Mary Nelson, the mother of a 9-year-old boy with disabilities, wanted to opt her child out of state testing, but the law doesn’t permit opting out.
She wrote a heart-wrenching story about her efforts to get him excused from what she knew would be a painful and humiliating experience for him, but the bureaucracy could say only that there is no opting out, no excuses. They even insisted that they were protecting his “rights” by requiring him to take tests that he could not pass.
She wrote:
I am the mother of a wonderful 9-year-old who has some learning differences. His challenges make school days very hard. He has fetal alcohol syndrome, ADHD, oppositional defiant disorder, anxiety disorder and mood disorder. Quite a list for such a little guy. To say we have had a rough time at school is an understatement.
At my son’s last Individualized Education Program meeting, considerable time was spent discussing how to help him get through the English Language Arts benchmarks and the End of Grade tests.
It was the consensus of his team that the tests were above his ability. Why should he be required to take tests that are above his ability when we already know what the results will be? The answer: “It’s the law.”
As his mother, I have spent all his life trying to protect him and doing what I believed to be best for him. So this did not sit well. I envisioned him having to sit at a desk for three hours at a time, trying to answer questions he doesn’t know the answers to. To me, that is child abuse. State and federal leaders are currently debating how many standardized tests children should be required to take and whether parents should have the choice to opt out of tests they see as harmful to their children. These leaders need to pay closer attention to the experiences of children like my son.
Imagine if your boss told you that you needed to take a three-hour test and that, when you opened it, you discovered it was in Latin. What would you be feeling? Anxiety? Fear? Anger? Embarrassment? Am I going to lose my job? What will my boss think? Was I supposed to know this? If your boss told you not to worry, that it didn’t matter whether you knew the answers, would you believe it? If your performance didn’t matter, why would you be taking the test in the first place?
Now consider this happening to a 9-year-old with emotional issues. How, in good conscience, can I let this happen to my child?….
If you know anything about children with disabilities, you know that you can do things right 100 times and that all it takes is to do it wrong once and it’s like starting over. For what? Why can’t his school be allowed to make a sensible, child-centered decision? Why can’t I do what I know is right for my child? To me, this is just crazy.
Many state legislatures have established official opt-out procedures that recognize the right of parents to make decisions in the best interests of their children. If North Carolina’s legislators care about children like my son and about the rights of parents, they will take similar action.
Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/opinion/op-ed/article19417917.html#/tabPane=tabs-b0710947-1-1#storylink=cpy
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Its child abuse at some level for all the children who take them.
Many of us in the opt out / refusal movement are firm that a parent should be able to refuse the test without giving any reason. Period. We have strongly urged parents in our state to just submit the letter, telling, not asking for permission. Despite pushback, it’s generally worked.
Testing is not good for any child. That way, no one negotiates whether a child can or cannot test.
They may have grounds to file a lawsuit. If that is what it takes to protect their child, they should consider it. Without challenges, states will continue to steamroll over children and their disabilities.
This. There is no way that some law that says that all children have to be tested overrides parental rights. There doesn’t need to be laws saying that parents can opt out – that’s a given. They need to show that there are specific laws against opting out. That’s the way a free country works. If people just keep accepting the idea that the can’t opt out and don’t challenge that in court, we’ve lost our freedom.
Also, what Peter says. Tell, don’t ask.
How about a class action law suit?
The obvious answer here is for parents to instill in their children a clear disrespect for authority. If they felt nothing but contempt for our government and its systems, they wouldn’t even begin to feel anxiety and depression over not being able to do well on the test.
In fact, with just a little effort, the nine year old boy in this example could be “finishing” his assessments in record time, clicking answers without even bothering to read the questions. Who cares? They’re stupid anyway, and by extension so are the people who claim that they matter.
This is basic game theory, folks. And this is where we’re headed.
Amen!
Any form of testing that provides no professionally responsible, developmentally appropriate, educational benefit to the child, that serves only a third party interest, amounts to (1) experimentation on minor human subjects without informed consent of the parents and (2) uncompensated child labor.
There are already laws against (1) and (2) — it remains but to enforce them.
