A reader posted this comment, in response to the story about Vietnamese students getting higher scores on PISA tests of math and science than U.S. students;
“According to the United Nations Statistics, only 77% of Vietnamese students are enrolled in secondary school, which means that the bottom 23% of test scores are eliminated for the Vietnamese case because those students are not in school to take the tests. (http://www.indexmundi.com/facts/indicators/SE.SEC.ENRR)
“I taught in China in the late 1990’s and have since taught hundreds of Chinese nationals in the US. My Chinese students who come here to study have explained to me multiple times that a large percentage of Chinese students don’t make it into an academic high school and therefore never study for these tests. By the way, the students come here to escape their test-driven system.
“When I started teaching high school in the US in the late 1990’s I was struck by how willing my American students were to take risks, experiment, and involve themselves in class discussions. They were intellectual risk-takers compared to the college students I had in China, who I could barely get to speak because of their fear of being wrong and their lack of experience with class discussion. (this is not a cultural observation – it is an institutional one)
“My college students in the US now, all products of the NCLB era, are more similar to my students in China. They are completely grade-focused, fail to see the bigger picture in the issues we are studying, and lack creativity or initiative. Every time I think we have just had a meaningful discussion about something important, one will pipe up and say, “how are you going to grade this?”
“I am tired of data and people’s unfailing belief that it there is a number attached to something, that means it is true. I have a master’s degree in Economics and was basically taught how to “massage the data,” which basically means make it say whatever your grant needs it say.
“I just watched a teacher spend 5 minutes yelling at a third grader about how to spell the word orange. Her face was red with anger and she was shouting, “is that the sound it makes?” No doubt this teacher was thinking of the student’s ability to make the grade on her upcoming exam and how the teacher might lose her job if she was rated ineffective.
“We have gone mad and our children are paying the price.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I hope you will read the following op-ed piece that questions the link between PISA scores and America’s economic standing in the world. The op-ed also cites Vietnam’s PISA scores. Jonathan Pelto has posted the op-ed on his blog.
http://ctmirror.org/2015/01/19/op-ed-wheres-the-praise-for-connecticuts-public-education/
Thank-you for voicing the same observations I am making at the high school level. In my high level classes, students are more focused on grades than the actual learning experience. Recently we were asked to submit names of students for end of year science awards. One of the students I chose is nowhere near the highest average. I chose him because he hangs on every word and asks great questions. He thinks outside the box and takes discussions to many interesting places. The other students don’t realize how much more they have learned because of him.
I agree-we have gone mad and the children are paying the price!
Ellie Brand
Exactly…we are a nation of inventors, creators, artists, actors…heck we invented hollywood and the movie making machine it is today, rock and roll..none of this happened because we were good at competing or taking a test. It happened because we came from a background or risk takers, our ancestors left their homelands (imagine doing that now) and moved to a completely new country to invent new lives for themselves. We welcome(d?) the new, the different, the unknown…why are we now trying to make everyone the same? How will that help us? We need to continue to take risks, take chances, create, and accept the differences we flourish with if our country is to succeed at all. After all, that is who we really are.
Here is a familiar comment that I hear from educators, “Our students are no longer willing to take risks.” This is evident in class discussions. Previously when a question was asked almost everyone in the class raised their hand to answer because all answers were and are acceptable not just the correct answer. In the era of test and punishment when a question is asked rarely does anyone raise their hand. We can only suspect that they are afraid of contributing the wrong answer. It is so obvious and depressing to the seasoned educators. Even my six year old grandson expressed that his hand shakes when he writes. I asked him why he thought his hand was shaking. He said, “because I am afraid I will get the wrong answer.”
Yes,“We have gone mad and our children are paying the price.”
It’s a dramatic way of describing the situation but it isn’t actually true. We Duh Peeps are just as sane on the average as we’ve always been.
What is happening today is that we are being forced by largely alien-to-democracy forces from a Jeffersonian democracy to a Hamiltonian plutocracy. We had this tension way back at the founding and a compromise was constituted, one that worked more or less well until relatively recently.
But there is a difference in the dynamics of then and now. In those days the power of wealth was limited by how much land one person could own — it was a One Field One Vote (OFOV) system. There were bounds — literally boundaries — on how much the power of landed wealth could overwhelm the power of the popular vote in the One Person One Vote (OPOV) system.
