Steve Nelson wrote a powerful case for opting out from state testing.
“”Opt-out” may be the most important political movement of this generation. It may seem, at first glance, a small ripple in the education reform debate — an understandable reaction to the frustration over increased testing and test-prep in America’s schools. I suggest that it is much more important than meets the eye.
That “first glance” is important in its own right. There is no reasonable argument in support of the tedious, stressful mess that education reform has made of the nation’s schools. Even within its own circular, self-fulfilling paradigm, the testing and accountability era has been a dismal failure. Test scores are essentially meaningless as a measure of real learning, but even by this empty standard, no progress is evident. For this analysis, let us just stipulate that it has not even achieved the limited objectives on which policy is predicated.
The broader issue is hidden within plain sight: This growing struggle over the future of American education may be proxy for the future of our democratic republic.
Most folks who follow education policy debates are familiar with the players and high stakes. Dozens of AstroTurf organizations are funded by the same Daddies Warbucks: Bill and Melinda Gates, Eli Broad, the Walton Family Foundation. The incestuous network they’ve created, aided and abetted by the Brothers Koch and the publishing cartel, Pearson, ETS, McGraw Hill, are engaged in a hostile takeover of the entire education enterprise in America.
The Common Core and its primary architect, David Coleman, are parts of a well-oiled, cradle-to-grave machine. It has been going on for years, beginning when George W. Bush was Governor of Texas and helped the industry-led Phonics First movement begin the insidious commercialization of education. Many others, especially “Mercedes Schneider in her wonderful book, A Chronicle of Echoes: Who’s Who in the Implosion of American Public Education,” have exposed this process in alarming detail.
Fed up by the dreadful experiences their children are having in school, parents and teachers are beginning to resist. In New Jersey, Illinois and New York, for example, the opt-out movement is gaining strength. A national organization called United Opt Out is working tirelessly to unite the many strands of this genuine grassroots effort.
Many of these parents may not be aware of the broader importance of this nascent national movement. They are just standing up for the well-being of their children. It is this simple, yet powerful, impulse that is at the root of every critical political movement in our history. Institutionalized social injustice is, at its core, the aggregate impact of highly personal injury. And millions of American children are indeed being injured in the stark, punitive, increasingly barren wake of so-called education reform.
The stakes are high already, but this battle is going to dramatically escalate. Mark my word. Every incremental growth in the opt-out movement is going to draw increasingly severe response. This is not even about education any more. It is about money. There is no reliable estimate of the overall investment in testing, the Common Core, and the various sub-industries education reform has spawned. As frequently noted, pre-secondary education is at least a $500 billion market and the capital invested to date will not be squandered without a fight. Hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars are in the pot, and these folks don’t like losing…..
“If enough parents are willing to join the movement, keep their children home on test days, ignore the threats, the battle lines will be clear. School officials, local school boards, state legislators and members of Congress will be faced with a real school choice: Whose side are you on? America’s children and families or a shadow government of plutocrats, investment bankers and publishing companies?
“Opt-out! Even if your child likes tests, keep her home. Like every other powerful movement in American history, this one requires a snowstorm of small acts of defiance. Which side of history will you be on?”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Yes, Opt-Out is the most powerful tool available. Principals, teachers and all school personnel are caught in the chain of command. As employees they must follow the boss’ orders. But parents are not in that chain of command, or if we are, we are at the top of it. My middle school daughter in MA did not take the first round of PARCC this year, nor will she take the next round.
What information could the PARCC tests possibly glean from 30 school day span between tests. Good for you!
This NYC family is opting out!
NY Parent: I admire what you are doing, but am wondering how you will handle middle school/high school admissions.
Does anyone know if there is any talk about removing or deemphasizing the state tests in the NYC admissions process?
No one I know is opting out due to this massive constraint.
Some parts of the city (outside of Manhattan and brownstone Brooklyn) have zoned middle schools and there are some zoned high schools, If you live in Staten Island, parts of Queens, parts of the Bronx, you are guaranteed admission to certain middle and high schools if you live in the zone.
Check the middle and high schools you are interested in to see what their criteria are. For middle school, the city wide G&Ts generally have their own test and do not rely on state ELA and math test scores, nor do the NYC Specialized high schools.
A law passed last year said that the State grade 3-8 ELA and math test scores could not be the primary factor used in school admission, so schools have re-done their admissions criteria to reduce or eliminate the weight accorded state test scores. They have also had to put in place admissions criteria for kids who don’t take the test, because if their formula means that kids who don’t take the test don’t get admitted, then that is an illegal admissions criteria where the test score is the primary factor in admission.
