Karen Klein, who writes editorials for the Los Angeles Times about education (and other topics), told her 16-year-old daughter she could opt out.
Like many other parents, Klein reached the breaking point where the tests didn’t make sense any more. After years of complying with the testing regime, she realized that this test was pointless. She even envied home-schoolers, who could take their children on field trips and explore what interested them. Imagine that!
Most touching was her story about the teacher who offered poetry teas. By the time her child was old enough to take the class, the poetry teas had disappeared. Test prep.
And then there was this event: “After one of the earlier versions gave a low score to my eldest on reading comprehension, my husband and I shrugged and knew there had to be something wrong with the test. That’s the daughter who is now finishing off her dissertation for a doctorate in literature.
The Los Angeles Times has been a reliable supporter of the new era of corporate reform, with occasional deviations (I recall an editorial scoffing at the parent trigger).
High-stakes testing is one of the Golden Calves of the Corporate Reform movement.
Karen Klein’s defection, rooted in her experience as a parent, not a think tank ideologue, suggests that there is hope for the future, that the patina of certitude attached to the standardized testing regime may in time crumble as more parents realize how flawed, how subjective, and how limited these tests really are.
She says, “Take that, world of Scantron.”
We say, “Right on. Welcome to the fight against the status quo. If it’s right for your child to opt out, it’s right for other people’s children.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Pittsburgh 4th graders have to take 33 standardized tests. What about your kids?
Find out!
Opt out!
Change public education to benefit the students not the testing companies!
http://www.examiner.com/article/pittsburgh-4th-graders-have-to-take-33-standardized-tests-what-about-your-kids
Perhaps, now many more parents/students will decide to opt out of these tests. This is probably making the testing companies nervous and if so, I’m pleased..
We need more of this! High profile peeps not caving to the system and saying enough is enough!
Indeed. My 10th grader was just recounting the long, long laundry list of tests today. It is just bizarre and ridiculous. The sort of thing people write farcical plays about, spending all day long navel-gazing. The gamble is, apparently, that parents won’t notice there’s no one hired to and no time actually spent in teaching your kids anything anymore. It’s the new form of babysitting: test-taking. The kids are busy, so it’s all good, right?
Please visit and LIKE our FB page about the Common Core in Los Angeles. The level of awareness if very low here in LA, but it will help if we can get some good conversations going there too. Thanks!!
Marian — did you know that the National Opt Out web page was hacked? Apparently “maliciously”, though whether deliberately-maliciously I don’t know and wouldn’t know how one could know. Still, the result is that all the content there was destroyed. Pretty wild, no?
16? for opting out? No revolution there.
Er— unless i’m mistaken wasn’t the LATimes the first newspaper to publish teacher ranking based on VAM? MAYBE this editor who sees these standardized tests as a stupid waste of time will refuse to publish VAM-based ratings and apologize to the LA teachers for dragging their names, reputations, and professionalism through the mud…
If I rember right , one of the teachers killed themselves. Wash all you want L.A. Times, but the blood will never come off. I cancelled my subscription because of that and I encorage every teacher to never read the times again. They seemed to have forgotten the whole investigative journalism and fourth estate thing
wgersen & bob the science guy—
The teacher was Rigoberto Ruelas. He should not be forgotten.
Link: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/09/28/rigoberto-ruelas-suicide-_n_742073.html
Link: http://www.nbcnews.com/id/39404037/ns/us_news-life/t/la-teacher-suicide-sparks-test-score-pushback/#.U0SdaV7oZz8
Link: http://articles.latimes.com/2010/sep/28/local/la-me-south-gate-teacher-20100928
He was worth so much more than the numerical smear, jeer and sneer pinned on him by VAManiacs.
😎
speechless here
I doubt that this editor has a say in the utterly contemptible decision to publish these scores. BTW, Wayne. You have a great blog. To others here, visit Mr. Gersen’s blog is well worth visiting. There is much, much worth reading there.