In the Global Oligarchic Plutocrazy of our times that lid has been utterly blown off and we may already be past the tipping point where democracy might have been saved.
Take 100% and remove the lowest 23%, though that assumption is probably not true for various reasons. Give the remaining 77% a shake to form a “normal distribution” / bell-shaped curve and it should come as no surprise that the mean / median for this sample might be higher than that of one that had no such modification.
But it is:
“We have gone mad and our children are paying the price.”
that is the more important point. Why are we so willing to sacrifice our children’s childhoods for the illusion of looking better, whether to ourselves or to the rest of the world?
My middle school just completed a month of PSSA (Pennsylvaia standardized tests in Language Arts, Math and Science), Keystone Algebra Tests (more standardized tests) and GRADE standardized tests in reading and listening comprehension (third time this year). The instructional time lost is off the charts, not just from the time devoted to testing, but also the fallout: student and teacher stress, schedule disruptions, lost prep time, etc. I teach 7th grade social studies to kids clearly deprived of any geography, history or civics foundation in their elementary schools due in part to the misguided emphasis on testing and the so-called college and career ready agenda of Obama, et al.
A few days into the testing, one of my kids asked me if there was a History PSSA they had to take. I said no. The response was, “then why do we have to learn it”. I gave my standard answer: it is exciting, fun, interesting, explains our present day world, etc. But I fear I am fighting a losing battle for the hearts and minds.
The emphasis on testing is corrupting the minds of young people in ways more damaging than anyone would have envisioned. The unintended, negative consequences of the testing madness is irreparable. We are losing an entire generation thanks to the “hard idolatry of test score expectations”.
GST your post is probably striking a chord with countless teachers in the trenches experiencing the same reaction from kids that have been lobotomized by the NCLB and RTTT test-and punish federal agenda.
“We have gone mad and our children are paying the price.”
Whada ya mean “we”, Kemosabe?
SomeDAM Poet: as I remember it, this was a Lenny Bruce joke…
The Lone Ranger and Tonto are riding along when suddenly they see Indians in front of them. The turn to the left. Indians in front of them. The go back the other way. Indians in front of them. They decide to retrace their original trail. Indians in front of them.
Long Ranger: “Well, Tonto, looks like we’re finished.”
Tonto: “What do you mean WE, white man?”
There are raunchier versions online.
😎
“Lone Ranger” not “Long Ranger.”
😎
Maybe you were thinking of the raunchy version. 🙂
As I see it…
Standardized test-driven education? It’s been tried for well over a millennium. It promotes the opposite of creativity, innovation, social mobility, and equity. Yong Zhao, WHO’S AFRAID OF THE BIG BAD DRAGON: WHY CHINA HAS THE BEST (AND WORST) EDUCATION SYSTEM IN THE WORLD (2014).
Won’t the standardized tests get better? There have been promises of fixing, tweaking, improving and finally delivering for more than half a century (and those promises predate the following book). Banesh Hoffman, THE TYRANNY OF TESTING (1962, latest iteration 2003).
Isn’t it fair to say that standardized testing is good good good but the implementation is bad bad bad? Ok, even if so, just how bad is bad? Todd Farley, MAKING THE GRADES: MY MISADVENTURES IN THE STANDARDIZED TESTING INDUSTRY (2009).
Standardized test-driven education is good? An inconvenient question: good for whom? Bill Gates, the de facto Secretary of Education for the USA, went (and sends his own children) to Lakeside School. Go to the Lakeside School website. Then read the Gates speech of September 23, 2005, to his alma mater on what a good education feels and looks like. Nothing like the testocratic monstrosity he and other self-proclaimed “education reformers” are imposing on OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN and parents and their public schools and their associated communities.
But don’t the self-styled “education reformers” have hearts of gold? Can’t they self-correct? This blog, 3-23-2014, “Common Core for Commoners, Not My School!” They are shamelessly and openly committed to double think, double talk, double standards.
Isn’t the real problem with standardized tests and the use of same the lack of willingness to engage in dialogue? A one-book answer: Anthony Cody, THE EDUCATOR AND THE OLIGARCH (2014). And to emphasize the rheephorm version of dialogue and listening, google “Peter Cunningham” and “monitor” and “Diane Ravitch” and read the linked online pieces, e.g., Anthony Cody’s comments on what it means to be monitored by the rheephormsters (to prepare a counterattack) and how different that is from actually engaging in honest and heartfelt discussion with others.