Until parents begin filing child abuse reports this will not come to the attention of anyone other than the individual parent. It is quite easy to file the report.
I also liked werebat73’s response. Many kids do this already. In fact on one test I had to give, one child connected the bubbled-in dots on his answer sheet, extending the resulting line to an insect crawling toward the edge of the page.
Loved it!!
One time when I was giving the state test, a kid asked if it affected his grade. I answered automatically, No. Half the class of “wanna be’s” stopped taking the test. Opting out isn’t new. Some of these kids may be as successful as investment bankers, only as drug dealers, the quickest way to make good cash in their neighborhood.
Note: These tests were essentially valid, reliable, tests and were an appropriate length and grade-level. After a while, however, they became obsolete. You would have had to have read a bunch of out of date novels to answer some of the reading questions.
“I also liked werebat73’s response.”
It wasn’t meant to be positive, though. Do we really WANT our nation’s youth to feel nothing but contempt for our government and its systems (and representatives)?
” These tests were essentially valid, reliable, tests and were an appropriate length and grade-level.”
NO!, They weren’t valid and reliable if they were standardized tests.
To understand why they were COMPLETELY INVALID read and comprehend Noel Wilson’s never refuted nor rebutted treatise: “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine.
1. A description of a quality can only be partially quantified. Quantity is almost always a very small aspect of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category only by a part of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as unidimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). The teaching and learning process falls in the logical realm of aesthetics/qualities of human interactions. In attempting to quantify educational standards and standardized testing the descriptive information about said interactions is inadequate, insufficient and inferior to the point of invalidity and unacceptability.
2. A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction. And this error is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).
3. Wilson identifies four “frames of reference” each with distinct assumptions (epistemological basis) about the assessment process from which the “assessor” views the interactions of the teaching and learning process: the Judge (think college professor who “knows” the students capabilities and grades them accordingly), the General Frame-think standardized testing that claims to have a “scientific” basis, the Specific Frame-think of learning by objective like computer based learning, getting a correct answer before moving on to the next screen, and the Responsive Frame-think of an apprenticeship in a trade or a medical residency program where the learner interacts with the “teacher” with constant feedback. Each category has its own sources of error and more error in the process is caused when the assessor confuses and conflates the categories.
4. Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.”
In other word all the logical errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.
5. The test makers/psychometricians, through all sorts of mathematical machinations attempt to “prove” that these tests (based on standards) are valid-errorless or supposedly at least with minimal error [they aren’t]. Wilson turns the concept of validity on its head and focuses on just how invalid the machinations and the test and results are. He is an advocate for the test taker not the test maker. In doing so he identifies thirteen sources of “error”, any one of which renders the test making/giving/disseminating of results invalid. And a basic logical premise is that once something is shown to be invalid it is just that, invalid, and no amount of “fudging” by the psychometricians/test makers can alleviate that invalidity.
6. Having shown the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, of the whole process Wilson concludes, rightly so, that any result/information gleaned from the process is “vain and illusory”. In other words start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity (except by sheer chance every once in a while, like a blind and anosmic squirrel who finds the occasional acorn, a result may be “true”) or to put in more mundane terms crap in-crap out.
7. And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”
In other words it attempts to measure “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.”
The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?
My answer is NO!!!!!
One final note with Wilson channeling Foucault and his concept of subjectivization:
“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.
Where are the psychologists on this issue?
Where does the American Psychological Association stand?
I read a post here not long ago by a psychologist that questioned the “validity’ and “reliability” of the tests, but if the tests are child abuse, it’s really irrelevant whether they are valid or reliable.
It is probably not intentional, but the focus on validity of the test rather than on whether it is child abuse is reminiscent of the focus on whether torture is “effective” (valid and reliable?) rather than on the fact that it is illegal, cruel and unethical.
The American Psychological Association had no problem with psychologists participating in torture of detainees. I don’t think I’d look to them for relief on this issue.
The psychologists are probably making money helping design these tests.
The child psychology clinic that I founded 5 years ago has been a avid, and vocal advocate against the issues described above, for the last 2.7.
