Emma Brown reports in The Washington Post that the Senate turned down an amendment that would have allowed parents to opt out of federally mandated tests without penalty.
The lead author of the Senate bill said that this decision should be left to states.
The chamber voted 64 to 32 against the amendment, proposed by Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) amid a backlash against mandated standardized tests. “Parents, not politicians or bureaucrats, will have the final say over whether individual children take tests,” he said.
But Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) — the Republican co-sponsor of the carefully crafted bipartisan bill — spoke forcefully against the proposal, saying it would strip states of the right to decide whether to allow parents to opt out.
“I say to my Republican friends, do we only agree with local control when we agree with the local policy?” said Alexander, who has framed the bill as an effort to transfer power over education from the federal government to the states.
I have great respect for Senator Alexander but his argument is not logical. The federal government mandates the tests, but it leaves to states the power to decide whether parents have the right to opt out. Why is the federal government mandating any tests? Why is this not a state responsibility? If he were being consistent, he would leave the testing and the right to opt out to the states. I would just remind the Congress that the Elementary and Secondary Act of 1965 was a resource equity act, not a testing and accountability act. It was meant to send money to schools and districts that enrolled students who lived in poverty. It was No Child Left Behind that turned the ESEA into a testing and accountability act in 2001-02. And it was the Improving America’s Schools Act of 1994 that first proposed that states create their own standards and assessments.
No matter what the Congress does, no matter what the states do, parents can opt their children out of testing if they believe the tests are neither valid nor reliable.
If anyone has a list of Senators who voted for or against the amendment, please send it.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Here it is, scroll down. I don’t know how to attach and image here.
http://truthinamericaneducation.com/elementary-and-secondary-education-act/u-s-senate-votes-down-parental-opt-outs/
The Senate has good judgment.
Only in the eyes of an imbecile so is safe to say you nailed this assessment. It’s too bad morons such as yourself can’t opt out from making idiotic comments on blogs.
Right. Your State should be free to oppress your right to tend to the welfare of your child. Good call, Bob.
Emma Brown updated her story after I posted about the Senate opt-out amendments. Her story now includes the important information that the Senate is leaving up to the states whether the opt out students are to be removed from the 95 percent.
Reread her article. Note this sentence:
“The Senate bill mandates 95 percent participation of students who are required to be tested, but allows states to decide whether children who opt out are among those who are required to be tested.”
Here is my post, which I wrote before she updated her piece:
http://deutsch29.wordpress.com/2015/07/14/the-senate-esea-draft-has-three-opt-out-amendments/
So why don’t they just let the parents decide. After all they want a “market place” environment. Seems that both sides of aisle wants to have some form of government regulating us for this test. Time to say no. Maybe we should put forth some initiatives telling the states to get rid of the testing.
http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=114&session=1&vote=00235
And if I continue opting out? My son’s school is already slated to be part of Nevada’s ASD. i shall defy them.
guess what Senate…I still will do whatever the Hell I want without penalty anyhow.
We definitely need more attitudes like this ^
Isn;t it funny that Alexander has no problem passing a bill that will end up being well over 1000 pages that dictates to the states but is against allowing parents the right to opt out of high stakes testing. What a joke he is and he thinks we are so stupid that we don’t see what he is doing. They cannot collect their data if parents opt out of these high stakes tests and THAT is the truth. Parents get up off your knees. Stop begging these criminals to give you rights that God has already given you and no man can take away. Rise up and work with your neighbors to pull out your kids from ALL high stakes tests. And if you really want to implode the system (which is what needs to happen) find a way to get your kids out of public schools and that includes Charters. Parents, neighbors, grandparents, retired teachers work together to provide home school for parents that must work. The day WILL come when they put an end to home school and private school but while we have the option we need to utilize it. Common Core WILL NEVER be stopped and you all need to realize this. They have implemented this reform so that it is irreversible. GED-ACt-PSAT-SAT-AP and our books all aligned and Pearson is currently working to align the international test (PISA) with Common Core. Now do you REALLY think you are going to be able to stop this? You CANNOT!!! So do what really needs to be done. Get your kids out. Find a way. Sell the big house, sell the second car, shut down cell service, no more eating out, no more vacations. It is a small price to pay for those few precious years you have your children. If you want to do it you will, if not, you will make excuses.
Wow, I love your forceful and most articulate reply.
It’s always been a bipartisan attack on teachers and on public schools.