Opt out of standardized testing.
Opt in to genuine teaching and learning.
The vomit bag industry will suffer, but time to remind (however inconvenient it may be) the rheephormistas of their own bedrock Marxist principles:
“This isn’t a particularly novel observation, but the world is full of people who think they can manipulate the lives of others merely by getting a law passed.”
And Groucho is right on this one.
😎
Andrew Vachss described the nature of emotional abuse in a Parade Magazine article twenty years before we had current research that shows how childhood emotional abuse leads to personality disorders. This is worth reading and sharing with our leaders who have “mind blindness” to the emotional abuse school children are suffering:
You Carry the Cure In Your Own Heart
Emotional abuse of children can lead, in adulthood, to addiction, rage, a severely damaged sense of self and an inability to truly bond with others. But—if it happened to you—there is a way out. by Andrew Vachss
Originally published in Parade Magazine, August 28, 1994
The attorney and author Andrew Vachss has devoted his life to protecting children. We asked Vachss, an expert on the subject of child abuse, to examine perhaps one of its most complex and widespread forms—emotional abuse: What it is, what it does to children, what can be done about it. Vachss’ latest novel, “Down in the Zero,” just published by Knopf, depicts emotional abuse at its most monstrous.
I’m a lawyer with an unusual specialty. My clients are all children—damaged, hurting children who have been sexually assaulted, physically abused, starved, ignored, abandoned and every other lousy thing one human can do to another. People who
know what I do always ask: “What is the worst case you ever handled?”
When you’re in a business where a baby who dies early may be the luckiest
child in the family, there’s no easy answer. But I have thought about it—I think
about it every day. My answer is that, of all the many forms of child abuse, emotional abuse may be the cruelest and longest– lasting of all. Emotional abuse is the systematic diminishment of another. It may be intentional or subconscious (or both), but it is always a course of conduct, not a single event. It is designed to reduce a child’s self–concept to the point where the victim
considers himself unworthy—unworthy of respect, unworthy of friendship, unworthy of the natural birthright of all children: love and protection.
Emotional abuse can be as deliberate as a gunshot: “You’re fat. You’re stupid. You’re ugly.”
Emotional abuse can be as random as the fallout from a nuclear explosion. In matrimonial battles, for example, the children all too often become the battlefield. I remember a young boy, barely into his teens, absently rubbing the fresh scars on his wrists. “It was the only way to make them all happy,” he said. His mother and father were locked in a bitter divorce battle, and each was demanding total loyalty and commitment from the child.
Emotional abuse can be active. Vicious belittling: “You’ll never be the success your brother was.” Deliberate humiliation: “You’re so stupid. I’m ashamed you’re my son.”
It also can be passive, the emotional equivalent of child neglect—a sin of omission, true, but one no less destructive.
And it may be a combination of the two, which increases the negative effects geometrically. Emotional abuse can be verbal or behavioral, active or passive, frequent or occasional. Regardless, it is often as painful as physical assault. And, with rare exceptions, the pain lasts much longer. A parent’s love is so important to a child that withholding it can cause a “failure to thrive” condition similar to that of children who have been denied adequate nutrition.
Even the natural solace of siblings is denied to those victims of emotional abuse who have been designated as the family’s “target child.” The other children are quick to imitate their parents. Instead of learning the qualities every child will need as an adult—empathy, nurturing and protectiveness—they learn the viciousness of a pecking order. And so the cycle continues.
But whether as a deliberate target or an innocent bystander, the emotionally abused child inevitably struggles to “explain” the conduct of his abusers—and ends up struggling for survival in a quicksand of self–blame.
Emotional abuse is both the most pervasive and the least understood form of child maltreatment. Its victims are often dismissed simply because their wounds are not visible. In an era in which fresh disclosures of unspeakable child abuse are everyday fare, the pain and torment of those who experience “only” emotional abuse is often trivialized. We understand and accept that victims of physical or sexual abuse need both time and specialized treatment to heal. But when it comes to emotional abuse, we are more likely to believe the victims will “just get over it” when they become adults.
That assumption is dangerously wrong. Emotional abuse scars the heart and damages the soul. Like cancer, it does its most deadly work internally. And, like cancer, it can metastasize if untreated.
