomy and creativity is undermined because of the tests?
Scab!
http://tinyurl.com/ma3d435
Tim,
Your argument is a statement in favor of the status quo, an argument when unpacked is in favor of oppression and an unjust system.
Either you understand this and are simply being honest in your support of inequity or you do not understand this and need to dig A LOT deeper.
The world envisioned by those who create and support high-stakes testing is a grim, lifeless world of automatons.
Perhaps, but it’s one example of the type of concerns that parents have.
No one is less happy with the status quo than I am. My kids have had more test prep than actual instruction this year, and they are far from being alone.
I refuse to accept that test prep is unavoidable and inevitable–there is no excuse for not doing what’s best for kids. Principals are given a great deal of autonomy, and now the chancellor has strongly and directly advised them to scale back test prep in a big way (I wish she’d gone a step further and banned the practice outright). If there’s a protest on the first day of school this fall demanding that schools teach an actual curriculum to every child for the next 180 instructional days and beyond, you can count me in.
APPR has a stranglrhold on the system.
It is invalid, unreliable, and grossly unfair.
Until it goes the test prep will be here, albeit in a somewhat re-branded form.
RTTT was not a buffet of educational reform choices. It was the ultimate unhappy meal. When you opened the box in NY, we all got the same thing: CCSS + PARCC + APPR
My response to Tim, FLERP!,
What I’m speaking about is the sentiment in Tim’s comment, nothing personal of course.
Much of the sentiment in Tim’s comment is due to the massive PR campaign, the well-funded machinery and the sense of intimidation that many (most) parents feel. I have talked to droves of parents and have not found a single one that believes in the high-stakes testing regimen- not one. And that is from a very “highly educated” demographic- those whose kids who do well. Those I speak to in the lower class neighborhoods, as I go between worlds, are also universally opposed. Soy is everyone going along with something they know to be detrimental to their kids? That’s an important question and I don’t mean it in a judgmental fashion. There is a vast apparatus out there that conditions people to believe they have no choice but to go along with this madness. People are beginning to see there are options and saying Enough!
However in most cases I hear similar fears expressed by Tim and once people get together and realize they don’t need to do any of this and can in fact take control of their schools these fears disappear.
Most of the discussions are based on the context that has been given to us by those who do not have our interests in mind. That spell has to be broken and people need to take control of this situation and can.
WRITE IN SOLIDARITY!
On this first day of testing in New York state, we in District 6 (Northern Manhattan) launched an email-writing campaign in solidarity with those children who are opting out. My children have opted out in years past, but not this year, because of high school applications. We are sending emails to our city Chancellor Fariña, cc’ing John King, state Commissioner, Merryl Tisch, State Regents Chancellor, our local superintendents, principals, teachers, and elected leaders–senators, assemblymembers, mayor, public advocate, and all their brothers (kidding on that last). We provided a couple sample letters, one of which specifically cites the NY budget passed last night with sweeping giveaways to the charter industry lobby.
Here’s what I wrote:
Dear Chancellor Fariña,
My children will be taking this year’s state standardized tests, but in solidarity with the many families in my school and district who are opting out of the test, I am writing to express my objection to the misuse and overuse of standardized testing in my children’s education.
The tests play too influential a role in crucial decisions, such as promotion to the next grade, admission to middle and high school, teacher evaluations, and school ratings and closings. As a consequence:
• Our school curriculum has come to overemphasize the testing subjects at the expense of the arts, sciences, social studies, and physical education.
• Valuable learning time is lost to test prep and long sessions of testing and field testing. Worse, they strip the joy from learning in favor of drill and grill. My children have complained bitterly of boredom as test prep has intensified over the last weeks.
• Our children suffer inappropriate stress and anxiety out of fear they will fail a grade, cause their teachers to be fired, or cause their school to be closed.
• Money that our classrooms desperately need is instead spent on expensive tests, test prep, test-aligned curriculum, grading, and analysis of data.
• The tests do not assess my children’s abilities or knowledge accurately or thoroughly.
• In District 6, where we live, 87% of children receive free and reduced-price lunch. Not coincidentally, 80% of our kids score 1s and 2s on the ELA section of the state tests. The tests more effectively measure our district’s income level than the work our students actually accomplish daily.
Standardized testing is seriously harming our schools, district, and city. I ask that you make a bold statement against testing and end the “consequences,” as you called them at the D6 Town Hall, of opting out of standardized testing. Please reduce the number of standardized tests given to my children and stop using their scores to penalize children, teachers, and schools.
Sincerely,
Kari Steeves
Public school parent, New York City District 6
Interesting question. Even the opt out groups in NYC are suggesting that parents think hard before opting their kids out of 4th and 7th grade testing, as flawed as the tests are. Curious what will happen to the Arts & Letters group next year as the elementary school has only expanded as far as 3rd grade, and I noticed that the middle school doesn’t seem to be part of the opt-out effort.
Also, Tim, as far as 4th grade test scores and admissions go, none of the schools we called, including NO D15 middle school, said test scores were a non-negotiable factor of admissions. Read the press release. D13 parent, research was not conducted by any opt-out organization, but by the parents at BNS. Parents at ICE conducted a similar survey of high schools. Again, a surprising number were more than open to applicants without test scores. After all, they take private school students all the time. I am opting out both my 4th and 7th grader. In my estimation, admissions is a crapshoot anyway. I know more than one child with double fours who did not get into their first or second choice middle school.
It must make John Dewey spin in his grave, but just about all of our most lovely private schools administer standardized tests to their students annually, and the selective public schools will ask to see those scores.
I’m well aware that D15 middle schools, which are carefully sealed off from the rabble like me, don’t require state test scores. This is not the case in almost every district, or at some of the city’s “crown jewel” middle and high schools.
Again Tim, I urge you to do some of your own research. As Michael says, don’t accept the status quo. Call guidance at these schools, ask them how they would handle a kid coming in without a test score. You will be surprised by what you find. The more of us who make these calls, the more the schools and the DOE will have to formulate a policy.
And if I may ask, how are D 15 middle schools any more “sealed off” than other schools? Genuinely curious. Sure D15 has some pricy ‘hoods, but whole less dear swaths as well.
I have done the research on the schools for which my child is eligible to apply, which does not include schools in D15. I didn’t mean to imply that D15 has different admissions practices than other districts, only that its critical mass of very well-to-do public school families means it has better options than just about every other district. There are no consequences to opting out there.
Dear Brooklyn parents,
Thank you for taking the brave stance on doing what is best for your children. The country is watching and teachers everywhere are so happy that the current ed “deform” is beginning to be brought questioned. Don’t give up this fight! It brings to mind the old shampoo commercial that said ” I told a friend and she told a friend, etc.”
Instead of Queens’ WE WILL WE WILL ROCK YOU we now have
Brooklyn’s WE WILL WE WILL OPT OUT!!
brought out and questioned. sorry. I should blame April Fools; my bad.
What happens if this were to happen at the high school level. Currently the state will not allow students to receive a diploma without passing the regents tests…We cannot withhold graduation…
Unless you are a Consortium school! Pressure the state to expand the Consortium! Students in Consortium schools take only the ELA. They used performance based assesment for other subjects. (PBATs)