Let me try that again, without the typos. To others here: Dr. Gersen’s blog is well worth visiting. A lot of really thoughtful work there from a highly experienced and perceptive educator.
I stopped reading the L.A. times as a result of its virulently anti-teacher editorial stance. Publishing teacher rankings based on test scores is particularly reprehensible. The Times has reduced itself to being a cheerleader for billionaires.
Wow! What a great way to end this up-and-down day! Thanks for this posting, Diane, and do route readers to the similarly eloquent argument for opting out one’s child posted by “Edusanity”–the University of Arkansas’s Jason Endacott and Chris Goering–re the reasons they decided to opt-out their fourth grade son. See http://www.edusanity.com/2014/04/08/why-we-chose-to-opt-out/
Oooo, *excellent* piece, Jonathan — thanks for the point!!
This is a start. Maybe LA Times will do real news again. Still the LA Times can’t wash their hands for doing harm via bad reporting.
Wonderful article…thank you!…united we stand, stronger together.
I’m hearing that Smarter Balanced Assessments may become part of college- entrance exams and I’m feeling extremely concerned. SBA was just piloted a few weeks ago.
I’m not sure how they could possibly do that, considering that a lot of states are not in that consortia.
This piece by Karen Klein is especially good news considering how myopic and driven the LA Times Editorial board has been on embracing all the Reformers rhetoric on Education. Those who toil in LAUSD know the full brunt of their reign.
My major concern with the Opt Out movement is it is still class driven. I will defer to historians like Mark Naison why this happens, but in the world of public education, the squeaky wheel is the white middle/upper class voter who ALL politicians fear getting upset., especially Democrats.
Keep in mind Karen Klein is from tony Laguna Beach. When parents there get involved in the school system, you bet people listen.
It seems that the only reason the Opt Out Movement has ANY credibility is because of the white, middle class revolt. My students and their parents could holler to kingdom come and it wouldn’t make much of a difference. There would be the resounding paternalism of the billionaires, our Supt. or his political and media supporters to lambaste the crybabies.and shame them for their insolence.
Arne Duncan’s “white suburban mom” lament was a Third Rail moment for him and he quickly backed down. We’ll see what happens with Andrew Cuomo and Thursday’s rally in NYC. Pearson testing, Gates and Common Core need white support because they LOOK like those people and frankly, white people acting en masse opting out scares the hell out of them because they have some degree of economic and political clout.
The students in my class lack that so my district has had free reign to do whatever THEY felt the colonies needed.
Again, I urge white suburban and urban enclaves to join in with their inner city and rural brethren to see their common interest in preserving and protecting the integrity of public education for EVERYONE’S kids.
Geronimo,
“I urge white suburban and urban enclaves to join in with their inner city and rural brethren to see their common interest in preserving and protecting the integrity of public education for EVERYONE’S kids.”
Thoroughly agree!
I’ve been saying since NCLB that the shit would hit the fan when the suburban and rich districts started to feel the effects of that piece of bovine excrement of a law. It has just taken about 5-7 years longer than I thought it would because the states kept changing the “game” so that those districts wouldn’t be affected. Now it’s time to pay the piper for that insane law (and RaTTT) and those white suburban upper middle to upper class won’t empty their pocketbooks to “pay” because they “know” their kids aren’t like “those others” who have already had to “pay” involuntarily.
George,
I attended one of the NYSED “listening tour” thingies with Commish King and Regent Tisch. I arrived an hour early to try to get a spot to speak out but learned that all spots had been taken much earlier – most of these by some organized group with matching hand-painted signs who refused to identify themselves as other than concerned individuals. Almost all of these folks were people of color who passionately “supported the Common Core” specifically as an equity issue. They spoke of how they all had miserable educations and had not been prepared for college and now the Common Core would fix this.
Meanwhile, King and co. framed every one of the state’s projects as allowing for greater equity – even the data mining (“We have give all our records to InBloom so we can get economy data dashboards for the poorer districts.”)