When it comes to damage, there is no real difference between physical, sexual and emotional abuse. All that distinguishes one from the other is the abuser’s choice of weapons. I remember a woman, a grandmother whose abusers had long since died, telling me that time had not conquered her pain. “It wasn’t just the incest,” she
said quietly. “It was that he didn’t love me. If he loved me, he couldn’t have done that to me.”
But emotional abuse is unique because it is designed to make the victim feel guilty. Emotional abuse is repetitive and eventually cumulative behavior—very easy to imitate—and some victims later perpetuate the cycle with their own children. Although most victims courageously reject that response, their lives often are marked by a deep, pervasive sadness, a severely damaged self-concept and an inability to truly engage and bond with others.
Emotionally abused children grow up with significantly altered perceptions so that they “see” behaviors—their own and others’—through a filter of distortion. Many emotionally abused children engage in a lifelong drive for the approval (which they translate as “love”) of others. So eager are they for love—and so convinced that they don’t deserve it—that they are prime candidates for abuse within intimate relationships.
The emotionally abused child can be heard inside every battered woman who insists: “It was my fault, really. I just seem to provoke him somehow.”
And the almost–inevitable failure of adult relationships reinforces that sense of unworthiness, compounding the felony, reverberating throughout the victim’s life.
Emotional abuse conditions the child to expect abuse in later life. Emotional abuse is a time bomb, but its effects are rarely visible, because the emotionally abused tend to implode, turning the anger against themselves. And when someone is outwardly successful in most areas of life, who looks within to see the hidden wounds?
We must renounce the lie that emotional abuse is good for children because it prepares them for a hard life in a tough world. I’ve met some individuals who were prepared for a hard life that way—I met them

Members of a therapy group may range widely in age, social class, ethnicity and occupation, but all display some form of self–destructive conduct: obesity, drug
addiction, anorexia, bulimia, domestic violence, child abuse, attempted suicide, self–mutilation, depression and fits of rage. What brought them into treatment was their
symptoms. But until they address the one thing that they have in common—a childhood of emotional abuse—true recovery is impossible.
One of the goals of any child–protective effort is to “break the cycle” of abuse. We should not delude ourselves that we are winning this battle simply because so few victims of emotional abuse become abusers themselves. Some emotionally abused children are programmed to fail so effectively that a part of their own personality “self-parents” by belittling and humiliating themselves.
The pain does not stop with adulthood. Indeed, for some, it worsens. I remember a young woman, an accomplished professional, charming and friendly, well–liked by all who knew her. She told me she would never have children. “I’d always be afraid I would act like them,” she said.
Unlike other forms of child abuse, emotional abuse is rarely denied by those who practice it. In fact, many actively defend their psychological brutality, asserting that a childhood of emotional abuse helped their children to “toughen up.” It is not enough for us to renounce the perverted notion that beating children produces good citizens—we must also renounce the lie that emotional abuse is good for children because it prepares them for a hard life in a tough world. I’ve met some individuals who were prepared for a hard life that way—I met them while they were doing life.
The primary weapons of emotional abusers is the deliberate infliction of guilt. They use guilt the same way a loan shark uses money: They don’t want the “debt” paid off, because they live quite happily on the “interest.”while they were doing life.
Because emotional abuse comes in so many forms (and so many disguises), recognition is the key to effective response. For example, when allegations of child sexual abuse surface, it is a particularly hideous form of emotional abuse to pressure the victim to recant, saying he or she is “hurting the family” by telling the truth. And precisely the same holds true when a child is pressured to sustain a lie by a “loving” parent.
Emotional abuse requires no physical conduct whatsoever. In one extraordinary case, a jury in Florida recognized the lethal potential of emotional abuse by finding a mother guilty of child abuse in connection with the suicide of her 17–year–old daughter, whom she had forced to work as a nude dancer (and had lived off her earnings).
Another rarely understood form of emotional abuse makes victims responsible for their own abuse by demanding that they “understand” the perpetrator. Telling a 12–year–old girl that she was an —enabler— of her own incest is emotional abuse at its most repulsive.
A particularly pernicious myth is that “healing requires forgiveness” of the abuser. For the victim of emotional abuse, the most viable form of help is self–help—and a victim handicapped by the need to “forgive” the abuser is a handicapped helper indeed. The most damaging mistake an emotional–abuse victim can make is to invest in the “rehabilitation” of the abuser. Too often this becomes still another wish that didn’t come true—and emotionally abused children will conclude that they deserve no better result.
