Yesterday, despite the strong objections of tens of thousands of parents across the state, the New York Board of Regents agreed to make field testing of the Common Core testing mandatory. This was supposedly to quell the uprising of parents who kept their children home last year. Making an unpopular policy mandatory seems likely to feed the parent rebellion.
New York has adopted the PARCC test, which some other states have rejected. PARCC is supposed to have at least 15 states signed on, but at present its numbers have shrunk to only 12 or 13 willing states.
Peter Goodman, a long-time commentator on New York education politics, here describes PARCC as “zombie testing.” It is dead, and no one is willing to give up the ghost.
He writes:
The only purpose of the current testing regime is to “measure” the effectiveness of the $55 billion New York State spends each year as well as to “measure” the effectiveness of individual teachers.
The governor loves to talk about turning New York State into a high tech center, creating high paying jobs in the new cyber industries and harasses educators and demeans parents, he is the troglodyte.
The governor should be leading our school system into the new age, not wasting time and money and resources testing kids in a meaningless exercise.
The Regents and Commissioner John King think they are in public office to compel the public to do what they want. They don’t understand that they are “public servants,” which means obviously they are supposed to serve the public. When thousands of parents rise up as one to say that their children are over tested and their schools have been turned into test-prep centers, the Regents should listen. They haven’t. They have added fuel to parent anger. It is not going away just because the Regents have passed a motion. The children belong to their parents, not to the state.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Diane, you wrote: “Yesterday… the New York Board of Regents agreed to make field testing of the Common Core testing mandatory.” My understanding (correct me if I am wrong) is that the field testing amendment is going to be put to a 45-day public comment period and then decided on in February 2015, no? From Ken Wagner’s memo, dated November 10, 2014: “It is anticipated that the proposed amendment will be presented for adoption at the February 2015 Regents meeting, after publication of a Notice of Proposed Rule Making in the State Register and expiration of the 45-day public comment period prescribed in the State Administrative Procedure Act. If adopted at the February meeting, the proposed amendment will take effect on February 25, 2015.” See “Timetable for Implementation,” page 3, http://www.regents.nysed.gov/meetings/2014/November2014/1114p12d2.pdf. I’m guessing NYSED did not anticipate the push back it received yesterday — 100s if not 1,000s of emails + phone calls….
LikeLike
This will push more parents away from public schools where they have no say to private, parochial, and charters which don’t have to be under the thumb of the testing regime. This is how you break public education by chasing away the parents who want to have a say in their children’s education. The road to privatization is paved in gold.
LikeLike
Also, I do believe there were some dissenting voices at the meeting.
LikeLike
“The children belong to their parents, not to the state.”
Not yet, Ms. Ravitch — not YET.
But when the children DO belong to the state — and the state continues to belong to the corporations… Well.
LikeLike
When children belong to the state I suppose the state will decide which schools the children are allowed to attend and which they are prohibited from attending.
LikeLike
How about prior to any further movement on the mandated field testing proposal the Regents, in a collective act of moral and educational conscience, do three things:
Pass a vote of NO CONFIDENCE in Chancellor Merryl Tisch, Commissioner John King and Deputy Commissioner Ken Wagner–urging their immediate resignation for failure to act in the best interests of public school education.
Pass a resolution repudiating the Common Core and its botched roll-out under Tisch, King and Wagner and calling for an indefinite moratorium on the so-called core-aligned ELA and math exams — developed by Pearson, using discredited stand-alone field testing procedures that the troika now wishes to somehow give legitimacy to by fiat and amended commissioner’s regulations that would force parental compliance.
Mandate, instead, via amended regulations, the following transcendent principle. That no field testing shall be proposed without advance notice to parents: explaining the purpose of the tests, estimating their full costs in classroom hours and teacher pay sacrificed to administer them; setting forth the name of the test developer the dollar amount the developer is being paid to complete the project; and requiring, as an affirmative action, their informed consent should they wish their children to particiapte in such an enterpirse.
If that occurs, there will be no need to mandate field testing.