The few parents and teachers who tried to say that they and/or their kids had had good experiences in NYC schools or who had a different goal for their kids education other than fast-food-quality standardization came off as privileged and out of touch. I don’t know how to make common cause in that environment – even if it is a PR construct.
In my neighborhood, when we protest to the DOE that our schools are overcrowded or our kids are over-tested they laugh and say “ugh, just give it up and apply to private school already.” They seem to consider the fact that our schools are not exactly “failing” to be some kind of inconvenience that they would like to see go away.
Duncan and co.’s newest project seems to be diminishing the connection between high SES and public school success. _Everybody_ must be shown to be failing. Then they can finally prove that more money isn’t the answer. For the short term just holding the line where it is. is a justified use of whatever “influence” the previously comfortable middle class may still cling to .
That said, I plan to attend both the Thursday rally for the soon-to-be-displaced Harlem public school students, and the Friday rally at my District 2 elementary school over poor test quality.
Wow, sorry, my post should be addressed to “Geronimo.” Deep apologies!
Geronimo, no one knows the trenches of LAUSD better than you. But I think you should have some confidence that the Opt Out movement is rising in all corners. Look at the incredible work of Rousemary Vega and Shoneice Reynolds with her amazing son Asean–Take THAT Rahm Emmanuel–Johnson and others in Chicago. I don’t know her work in detail, but Dipti Baranwal in LAUSD is organizing in East LA.
Slowly, slowly, together.
Tangentially related: My high school age child took the NYC DOE school survey today (in home room; they wouldn’t let the kids take them home). Among the questions (my wording is probably not exact): “When you give evidence in class, are you encouraged to bring in your own outside knowledge?” And “Are you taught to support your facts in class discussion with close reading of a text?”
Big brother is watching….
Blech. Opting out is fine until 9th grade. What’s going to happen with the Common Core aligned Regents exams?
When she and the LA Times publicly apologizes to the teachers of LA for their relentless bashing and pro-corporate stances, peddling sound bytes sans journalism, then perhaps I’ll celebrate and have hope. This is yet another instance of hypocrisy in action – it’s good for your child, but not for mine.
I agree Carrie. Those of us in LA who have had to stomach Karin Klein’s pro reform messages for so long do not have confidence that her ‘angry mom’ article to opt out in Laguna, not in LA, has much substance. She is in charge not only the education editorials, but also of all the education reporters assignments, and she rules with an iron fist. Until this strange piece, she has always been pro reform, pro parent trigger, pro charter schools, and not at all a friend of public schools and public school teachers.
Don’t hold your breath that this one personal incident means that Klein and the LA Times have changed their focus.
Just a quick news publishing lesson: Karin Klein definitely does not assign education news stories. It would be outright scandalous if (and has been when) any newspaper’s Editorial Page directed news content. Beth Shuster is the education editor of the LA Times and she is a real pro. Have they covered enough? No. Do they need to get out of the school board’s Beaudry offices to talk to real people in the trenches of the geographically largest school district in the United States? Hell yes.
I’m not defending the stance taken by the LA Times editorial board, which has been mostly atrocious with occasional blips of reason (see my blog post from last fall about their coverage http://mail.citywatchla.com/8br-hidden/5837-good-morning-la-times) and the excellent blogs that are covering education in much more depth.
The big “reveal” to me is finding out that the LA Times opinions on education are formed in a seaside resort town in the heavily conservative Orange County! What in the world does a resident of one of the most exclusive enclaves in Southern California know about the dynamic, diverse school district of Los Angeles?! To me, this is the real scandal.
http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/campaign-k-12/2014/04/bipartisan_charter_research_bi.html
Dc Democrats are all patting themselves on the back for taking care of charter schools.
They can’t get anything done on anything else, but Job One was taken care of!
I can’t wait until they get back to work and institute the newest unfunded mandate for public schools, along with another stern, grim lecture to parents and teachers.