I have personally blog, posted and lectured around the nation calling these practices for what they are:
1. Emotional child abuse
2. Experimentation on children without informed written parental consent.
I appeared on national tv via the Glen Beck Show, written op Ed’s, and given community lectures in multiple states educating parents about the APA ethics we hold so dear to hearts, and alerting parents that public schools have entirely abandoned such.
We have done this despite death threats and threats to our ability to feed our own children.
I even wrote Ms. Ravitch (who is my hero by the way) about this very issue two years ago.
Below is a link to my last public appearance about Common Core testing, APA ethics, and developmental inappropriate practices tied to Common Core given to around 1500 parents in Idaho on October 31, 2014…
…..we recieved some death threats prior to event which resulted in both my wife and I having to have armed escorts prior to, during, and immediately after the event.
The stress of all of this resulted in my wife losing her baby three days before the event via miscarriage.
I’m a Doctor, not a advocate or politician. Despite the challenges, we went through with this lecture and had it professionally taped for one reason:
We love children, and we love and respect our profession and the ethics we abide by on a daily basis. We felt it was our ethical duty to inform the community, as well as the nation, about the literal and actual harms caused by high stakes testing, ignorance of ethics, and inappropriate developmental practice associated with Common Core.
We have never charged a dime for our efforts . Never promoted our clinic. Never wrote a book to cash in on the fear of parents. We did it because it was the right thing to do. Period.
After two years of speaking on this issue as father, African American, and Doctor of Clinical Psychology, we stopped public “advocacy” on these issues after a loss of $250,000.00, a child, our reputation in the community, and our own safety.
The taped, 45 minute Idaho Conference, linked below, was our “swan song” regarding our battle against Common Core. We are now back to being “just” parents of our 4 kids (another one due November!!!), and being Doctors….healing kids in our own community from the damages associated with Common Core.
I hope you, as well as Ms. Ravitch, will take 45 minutes out if your day to view the presentation…the last one we will ever give….and at least KNOW that there ARE psychologists out here in America who love children, as well as the ethical practice of psychology, enough to speak out against this blatent form of child abuse regardless of loss of money and threats to life.
This presentation currently has 1300 views….it should have 1,300,000 views….NOT for self promotion, and NOT because I am a dynamic speaker (I’m not), but because the MESSAGE regarding ethics needs to be sent around the nation.
Best regards ;
Dr. Gary Thompson
Early Life Child Psychology
http://www.earlylifepsych.com
drgary@earlylifepsych.com
May God bless each and every one of you. Thank you Ms. Ravitch for all you have done with your platform to protect the most vulnerable in our nation: our kids.
Let is also note that the largest single recipient of taxpayer largess under NC’s notorious school voucher plan is the Greensboro Islamic Academic. — Edd Doerr (arlinc.org)
Do you have a source/link for that? I’m finding that rather hard to believe in a Bible Belt state like North Carolina.
There is a link in the story.
While serving as a special education liaison in a large urban district, I watched a parent do the following:
1. Under the parent input section of the reevaluation report, include a statement from a psychiatrist about the student being unable to handle the stress of any (yes, any) assessments and thereby needing to be exempted.
2. Insist that the need for exemption be stated under the parent concerns section of the IEP and under program modifications (and anywhere else it would fit).
3. Insist that the NOREP reflect the exemption and refuse to sign it if it doesn’t.
4. State publicly that any attempt to administer a standardized test will result in a due process suit.
She won. Despite this being questionably legal, no one in the district felt like going through a hearing following by a series of appeals. Her kid just didn’t take the test, or any test for that matter.
If a parent of a child with an IEP wants something—almost anything—the matter is often how much legal pressure the parent is willing to exert versus how much a district feels like tying up its legal team over one kid. Case law definitely favors parents in special education disputes. Testing is a hot area in case law right now. I wouldn’t be surprised to see some decisions in the next few years that could lead to a change in the language of the IDEA.
