Hooray! Jonathan Pelto reports that parents in Connecticut have the right to opt their child out of Common Core testing!
“In a published report today in the CTMirror, the Executive Director of the Connecticut Association of Public School Superintendents, Joeseph Ciracoulo, has announced that superintendents in Connecticut will now recognize the right of parents to opt their children out of the unfair, inappropriate and discriminatory Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium SBAC Testing AND that students who opt out will be provided with an alternative location where they can read a book, do homework or engage in some other educational activity for the eight to eight and a half hours of the SBAC Testing.”
Eight (8) hours of testing! This is nuts!
Opt out!
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This is good news indeed! Now if other states will follow with the same decision…and more importantly to have parents become aware of this; many parents are not aware of the details of the changes in the schools and some parents are not even aware that common core is in the schools along with the increase in time for testing.
The testing issue is accepted without question when people do not pay attention or assume that all changes implemented by the dept of education are good and assume that changes have been field tested prior to implementation. Therefore, they do not pay attention to the changes and just accept them.
Tax payers with our without children often fall into the same category of being blissfully confident that these expensive educational reforms have been tested through adequate research. Without question they accept that these reforms must be good for students.
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It’s not really something for the states to decide. Parents have the right to opt their children out of testing simply because they, not the state, are parents. The only decision for the state to make is whether they’re going to voluntarily recognize parental rights or whether they’re going be forced to do so.
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“The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppose.”
Frederick Douglass was right then. He’s right now.
If he were alive today he would be leading the fight to
OPT OUT!
😎
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AND march on ALL Pear$on campu$e$–tell every taxpayer exactly how much of their tax $$$ are WA$TED on all their CCRAP (for all these years–make sure to mention the TOTAL expenditure$).
Whenever I tell anyone where I live, they ab$olutely freak out, no matter their political affiliation.
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The edge of all this is where does standardized testing deviate from the educational program. We’ve had summative assessments that gave no feedback to students or teachers for ages but they weren’t as high stakes for everyone involved. Still it was considered acceptable for students at different grades to take year end exams – just not SO many students for so much time for such high stakes at so many grades.
Bear in mind I’m all for opt out – in terms of articulating the limits where parental rights begin and the coercive ability of the instructional program ends, where is that point?
Even if you draw a distinction between standardized testing and teacher assigned tests that give timely feedback, we have had standardized tests for decades that were deemed acceptable and so do many professions as well as both entry and exit points. Which tests are ok to opt out of, and which are not?
Said as someone who is an enthusiastic teacher who is rigidly against the testing regime.
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Congrats to all who exerted pressure. I hope the success spreads to other states.
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Coming soon, we hope, to Illinois–lots of legislators listening to parents, groups. Special thanks to Wendy Katten/Raise Your Hand; Cassie Cresswell/More Than a Score & everyone involved in ChiOptOut & IlPark/PARCC AND State Rep. Will Guzzardi, creator of HB 306!
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Parents must understand that opting out doesn’t hurt their child. Assessment can be done at the local level. However, we must develop a system of assessment and accountability that supports students and the profession of teaching
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Unfortunately, opting out doesn’t work for teachers in Connecticut. All kindergarten through grade 2 teachers in the state have to take a Foundations of Reading “survey” written by, you guessed it, Pearson. Rumors had been swirling about for a while about this “survey”, but there was no substantial information about it until it was too late for us to do anything about it.
We learned that the “survey” would assess us on the knowledge of the teaching of reading. Recent college graduates were exempt. Veteran teachers were concerned that new terminologies for old methods would make it difficult to do their best. We would need our own personal login number to take the “survey” and it would be proctored by our superintendent. How many surveys have you taken under such conditions? Alarmed, we asked the Connecticut Education Association for advice: could we refuse to take what was actually a test, and was a refusal grounds for dismissal? We got no definitive response from the CEA, so we took the test.
After logging on, we were asked to agree to Pearson’s terms and conditions before we could continue with the test. We did not agree with the terms and conditions, but we had to take the test. Got that?
The test had 85 questions and we had two and a half hours to complete it. Many test items were geared to teachers in grades 4-6 and ELL teachers, teachers who did NOT have to take the test. There were questions using deliberately confusing terminology (“polysemy” for “words with multiple meanings”, for example), questions about English cognates for words in other languages (seriously?), and questions asking about the BEST or MOST EFFECTIVE methods for teaching certain skills. These were head-scratchers. Every teacher has an arsenal of strategies up his or her sleeve and considers the strategies with which he or she is most successful AND the learning styles of the student before deciding on a course of action.
It was frustrating, demoralizing, and a complete waste of my time. I am not a better teacher because of it. You can bet, though, that soon you’ll see emblazoned on the front page of the Hartford Courant, “__% of CT’s Teachers Do Not Know How to Teach Reading”.
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L, Is Pearson “monitoring” social media of teachers required to take this test, as they are “monitoring” students in NJ & MD? Can your association rep call to ask CT DoE?
In NJ, DoE is paying a Utah subcontractor for Pearson ~$90K to do so. NJ Assembly Ed Committee is meeting 3-19 re monitoring; DoE & Pearson were invited to send reps.
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That’s a very good question. The CEA has been no help to us, but we do need to ask that question.
Also a correction to my original post: third grade teachers were also required to take the “survey”.
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“There were questions using deliberately confusing terminology (“polysemy” for “words with multiple meanings”, for example), questions about English cognates for words in other languages (seriously?)”
Ah, yes. Reminds me of my special ed students asking me the meaning of words in the directions to tests…and I was not allowed to tell them. As for cognates, it is only because I have been taking Spanish that I have any idea what you are talking about.
I learned the new jargon of the teaching profession as I navigated my first job search(since my 20s) over a decade ago. That knowledge was particularly important when I found out that job applications that did not contain a certain number of high utility terms were thrown out by the computer scanning and never saw human eyes! I s’pose now you have to throw some rigor and grit into your application to get noticed. Don’t get me started on best practices.
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Fortunately as a bilingual person (my second language is not Spanish or Portuguese, however), I also knew the term “cognates” and was able to figure out the meaning of “polysemy” by looking at its components. The purpose of these questions was clear: they were “gotcha!” questions.
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It is absolutely astounding what is happening in education today. It boggles the mind.
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…and just when you think it can’t get any crazier, it somehow does so. I’ve got seven years left, but who’s counting?
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This is another battle won but the war is not over. Will it ever end?
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The Colorado legislature has an Opt-Out bill in draft right now, reported by Chalkbeat Colorado. The language says no penalties to teachers, prinicipals, or districts if parents opt out of the standardized tests.
I thought this would be a good thing, just like what CT has done. But Peg Robertson with the United Opt Out group is against it, and I can’t quite figure out why.
Here is the Chalkbeat article http://co.chalkbeat.org/2015/03/18/opt-out-leader-opposes-bill-that-would-legitimize-parent-refusal-of-state-tests/#.VQnYJaN0yUk
And here is a post on her blog http://www.pegwithpen.com/2015/03/alec-pearson-gates-opt-out-bills-vs.html
Any thoughts on this?
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