These folks are fabulous advocates for “education” I must say. How many states have cut funding for public schools since 2008, again? Is it 32 out of 50? How many new ed reform mandates have public schools taken on since 2008? Let’s see, we’re grading schools, grading teachers, we’re testing the Common Core tests…and that’s before they wrote any public school legislation. I cannot imagine how bad it will be if they actually write a law that involves public schools. With any luck they’ll forget all about us.
Their laser-like focus on building and promoting charter schools while delivering economic sanctions to public schools is going great. Keep up the good work, Democrats. See if you can get Congressional approval ratings down to single digits.
The CCSSO has a new design for its website on the Common [sic] Core [sic] State [sic] Standards [sic]. It features a 3-minute video called “Learn about the Common Core in 3 Minutes.”
This slick RSA Animate-style piece of PR for the Gates/Pearson bullet list (you know, the bullet list prepared by that highly experienced educator and profound learning theorist, Lord David Coleman) features an African-American female voice using a “tellin’ it like it is” sort of tone and saying, and I quote:
Beginning: “Like it or not, life is full of measuring sticks:
“how smart we are,
“how fast we are,
“how well we can, you know, compete.
“But up until now, it’s been pretty hard to tell how well kids are competing in school and how well they are going to do when they get out of school.
“We like to think that our education system does that, but when it comes to learning what they really need to be successful after graduation . . . is a graduating senior in, say, St. Louis, as prepared to get a job as the graduate in Shanghai?
“Well, it turns out, the answer . . . is ‘No.'”
Middle: [Blah blah blah. A lot of talk about how education is a staircase, and the Common Core is one big staircase for everyone, and each standard is a landing on that staircase. A graphic showing little boxes being checked off below each stair, all the way up. Some kids gloriously at the top. Some slipping and falling, barely hanging on.]
End: “The world’s getting more and more competitive every day, but now, when our kids get to the top of their staircase, they can have way more options. Clear goals. Confident, well-prepared students. That’s the Common Core State Standards.”
Why the folksy African-American female voice? Call me cynical, but this appears to me a piece of cultural appropriation by the CCSSO of the kind that Disney is so famous for. One of the stock memes of racist films of the 1940s and ’50s is the wise, older woman of color who sits those crazy white folks down and talks sense into them: “Why, young Mr. White, it’s time you figured out the difference between wantin’ and doin’.”
And, of course, the video is directed at middle-class parents and plays upon the fears created in them by the recent and continuing economic downturn and the general theft of middle-class prosperity by the U.S. oligarchy: You have to have these standards if your kid is going to be able to get a job in the future. The video employs subtle racism: If we don’t have these standards, those kids in Shanghai are going to take your kid’s job.
So, the Common Core Stairway to the Big Bucks video has me thinking, reevaluating.
You see, weirdly, I always thought that education was
a. A great, enormously varied and rich handoff whereby many, many older individuals transmitted to many, many younger individuals what they knew and cared about–art, music, literature, history, science, mathematics–you know, culture; and
b. A garden of many, many forking paths for young people to explore so that they could discover and follow those suited to their disparate talents and interests–differing paths leading to enormously varied adult roles in a highly complex, highly diverse, highly pluralistic society
c. Lighting a fire, not filling a bucket
Turns out I was all wrong.
Education is about everyone Competing on a race up a single stairway. It’s the race to the top. (The dummies always go for the sports metaphors.)
It’s about invariance, about everyone checking off the same set of boxes.
It’s about beating those kids in Shanghai up to the top and leaving the pathetic loser underachievers struggling to hang onto the landings below.
Oh, and all the way up, what are the kids checking off? Skills. The term is used over and over. All skills, all the time on that stairway to total dominance.
Education as Stairmastery.
Now Trending: Resurgence of the distorted and myopic view of Charles Darwin’s “surivival of the fittest.”
Jeb Bush: “You tell me which society is going to be the winner in this 21st Century: The one that worries about how they feel, or the one that worries about making sure the next generation has the capacity to eat everybody’s lunch?”