Absolutely, Jeffrey, a due process hearing threat is the way to go. I was a special education teacher for 35 years, & such a threat (actually, at least one parent carried this out) caused such quaking & shaking on the part of administration that the nonsense stopped before it got to that point. Parents–speak up for your children–BUT–for
parents who have difficulty w/this sort of assertion, there are agencies in your area that deal w/this type of advocacy (& for free), or which can refer you (Autism Speaks is a good one; in Chicago, there is an agency called the Family Resource Center on Disabilities {frcd}, located on West Jackson Blvd., downtown). Also–retired teachers can help, as well (we’re not going to get fired!). A group of retirees working together saved their district from their incompetent Broad superintendent by doing their due diligence & exposing her to the school board.
There ARE people out there to help you–do NOT allow your child’s/your rights to be trampled upon!
Please just keep him home. Read him a story or play a game. There is simply no reason to comply with such an ill-thought mandate.
Very sage and wise advice Mr. Delclos.
Yes, but… Not everyone can keep their child home for the 15 or so days of PARCC testing. And if they do, it might be possible that the school could sic the truancy court on them.
There are many parents who depend on the schools for daycare while they work.
Someone like me can take a “pass” just by sending his children to Catholic school (which is what I’m doing next year for my youngest children), but many parents cannot afford that either.
How did the last “gilded age” end? What happened to return our society to a more equitable one? That is what we need to learn or re-learn, and then if possible put into effect.
So true.
I too am able to have my little one in a private school, however my heart breaks for those who do not have that flexibility. I also get angry at folks who seem to not understand the economic realities of parents in other situations that you eloquently pointed out.
“Guilded Age”? This certainly was not the “hope and change” that I voted for….I wanted more choices for a wide variety of kids who live in all socioeconomic situations. I did not predict that “big testing” and corporate interests would end this pipe dream.
I did have so much hope in 2008….
Yep, home school them for the entire testing window. Fill out the necessary paperwork and then enjoy some “free” time with your children. At the end of the testing period, re-enroll them. That way the school can’t do anything to retaliate.
Common core and the assessment tests are abusive to all children and must be stopped. I just don’t understand how just a few people have so much power over our local schools. Parents need to stand up now before they have no rights to their own children. We refused the tests in NY state. Our governor made a statement that the tests are meaningless for the children, so why is he trying to make children take them? Meaningless tests? Stand up now, join a stop common core group.
If a teacher is convicted of child abuse, they will be fired, lose their teaching credential and might go to prison.
If a parent is found guilty of child abuse, the state can take the child away and place that child in a foster home. If a father doesn’t pay child support, he can end up in prison.
What do we do with the government of North Carolina for its abuse of children?
Our clinic of child psychologists have spoken boldly, nationwide, at great loss of safety and reputation, about the ethical abuses associated with high stakes testing, and developmentally inappropriate practices associated with Common Core.
“Above ALL else, do no harm”
https://earlylifepsych.wordpress.com/
It’s definitely a tragic situation. I can see no benefits for anyone.
there is a big benefit to wealthy investors and the politicians whose pockets are lined with the money made from these state sponsored abusive practices.
Yep, Never say that corporate education reform isn’t successful! Pearson’s stock is up 50% from five years ago, McGraw-Hill’s is up a whopping 200%! It’s been very, very successful at doing what is was always intended to do.
This parent is right. I have an 8 year old student who is so similar. He does not need testing next year, but I am not his parent and I am k-2nd so he will probably be in another classroom. If I were the parent, he would stay home on testing days. They have given her no other choices.
Reblogged this on stopcommoncorenys.
They have been technically correct but not honest with her. The procedure in North Carolina is called Refusal. It involves writing a letter to the school’s principal. Please tell her to visit the state’s opt out site.
“Technically correct but not honest” — So, so much of that in education these days. Here in Rhode Island, it has been a trademark of Deborah Gist and her underlings.
As someone who used to administer these tests to children with disabilities, it felt wrong. I worked all year to get students with learning and behavior disabilities to work hard with me. To tackle the subject that was hardest for them with the promise of progress and learning. And then came standardized testing day. It was confusing and undermined my rapport with students. Today- work hard on this test- that both of us know is not at your level. Spend many hours on it. Tomorrow, trust me again to give you work I know you can do if you try your best? I lost so many students at that point. The students knew it just didn’t add up.