Note, we may win this battle, and still lose the war. The only solution is to demand a change in the culture within the schools, that has been corrupted, by eliminating all administrative positions and replacing them with support personnel culled from the senior staff on a rotating basis so they can’t form an adversarial relationship. We must end the intimidation and deprofessionalization of teachers, eliminate the so called charter schools that were created to give the white middle class a means to circumvent desegregation laws and remove their elevated status, take the school systems out of the hands of the “butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker” on the boards of education, and stop the demeaning of all teachers by focusing on the few ‘bad apples.’ We are losing this war because Bill Gates, Pearson and their cohorts from the corporate computer industry recognized that in good times and in bad there is always plenty of money earmarked for public education, so they are bribing politicians and administrative staff and diverting that money into their digital world, and using it as a cash cow to sustain their industry ad infinitum. Remember, the only people who count in the process of education are the teachers and their students. Everyone else is superfluous.
Ian Kay
Parents pulling their kids out of public schools is exactly what the rephormers want. Once public education is gone, it’s not coming back. People who can’t afford private school and can’t homeschool are just going to be SOL.
What will they do, put parents in jail? Maybe some billionaire will start a chain of privatized parent prisons. This fowl law will probably be challenged in court. A parent’s right to protect his child should be a more primary responsibility than the fed’s data mining project. My husband works for the census bureau, and the only mandatory survey is the 10 year one. People can refuse the other surveys.
Grouped By Vote Position
YEAs —32
Ayotte (R-NH)
Barrasso (R-WY)
Blunt (R-MO)
Boozman (R-AR)
Cassidy (R-LA)
Coats (R-IN)
Cotton (R-AR)
Crapo (R-ID)
Cruz (R-TX)
Daines (R-MT)
Enzi (R-WY)
Ernst (R-IA)
Fischer (R-NE)
Grassley (R-IA)
Heller (R-NV)
Hoeven (R-ND)
Inhofe (R-OK)
Johnson (R-WI)
Lankford (R-OK)
Lee (R-UT)
McCain (R-AZ)
Moran (R-KS)
Paul (R-KY)
Perdue (R-GA)
Risch (R-ID)
Sasse (R-NE)
Scott (R-SC)
Sessions (R-AL)
Shelby (R-AL)
Toomey (R-PA)
Vitter (R-LA)
Wicker (R-MS)
NAYs —64
Alexander (R-TN)
Baldwin (D-WI)
Bennet (D-CO)
Blumenthal (D-CT)
Booker (D-NJ)
Boxer (D-CA)
Brown (D-OH)
Burr (R-NC)
Cantwell (D-WA)
Capito (R-WV)
Cardin (D-MD)
Carper (D-DE)
Casey (D-PA)
Cochran (R-MS)
Collins (R-ME)
Coons (D-DE)
Corker (R-TN)
Cornyn (R-TX)
Donnelly (D-IN)
Durbin (D-IL)
Feinstein (D-CA)
Flake (R-AZ)
Franken (D-MN)
Gardner (R-CO)
Gillibrand (D-NY)
Hatch (R-UT)
Heinrich (D-NM)
Heitkamp (D-ND)
Hirono (D-HI)
Isakson (R-GA)
Kaine (D-VA)
King (I-ME)
Kirk (R-IL)
Klobuchar (D-MN)
Leahy (D-VT)
Manchin (D-WV)
Markey (D-MA)
McCaskill (D-MO)
McConnell (R-KY)
Menendez (D-NJ)
Merkley (D-OR)
Mikulski (D-MD)
Murkowski (R-AK)
Murphy (D-CT)
Murray (D-WA)
Peters (D-MI)
Portman (R-OH)
Reed (D-RI)
Reid (D-NV)
Roberts (R-KS)
Rounds (R-SD)
Sanders (I-VT)
Schatz (D-HI)
Schumer (D-NY)
Shaheen (D-NH)
Stabenow (D-MI)
Tester (D-MT)
Thune (R-SD)
Tillis (R-NC)
Udall (D-NM)
Warner (D-VA)
Warren (D-MA)
Whitehouse (D-RI)
Wyden (D-OR)
Not Voting – 4
Graham (R-SC)
Nelson (D-FL)
Rubio (R-FL)
Sullivan (R-AK)
Grouped By Vote Position
YEAs —32
Ayotte (R-NH)
Barrasso (R-WY)
Blunt (R-MO)
Boozman (R-AR)
Cassidy (R-LA)
Coats (R-IN)
Cotton (R-AR)
Crapo (R-ID)
Cruz (R-TX)
Daines (R-MT)
Enzi (R-WY)
Ernst (R-IA)
Fischer (R-NE)
Grassley (R-IA)
Heller (R-NV)
Hoeven (R-ND)
Inhofe (R-OK)