Predation is the new “it” quality.
predation, exactly
I was so happy to read “myopic view” in your post, for Darwin was, of course, a remarkably gentle fellow, appalled by Social Darwinist notions, a defender of children and the poor and of the rights of nonhuman animals
I opted my 8th grader out. I think I am the first and maybe only in my public middle school. I’ve shared my letter, asked many to follow suit but the only support I have is from a single (brave) teacher. I know many others agree, but they are not talking out loud.
Sadly, though Kline is opting her child out, she still plugs the egregious Common [sic] Core [sic] State [sic] Standards [sic] in her piece, saying that she hopes they will help improve things, because she has seen a noticeable fall-off in creativity in classes as they spend more time test prepping.
Totally clueless as to how these backward, amateurish, pedestrian, unimaginative “standards” are distorting curricula and pedagogy.
cx: Klein
Exactly Bob. she has repeatedly lauded CC, and also was in favor of the billionaires choices for school board…..and she controls education letters to the editor. She seems to have free reign of the editorial page. She did not let a single letter on the Gulen Charter Schools be printed. Many teachers wrote about this insidious movement after the Times surprised us with an article on Gulen. Stripes stay stripes on reformers as well as on zebras.
Let’s hope that this article signals that she is beginning to see.
“There’s a crack, a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” –Leonard Cohen
Maybe it is time to offer a “challenge” to Obama… it would be this… If common core is so wonderful and exemplary and success on it reveals students know all they should know and blah blah blah… let us see how both his daughters do on these tests by forcing all Sidwell Friends students to take them. But to make it a bit more real, we’d have to add some stakes to this… tie it in with their end of year gpa’s and with their teachers evaluations (yes every teacher each his children have). Why not give them the NYC version of PARCC. Oh and while we are at it… how about doing this for Duncan’s kids too. Is it not the ultimate in irony that Duncan’s kids attend public school in one of the few states NOT following common core… thus they are not forced to take PARCC – yes this would be Virginia! Let his kids’ school do the same. The reality is with their kids getting such an exemplary education they should be able to figure out essays like the one the students were given last year labelled “Pineapple Gate” and such and do the test within the time allotted!! Truly here is the challenge to Obama and Duncan…put your money where your mouth is. Then..if your kids do better than title one kids with no prep at all (despite the ridiculousness of this test), we can look at how Sidwell Friends and a top Arlington VA public school runs their schools … you know with classes heavy on “hands on” and lots of enrichment activities and we can examine that “little elephant in the room” so ignored by our leaders – POVERTY! If their kids do not do well? Why not??? Is their education not up to par? And if they protest about it… would it not be time to question the validity of the common core altogether???? I will call this the “Catch 22” challenge….
Sent from my iPhone
>
Reblogged this on One Teacher's Voice.
Reblogged this on Transparent Christina and commented:
brilliant
See also: “New research has found that parents of public school students in states with more extensive and stringent student assessment systems express lower trust in government and more negative views of their children’s schools, threatening civic engagement and the potential for future education reform.” http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/04/140407130927.htm
fascinating
The best hope–perhaps the only one–we have for ending the testing and Common Core mania is the “Opt out ” movement. Not only parents must do this , but also teachers. If teachers would band together like those in seattle last year, school districts could not fire them or take other punitive actions.
Schools Matter: Responding to Karin Klein of the LA Times’ ‘Why my family is opting out of the Common Core testing’
http://www.schoolsmatter.info/2014/04/responding-to-karin-klein-of-la-times.html
Ms. Klein’s response to my letter was that both she and the Times have always had a “nuanced” stance on these issues.
Outstanding letter, Robert!
Dear Ms. Klein, don’t worry, Lord Coleman is busy creating the Mother of All Tests to show what your beloved Common Core can REALLY tell us.
I wonder how Lord Coleman is getting along with the creation of his new Scholastic Common Core Achievement Test, or SCCAT.
