A group of high school students in Lake Oswego, Oregon, has launched a campaign to persuade their classmates to refuse the Smarter Balanced tests, which will be given in April and May.
I have always believed that students are the best advocates for change, because they are the victims of the adult obsession with measuring their brains with bubble tests, and they have an additional advantage: they can’t be fired.
Here is the story:
Last week, they mailed letters to the parents of more than 300 LOHS juniors, urging them to opt out and including a link to an opt-out form they’d created.
“It’s not that we want to cause trouble for the school district or the parents or anything,” said Shaheen Safari, a junior and Student Union member. “It’s just what we personally believe in. We’re exercising our democratic right to speak our voice.”
The Student Union evolved from a series of stories on the front page of the March 13 issue of Lake Views, the LOHS student newspaper. The coverage included an opinion piece by all six editors headlined “Everyone, opt out now,” a news story about opt-out efforts across the country and a local story that quoted faculty, administrators and teacher union president Laura Paxson Kluthe…..
“Opting out is a private action, allowing status- and appearance-focused Oswegans to resist in an environment that contemporarily antagonizes political action,” said Daniel Vogel, an LOHS junior and co-editor-in-chief of Lake Views.
Students in grades three through eight and high school juniors are scheduled to take the SBAC tests this spring. The tests involve more in-depth problem solving than previous assessments, and about 30-40 percent of Oregon students are not expected to meet the new standards, according to state Department of Education spokeswoman Crystal Greene…..
A school’s performance rating is linked to its implementation of SBAC, and one of the criteria for a top score is student participation of 94.5 percent. On the five-point rating scale, enough LOHS students have opted out to drop the school from a five to a four. A lower rating affects a school’s image, Greene said, because some people use the rankings when deciding whether they will move to a particular neighborhood.
For LOHS junior Farah Alkayed, that’s not a good enough reason to take the new tests.
“We think it’s more important to create change in our education and educate people about (SBAC) than to be concerned with our school’s ranking,” Alkayed said….
“Opting out is a lot easier than holding rallies or encouraging students to walk out of the tests, and students/parents cannot be punished for opting out,” he said. “That’s not to say we’ve ruled out the possibility of walkouts or rallies. Opting out allows us to gauge support for further actions.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Reblogged this on Exceptional Delaware and commented:
How great would it be if students in Delaware did the same thing! Way to go Lake Oswego, Oregon students!
Uncommonly sophisticated reasoning by the students. Their teachers and parents and peers have done something right.
This is your opportunity to make a difference. Keep up the good work of protesting the tests and the survellience systems those tests require. The tests and the results have been marketed as if your future depends on taking them. Do not believe the hype.
That high school students would feel the need to “lead’ the opt out campaign tells you just how screwed up the situation is.
It indicates a massive failure by the adults.
In school districts where reformers pack the school boards and those reformers have hired shills to lead the district as fake public school administrators, the students will be threatened, pressured, and possibly punished in some way to break them so they comply with the agenda of corporate education reform as defined by Bill Gates and the Walton family.
Lake Oswego students: Kudos! Contact Newark Students Union (NJ) for inspiration. I think 140/170 freshmen at Science Park HS (magnet for high achievers) opted out of PARCC in March.
This is significant since Lake Oswego is among the wealthiest school districts in Oregon. I would guess that many of the students in this district have benefited from many things that would contribute to higher scores than other, less financially stable areas of the state. As an Oregon resident, I can only hope they can lead the way for other districts–maybe even the one I teach in.
Your percentage is backwards…..30% of students ARE expected to pass the test. This articles says 30-40% are not expected to pass. Completely different!!!!!!! And that’s English speaking students who are not receiving any sort of special education. Only 3% (THREE!!!!) of students who are not native English speakers are expected to pass. Similarly with students in special education. This is another huge reason that students all over the state are boycotting the test.
How does opting out work? Did it just now become a big thing? I’m only a junior in college and when I was testing a few years ago it was never communicated to me that I could opt out of testing