The costs of emotional abuse cannot be measured by visible scars, but each victim loses some percentage of capacity. And that capacity remains lost so long as the victim is stuck in the cycle of “understanding” and “forgiveness.” The abuser has no “right” to forgiveness—such blessings can only be earned. And although the damage was done with words, true forgiveness can only be earned with deeds.
For those with an idealized notion of “family,” the task of refusing to accept the blame for their own victimization is even more difficult. For such searchers, the key to freedom is always truth—the real truth, not the distorted, self–serving version served by the abuser.
Emotional abuse threatens to become a national illness. The popularity of nasty, mean–spirited, personal–attack cruelty that passes for “entertainment” is but one example. If society is in the midst of moral and spiritual erosion, a “family” bedrocked on the emotional abuse of its children will not hold the line. And the tide shows no immediate signs of turning.
Effective treatment of emotional abusers depends on the motivation for the original conduct, insight into the roots of such conduct and the genuine desire to alter that conduct. For some abusers, seeing what they are doing to their child— or, better yet, feeling what they forced their child to feel—is enough to make them halt. Other abusers need help with strategies to deal with their own stress so that it doesn’t overload onto their children. But for some emotional abusers, rehabilitation is not possible. For such people, manipulation is a way of life. They coldly and deliberately set up a “family” system in which the child can never manage to “earn” the parent’s love. In such situations, any emphasis on “healing the whole family” is doomed to failure.
If you are a victim of emotional abuse, there can be no self–help until you learn to self–reference. That means developing your own standards, deciding for yourself what “goodness” really is. Adopting the abuser’s calculated labels—”You’re crazy. You’re ungrateful. It didn’t happen the way you say”—only continues the cycle.
Adult survivors of emotional child abuse have only two life–choices: learn to self–reference or remain a victim. When your self–concept has been shredded, when you have been deeply injured and made to feel the injury was all your fault, when you look for approval to those who can not or will not provide it—you play the role assigned to you by your abusers. It’s time to stop playing that role, time to write your own script. Victims of emotional abuse carry the cure in their own hearts and souls. Salvation means learning self–respect, earning the respect of others and making that respect the absolutely irreducible minimum requirement for all intimate relationships. For the emotionally abused child, healing does come down to “forgiveness”—forgiveness of yourself.
How you forgive yourself is as individual as you are. But knowing you deserve to be loved and respected and empowering yourself with a commitment to try is more than half the battle. Much more. And it is never too soon—or too late—to start.
© 1994 Andrew Vachss. All rights reserved.
Thank you for posting this.
What happens in today’s media is worse than “massaging data.” No one seems to fact check. Everyone is motivated to get the word out first, and accuracy is a low priority. We all know data can be misleading from the first superficial glance. Often the data must be analyzed further and disaggregated. Sometimes the data is so misleading, or based on the wrong assumptions (like VAM), it is comparing apples to oranges. Data should be considered with a critical perspective.
retired teacher: I agree.
In personal conversations I often put it another way: there is a profound lack of thoughtfulness. And as I see it, this implies taking one’s time and being patient.
IMHO, thoughtlessness is a hallmark feature of the heavyweights and trendsetters of the self-styled “education reform” movement: frenetic unceasing motion, the quicker the better and damn the cost—as the old saw goes “fast and dirty and cheap”—is almost always the first and most preferred option.
The exceptions? When whatever is being done personally affects the leaders and enablers of the so-called “new civil rights movement of our time.”
Then time and effort and patience and civility are demanded—and when not delivered to their complete satisfaction then their outrage, shrill and strident, is put prominently on pubic display in the MSM.
Part of this is quite neatly and expertly summed up by the NJ Commissioner of Education: “Whatever we’re doing, we need to double down.”
Link: https://dianeravitch.net/2015/03/04/lyndsey-layton-governor-christie-fails-in-newark/
Doubling down on whatevers. In less elegant terms: push even harder in the mad dog pursuit of $tudent $ucce$$ at the expense of OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN.
Just my dos centavitos worth…
😎
I agree. In my school district, we used to have a curriculum cycle. Any new program we spent a year studying, a year writing curricula and purchasing, and a year evaluating and making changes. While it wasn’t a perfect process, it was a thoughtful one. Now the Feds and states make “knee jerk” sweeping changes that are NOT evidence based to satisfy various monied and political factions. It is like policy on crack cocaine, or in this case, billionaire bucks.