Is he modelling the SCCAT on the Core-aligned PARCC (spell that backward) and SBAC field tests, the sterling quality of which you learn about on TestingTalk.org? After all, 300 million in taxpayer money, was spent developing those revolutionary assessments, what we in the Resistance affectionately call The Common Core College and Career Ready Assessment Program, or C.C.C.C.R.A.P.
But alas, no, Lord Coleman can’t model his new SCCAT on PARCC and SBAC. Why not? What’s the problem?
You see, with criterion-referenced tests like PARCC and SBAC, the deformers can kinda sorta get away with the, uh, forceful (looney?) claims that
a. 70 percent of kids (and their teachers and their schools) are failures and
b. that the test is just showing that,
claims that both Bloomberg and King made last year.
They can at least sort of get away with pretending that those claims are based on something other than purest numerology–that is, if no one looks closely at the data (and if much of that data and all the tests questions are withheld, as they were).
In New York State, on the Common Core tests, proficiency dropped 33.8 percent in math and 24 percent in ELA,
to 29.6 percent and 26.4 percent, respectively.
But in order to get scores even that high for the 2013 exams, New York had to set the cut scores at a point where proficiency on the exams was equal to getting barely over half the questions correct (around 60 percent of them).
Now, I know what all you classroom teachers are thinking. 60%? That’s an F on one of my tests, or a D at best. But hey, the folks who made those New York tests, unlike you, are GEN-YOO-INE ASSESSMENT EXPERTS. That’s how the experts roll!
The kids bombed the new exams so badly that to get even a circa 30 percent proficiency rate, they had to set the cut scores that low, but see, that’s not because the tests were terrible but because public schools suck. People would understand that if they were highly qualified, highly compensated assessment experts like the folks at PARCC.
As PARCC assures everyone on their website, the New York tests finally gave an “honest assessment” of the state of education in New York. That’s what they call the New York results. An “honest assessment.” Finally, after nothing but lies from everyone in New York for decades–every teacher, every administrator, every district and state official, every mayor running a school system (uh oh, scratch that)–a bunch o’ liars. And those poor soccer moms believed all that lying.
That’s the “honest” assessment: 70 percent of teachers suck and need to be fired. 70 percent of schools suck and need to be closed. 70 percent of kids need to be held back.
All those schools, you see, need to be closed and replaced with virtual charters run by the grifter cousins and brothers and golfing buddies of bureaucrats and politicians. And all those teachers need to be replaced with software systems generating Big Data. Billions need to be spent on software and data systems and tests to fix this. Billions and billions and billions. Thank goodness for Lord Coleman and the Core. We wouldn’t have known.
Stop the madness.
End the tests.
Opt out.
What has the ACT been saying about the new version of SAT? Is there a chance that ACT stands where they are and let’s SAT jump over the edge alone? Coleman won’t be running College Board for very long if ACT starts picking up dissatisfied SAT customers.
An example of how the Common Core in ELA limits possibilities for curriculum development:
http://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2014/04/10/on-developing-curricula-in-the-age-of-the-thought-police/
As the author of the piece in question, I would like to note that I am not a defector from testing. This column was a cry for more balance and nuanced thinking about school reform, not a call to do away with testing. I do believe standardized testing has a valid role to play and it does indicate some helpful things. But there can be points where the amount of testing and the uses of the results go overboard.
I also would note in response to a commenter that the Times has endorsed pro-reform candidates as well as union-backed candidates. Monica Ratliff was hardly the choice of the billionaires who were contributing to campaigns in the most recent school board election.
Ms. Lubic, I have absolutely nothing to do with letters to the editor. Nothing. I see them at the same time as the readers do, unless there is a letter that the editor asks me to look at for fact-checking, which happens perhaps twice a year.
I think the entire discussion of education would be better off if there were less rhetoric and more attention to accuracy.
–Karin Klein
Adding to Ms. Lubic: And I have less than nothing to do with reporter assignments. I am not an editor. I am a writer. In a completely different department. I supervise no one. I assign no one. I don’t even know what stories they are working on most of the time, unless we happen to attend the same news events. These are simply facts.