LikeLike
I agree.
NYSUT already took care of the no confidence vote (John King) back in January:
He’s still there.
Of course, it should also include Tisch and Wagner, too. These are public servants who are doing anything but serve the public.
King’s still there. I’m not sure what it’s going to take in order to really get these people’s ear.
LikeLike
UnitedOptOut 2014/11/16 urgent national update—information on parents rights for children under 13 and on-line testing and curriculum. Check it out
LikeLike
Why not just have the children of the opt out parents answer incorrectly in order to subvert the powers that be.
LikeLike
I’m sorry, I must have missed something: exactly how are they going to compel a child to pick up a pencil for this test?
LikeLike
Will this make it impossible for me to opt my child out out?
LikeLike
Nothing makes it impossible for you to opt your child out. This is about YOUR children…its teachers their after, and we can only do so much without parent support.
LikeLike
Will our refuse letters apply to these field tests?
LikeLike
Tell your child to start singing very loud so they will be removed from the tests!!
LikeLike
No need to opt out of field tests. Just have your child fill out their name and then have them select just one random answer. Then have them end the program.
If the majority of parents have their kids answer just ONLY ONE RANDOM ITEM, then STOP, the field test data will be disabled. There is no consequence for low field test scores. Odds are pretty good your kid scores a “0” and Pearson gets useless data.
LikeLike
Thank you. Duly noted.
LikeLike
I wish the answer were as simple as giving educational decisions back to parents and away from the state, but a lot of the parents who oppose the Common Core and the testing craze have an agenda that is anti-teacher, anti-public schools, and pro-voucher. Many of these parents would have us teach a “traditional” curriculum (which isn’t traditional), which continues to praise Columbus as a hero, glorify the industrial revolution, and paint the founding of our country as a Christian nation. They would have us teach “traditional” math and science to the exclusion of other curriculum, despite the end of the Sputnik era, and they would have us track kids into ability levels to keep their own kids away from the “rif-raf.” This particular interest group of parents seem to despise the few aspects of the core that have some redeeming features. I think educational change should definitely be a democratic dialogue and exchange, but the voices that are most absent in the decision making process are educators. Educational researchers, academia, philosophers, teacher-educators, the ones that haven’t been bought out that is, need to be weighing in. And if they are not invited, they need to crash this debate. Teachers and administrators need to speak up, too, despite the potentially devastating consequences to our careers, and thank God for leaders like Diane Ravitch, Jennifer Berkshire, and Mercedes Schneider, but by and large, teachers and administrators have a lot of work to do if they are going to engage in a debate that goes deeper than being a proponent of public education because “we’re doing just fine without more accountability.” That happens to be true, but, tragically, our teacher’s colleges managed to graduate far too many of us without demanding that we develop rich understandings of our fundamental assumptions, philosophy, educational research, and even the very purpose for education. Then when we got out of school, we were too busy teaching and surviving to read John Dewey or even professional journals, for that matter. It pains me that the recent reactionary change agents in education have hijacked the word, reform. But in some ways, we as educators, deserve what we got, because we are not fully capable of advocating for a vision of what schools should look like and why. There is curriculum and pedagogy that we need to embrace in public education system in order that we don’t undermine democracy or personal liberation. For example, I think we should be thoughtfully studying the phenomenon of Islamophopia even when the majority of parents believe that all Muslims are terrorists or terrorist sympathizers. We should be re-thinking Columbus even if it offends the sensibilities of our students’ parents. In order to engage in a debate with the corporate world or the religious right about how their vision is bad, we, as educators, need to know what our good vision is that would replace it. Mainstream America, moderate republicans, and the democrats would not be buying into lame brained ideas like high-stakes testing, charter schools, and NCLB if we, as educators, had alternatives- thoughtful complex well developed alternatives. We look to doctors, not CEO’s, to tell us how to treat cancer and how to be healthy. People want to look to educators to guide us in how to solve education’s problems and a to offer a vision for a healthy democratic public school system.
LikeLike