This is true even in “choice” districts (where the “choice” was really in the hands of middle schools and high schools, where the most desired schools could pick the students, based on test scores (largely aligned with family income and corresponding with easiest to teach). Instead of being parent-empowering and letting parents vote with their feet, it left us parents as servile supplicants, looking to please the current school to get good recommendations and making sure our kids circled in those A, B C choices appropriately, instead of empowered, engaged school parents demanding real education instead of hours of test prep (including all that reading and math homework that seemed more designed to familarize kids with the weird language and grading criteria specific to the NYS tests than designed to teach kids anything.).
The Brooklyn New School parents group recently polled middle schools in their districts, Districts 13 and 15, and learned that they mostly seemed to have alternate admissions criteria for kids who don’t take the test and were much more likely to look at grades than the test.
That said, even when schools did look at scores in the past, middle schools seemed to only look at 4th grade test scores, and high schools only looked at 7th grade scores. Why take the test any other years, even if you are worried about middle school and high school admissions? Your kids don’t need to be subjected to the tests for 6 other years to give them “practice.” Believe me, they will get plenty of test prep every year until these tests are gone.
Since the deformers don’t want to hear our voices or let real educators, research or even truth play a role, let them hear our stats for opting out all of the coverage it merits and means. These stats mean the deformers’ policies are a failure, and have been for years and years. What’s worse, it appears to be a failure steeped in hypocrisy, arrogance, elitism, malice, avarice and corruption.
Steve Nelson’s case is strong, but isn’t it unseemly for the head of an expensive, elitist Manhattan private school head to be arguing, fundamentally, against the government’s funding his competition? He’s hardly a poster boy for democratic public education.
That’s not what he is fundamentally arguing.
Opting out across the US:
http://mobile.wnd.com/2015/04/americans-opting-out-of-common-core-tests-in-droves/
I dispute “This is not even about education any more. It is about money.” It never was about education. It was always about money.
A small group of billionaires have been gunning for control of our school funding since the release of the report “A Nation at Risk” AND control of our minds. It’s very sickening. We write about it in detail in our easy to read and very well researched book- Weapons of Mass Deception- http://weaponsofmassdeception.org/
So glad to see this concise, cogent, spot-on analysis!!! Every aspect of this agrees with everything I’ve come to understand in the past several years. It brings together the work of so many great educators and scholars and places their work in the larger political context. And it explains why the growth of popular outrage hasn’t been followed by a change of course, but rather by doubling down on high-stakes testing. The only explanation is this never was about education, but only and always about power and money.
It is time for citizens of all political persuasions who share the desire to live in a democratic society to join together and reassert our right to direct the education of our children. It won’t happen without a major fight, but we will win.
“If I were asked to name the most needed of all reforms in the spirit of education I should say: ‘Cease conceiving of education as mere preparation for later life, and make of it the full meaning of the present life.’”
—John Dewey
Why are we still arguing about things from the early 1900’s? Dewy knew what we still no and we still keep advocating for the same things.
He said,”However, the impulsion for educational reform does not come in the first place from any abstract recognition of the deprivations suffered by the young. It arises from reactions to widespread changes in the conditions of life which affect all age groups. Their new situation forces both parents and children to seek new ways of satisfying the new demands thrust upon them. The child brought up in a tenement or an apartment in crowded city streets has different needs and faces more complex and perplexing problems than the child on a family farm. The families who have migrated from Puerto Rico to Manhattan since the end of the Second World War can testify to this.
The problems of readjustment differ somewhat according to the child’s social status. The class structure quickly impresses its stamp upon the plastic personality, conditioning and regulating the relations between the sexes, the rich and the poor, the upper, middle and lower classes. This determines both the characteristics of the educational system and of the children tutored and trained under it.”
Dewey talks about the failure to keep the hands-on practical learning experiences that helped children make meaning of learning in the Urban schools a downfall.
He said, “In The School and Society Dewey pointed out how haphazardly the existing school organization had grown up. It was composed of oddly assorted and poorly fitting parts, fashioned in different centuries and designed to serve different needs and even conflicting social interests.”
It is very hard to serve one master, let alone the NYCDOE, The Board of Regents, The Governor and the Federal Government all at the same time.
Dewey knew that in order for the children to be ready for the common core they had to mature first. He wrote, “He therefore urged that manual training, science, nature-study, art and similar subjects be given precedence over reading, writing and arithmetic (the traditional three R’s) in the primary curriculum. The problems raised by the exercise of the child’s motor powers in constructive work would lead naturally, he said, into learning the more abstract, intellectual branches of knowledge.”
We know the right way for our children to learn, why do we let others tell us our jobs? Why did we spend years and years of collegial studying mounting up huge school loans if our professional knowledge and expertise is going to be thrown out the window because of Tisch, Gates. Pearson and the rest of the crew? What is the point if we do not follow the teachers we were made to study in college? Until people are ready to fight this warped agenda and put a face to their voice, its all just chatter and nothing more.
“Rooting out Democracy”
Public education
Democracy in action
Demands eradication
By oligarchic faction
I’m a fan!