“My college students in the US now, all products of the NCLB era, are more similar to my students in China. They are completely grade-focused, fail to see the bigger picture in the issues we are studying, and lack creativity or initiative. Every time I think we have just had a meaningful discussion about something important, one will pipe up and say, “how are you going to grade this?”
Unfortunately, these questions are not only the result of our K-12 focus, but the focus in college, as well. What I have observed with my children is that college has become a place of preparation for the next stage of graduate school, just as K-12 is preparation for college and career readiness. At times, when my child asked to take a challenging course to learn more, he was discouraged from doing so. I wonder about the idea of savoring the moment and learning for its own sake/pleasure. It may be a question for us all, what is the purpose of education? What do we want it to be?
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Texas Education.
Dear Diane,
I have followed your blogs daily since reading Reign of Error in November 2013. I have never responded as I am today.
You have said so well in the blog titled “We Have Gone Mad, and Our Children Are Paying the Price” is what I have witnessed over my 33 years of teaching in WA State. As a Special Education Teacher in an elementary resource room with K-5 students I feel that I am an outsider in the teaching field. I have a different perspective than most educators as I have watched the testing mania take over our school calendar and curriculum.
Teachers in the general education classrooms at our school have tried to keep a balance between educating children to become lifelong learners and to love learning and following the purchased curriculum. Some grade levels still balk at using the purchased curriculum. Good for them and their students! I see my peers in the general education classrooms making time to include novels, field trips, music and physical activity. But the calendar has been shortened to prepare for tests and to be tested. As more experienced teachers are replaced by new graduates who grew up on testing or have earned a master’s degree or National Board Certificates recently have been sipping the tea which makes one think that data is all that is relevant.
I am saddened by this turn of events as I look at my grandchildren and wonder what kind of an education they will receive as they enter public schools. Personally, I feel like an outsider because I teach the children who are not served well by the lock step method of instruction being used and the fear that these children’s scores will affect the classroom teacher’s scores.
Students with an IEP have already been tested by a professional one on one and it has been determined that the status quo is not working for them and they need to have a specific plan to help them learn. The mandatory tests are so far above where these students can comprehend or respond it is a waste of their time. Special education students have no time to waste. The school psychologist has already tested them so they can gain access to education at their level. Yet, we stop their learning which is prescribed for them in the Individual Education Plan for so many minutes and so many days a week in a legal document referred to as an IEP. But all those plans are ignored during the 6 weeks of testing. You can be sure I kept teaching and maintaining a routine schedule as best I could so my special needs students could feel secure. But it wasn’t easy or fair.
How can these tests be of any benefit to any student on an IEP in these areas?
As their special education teacher my hands are tied when parents and students are told they must take these tests. They are not educated on the fact that they could opt their child out. Some of the children taking the test have learned how to speed up the test by marking something in the box so they can move onto the next item and do the same for each question so they can just be done with it. They do this because they are not able to read at the level the test requires or even listen to the information. They certainly don’t know how to respond to what they don’t understand.
In the meantime while I am “testing” these students the younger students are hanging out in their general education classrooms doing their best not to be a problem in the general classroom which is functioning at a higher level than most of them in at least one or more subject areas. When we finally get back to routine schedules of the non-testing type it takes a day or more to get them back into the expected behaviors of a learning environment.
Now that the tests and the teacher evaluations are complete the importance of maintaining a schedule appears to be insignificant. Perhaps the teachers want to make up for all the pressure everyone has been under for months and make impromptu changes to their schedules to include more fun activities which is great unless it is during the service times I have their children. The last thing special needs students need is to feel left out of activities they can participate in or lose more time reaching and meeting their goals in the resource room.
You lay out the scenario beautifully. As a teacher of children with disabilities, I have been experiencing the same frustration with the loss of instructional time and the useless nature of the testing.
At my school, many of the parents of children with IEPs did opt their children out of the testing. Unfortunately, all teachers were still assigned to proctor the test. The children opting out were required to sit in their classrooms with a book during the testing process, so they still lost days of instruction.
Exactly my experience over the last 18 years as a professor. The contrast between my students before NCLB with those I have now is striking and disheartening, to say the least!
You have all listed reasons my kids go to private school. I can not afford it but do it anyway. I had a teacher tell me to my face she didn’t have time for so many questions in class. There you can go sit right in on class if you want to. By the way I still have to pay my school taxes for teachers that don’t have time for my kids.