Very few parents are expected to opt out in Houston. The culture of testing is so deeply ingrained that few question why their children are subjected to weeks of preparation for bubble tests and for a school year dominated by the tests. Parents and children are afraid of hurting their teacher if they don’t take the tests.

The article goes into depth about the docility created by that culture in a state that claims a strong streak of individualism. Frankly it sounds like the education system creates sheep, not people capable of thinking for themselves.

Read this terrible story:

“A TEACHER at a Montrose elementary school is refusing to administer the test for the same reasons.

”Before moving to Houston I taught in a private school,” says the teacher, who asked that both she and her school not be named. When she first arrived in Houston, she says, she taught at an HISD school outside Montrose, and was horrified by her first glimpse of test culture.

“It was not teaching, it was not learning,” she says. “It created an abusive environment for everyone: children, teachers, administration.” She moved to her current teaching position in Montrose with the idea of eventually starting her own school, and was delighted by the humane environment she found. Until, that is, this February, when she had to administer the DLA, a STAAR length practice test required by the district.

”You have to understand: the school shuts down,” the teacher says. ”There is no teaching. There is no learning. I had to sit there and force fourth grade kids to take four-hour long tests, and do it the next day and the next day, and act to them like it was a totally normal thing. It made me feel like a hypocrite. I was implying to the kids that this is something I believe in.”

“Worse, she says, even when the testing is done a corrosive effect on learning continues.

“Once the testing was over last year, I thought, I’ll actually be able to teach my kids something,” the teacher remembers. “I passed out a story, we read it as a class, and the next day I passed out a quiz. One of my students raised her hand and said, ‘I don’t get it – isn’t there multiple choice?’ She didn’t know what to do when it wasn’t multiple choice and the answers weren’t provided. I don’t feel that my kids understood what learning was.”

“The teacher has decided to leave HISD at the end of this school year. But first, she told her principal, she was going to protest.

”All I will say is that my principal was as understanding as he or she could possibly be,” the teacher says. Instead of administering the exam, the teacher will take personal days during the testing period, offering volunteer enrichment education for students who are opting out.

“Like many parents, though, the teacher broods about the wellbeing of her colleagues. “Unfortunately I can’t make as public a statement as I want to,” she says. “Test culture is a culture of fear. Everybody is terrified. Nobody knows what the consequences of their actions are going to be.”