Johnson (R-WI)
Lankford (R-OK)
Lee (R-UT)
McCain (R-AZ)
Moran (R-KS)
Paul (R-KY)
Perdue (R-GA)
Risch (R-ID)
Sasse (R-NE)
Scott (R-SC)
Sessions (R-AL)
Shelby (R-AL)
Toomey (R-PA)
Vitter (R-LA)
Wicker (R-MS)
NAYs —64
Alexander (R-TN)
Baldwin (D-WI)
Bennet (D-CO)
Blumenthal (D-CT)
Booker (D-NJ)
Boxer (D-CA)
Brown (D-OH)
Burr (R-NC)
Cantwell (D-WA)
Capito (R-WV)
Cardin (D-MD)
Carper (D-DE)
Casey (D-PA)
Cochran (R-MS)
Collins (R-ME)
Coons (D-DE)
Corker (R-TN)
Cornyn (R-TX)
Donnelly (D-IN)
Durbin (D-IL)
Feinstein (D-CA)
Flake (R-AZ)
Franken (D-MN)
Gardner (R-CO)
Gillibrand (D-NY)
Hatch (R-UT)
Heinrich (D-NM)
Heitkamp (D-ND)
Hirono (D-HI)
Isakson (R-GA)
Kaine (D-VA)
King (I-ME)
Kirk (R-IL)
Klobuchar (D-MN)
Leahy (D-VT)
Manchin (D-WV)
Markey (D-MA)
McCaskill (D-MO)
McConnell (R-KY)
Menendez (D-NJ)
Merkley (D-OR)
Mikulski (D-MD)
Murkowski (R-AK)
Murphy (D-CT)
Murray (D-WA)
Peters (D-MI)
Portman (R-OH)
Reed (D-RI)
Reid (D-NV)
Roberts (R-KS)
Rounds (R-SD)
Sanders (I-VT)
Schatz (D-HI)
Schumer (D-NY)
Shaheen (D-NH)
Stabenow (D-MI)
Tester (D-MT)
Thune (R-SD)
Tillis (R-NC)
Udall (D-NM)
Warner (D-VA)
Warren (D-MA)
Whitehouse (D-RI)
Wyden (D-OR)
Not Voting – 4
Graham (R-SC)
Nelson (D-FL)
Rubio (R-FL)
Sullivan (R-AK)
Not one “D”. What a bunch of cowards
Coons and Carper…cowards!
Do I understand this correctly? It appears that the ESEA amendment (voted down) would have stated parents’ rights to opt out their children from federally-mandated tests. And that it was voted down– perhaps?– as part of a states-right agenda.
I’m not sure I have a problem with this. The general drift of the ESEA re-authorization seems– so far– to be undercutting the power of the DOEd.
A couple of months ago I reported to my sis (a public-school administrator) that the ESEA update was trending toward cutting off Fed ability to tie high stakes to student scores. Her response: great, now all parents have to do is opt out.
Am I missing something?
Schemer (D-NY) and Gillibrand (D-NY)…
Participants in the Great Conspiracy Act
The next battery of mandated exams to serve up our children to the hungry appetite of the big data machine will yield 750,000 to 1,000,000 opt outs, in New York alone.
If our former leaders such as Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Delano Roosevelt are watching, they must be asking what has become of the great state of New York?
And I’m sure FDR would deservedly so, find another use for his cane, if the two of you were standing before him.
Treachery in the first degree.
Whack, whack, whack!
“I would just remind the Congress that the Elementary and Secondary Act of 1965 was a resource equity act, not a testing and accountability act. It was meant to send money to schools and districts that enrolled students who lived in poverty. It was No Child Left Behind that turned the ESEA into a testing and accountability act in 2001-02.”
They need that reminder since providing equitable resources never seems to be part of the agenda. We have yet to meet that resource mandate.
Leave it up to the states? How about leave it up to parents on raising their kids?
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Texas Education.
This doesn’t make any sense. The entire debate over the ESEA has centered on States Rights vs. the Fed. However, on this issue that’s the wrong way to look at it. This is a parents’ and children’s rights issue. Why would you trample their rights in favor of the state legislature? Isn’t it better to protect the parties most essentially involved? But if the Senate did that, pundits would see it as a win for the Fed. Education is falling through the cracks because too many people are obsessed with Team State vs. Team Fed.
Further analysis:
https://gadflyonthewallblog.wordpress.com/2015/07/15/in-esea-debate-education-is-caught-in-the-middle-between-the-state-and-fed/
No, it doesn’t make sense. The accountability testing mandate is coming from the Federal government, so an amendment defining boundaries on it couldn’t possibly decrease states rights.
The “outcome measurement accountability” mandate itself is a federal one.
Did people forget mandate means impose by force of law? Unless Obama rescues us with a veto, we are now going to get new pushback on our H340 moratorium bill in Massachusetts, with new threats to withhold Title I funding. Our goal is to freeze the process before Chris Gabrielli’s politically powerful turnaround operations can harvest any more of our “Gateway” communities, which our legislature and corrupt unions served up to the privatizers in 2010 as part of the RttT application process. I was at the Holyoke receivership hearing this spring, and am expending the remaining strength I have trying to get Holyoke schools back, and save Lynn and Salem specifically, and all eight target cities, from forced takeover and turnarounds.
Former NPE “allies” are faced off on the other side on many specific issues, with Gates and Broad funding sources paying for book tours, subsidizing “teacher leader” sites, and bolstering the AFT and former MTA entrenched leadership.
http://www.turnweb.org/members/
Federal mandates and restrictions generate secondary state laws and policies, is the problem. We just broke the back of the TS Gold kindergarten assessments, which were ordered by the state DOE for districts that receive federal kindergarten money. They overstepped, and popular revulsion is driving a furious pushback, with NPE and AFT on the side of testing mandates, and the people against them.
It is rather shocking that every single Democrat voted against this opt-out amendment. I should mention the No votes included Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.
Has there been any comment from Bernie explaining his thoughts behind his No vote?
Diane was there anything in the original ESEA that prevented states from taking taking the money and then shifting state money out of education as a shell game?
Truth: “Why is the federal government mandating any tests?” Test is a test is a test is a test. http://publicschoolscentral.com/2015/07/15/test-is-a-test-is-a-test-is-a-test/
The essence of civil disobedience and social justice is to simply quit doing something you believe to be wrong. Opt out. Parents don’t need permission or legislation.
http://publicschoolscentral.com/2015/07/15/test-is-a-test-is-a-test-is-a-test/
Well said.
Speaking strictly as a private citizen from the privacy of my home, Deborah Duncan Owens on July 16, 2015 at 7:58 AM, puts it excellently.
And if the feds are going to withhold Title 1 and 3 funds, so be it, because it is OUR federal tax dollars, not the feds’s, and it will only throw bacon lard into the fire . . . . That will motivate more civil disobedience.
The feds are hanging themselves ultimately with their own indifference and disconnect, even is they vote this way. They are, in this context, a prime example of an oppressive entity instead of one that helps the people who voted in the officials who choose to misuse the machinery of government.
The only possible grace here is that people like Bernie Sanders voted against the amendment because there were other components attached to it that were outright, tip-the-scale nefarious. Or maybe state sovereignty is seen as something still precious in the background of federal overreach.
Either way, opting out families are opting out families, and their movement will change from one of accelerated growth to one of burgeoning momentum.
One cannot stop a parent from loving their child, protecting their child, and making value judgments about what is best for their child. In the absence of a Sophie’s choice type of situation, which I would wish upon no one, parental love will always stand independently of politics and funding.
– Robert Rendo
Cx:
” . . . . even if they vote this way.”
When are politician and school districts going to consider the needs of the children? As natural disasters span across the country, I think of all the children suffering in so many ways. People in devastated areas of floods, tornados, violent storms, draught … They won’t be able to get their lives back in order by the beginning of the new school year. Why can’t the politicians and school districts have a heart and stop causing more pain by imposing those asinine, standardized tests. Stop wasting millions of dollars for the unnecessary standardized testing and apply it to alleviating the suffering caused by so much natural disaster. Some children are being bombarded with pain of all kinds. Why can’t we at least let the little children find some joy in school with experiential learning instead of hounding them with the rote learning imposed on them by CC and its testing.
Let the teachers get back to real teaching reading great literature to help ease their pain, listen to, dramatize, sing and illustrate. Give them back all the gym time they are entitled to, their art classes and their recess. Let joy enter their hearts instead of fear.