NYSAPE (Néw York State Allies for Public Education) represents 50 organizations of parents and educators. Today they released a statement on the state scores.
They previously thought that about 200,000 students had refused the tests, but the state acknowledged 225,000.
Without any change in state policies, NYSAPE warned that there would be more opt outs next spring. In some districts, opting out is the norm,not the exception.
Here is the press release. To open links, go to the original link:
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: August 13, 2015
More information contact:
Jeanette Deutermann (516) 902-9228; nys.allies@gmail.com
Lisa Rudley (917) 414-9190; nys.allies@gmail.com
NYS Allies for Public Education (NYSAPE) – http://www.nysape.org
Opt Out to Sharply Rise as NYS Continues to Sacrifice Children With Flawed Tests & Policies
Yesterday, the New York State Education Department (NYSED) released the results of the 2015 3-8th grade English Language Arts (ELA) & Math exams. ELA scores were essentially flat, and the small increase in Math scores (less than 2 percentage points) was smaller than last year’s modest jump. There was also an increase in the percentage of Level 1 students in ELA, and an unchanged percentage of Level 1 students in Math, suggesting that the ratcheting up of high-stakes is leaving our most struggling students behind.
Test refusals, also known as opt outs, rose to a record number of 222,500, surpassing advocates’ estimates. More New York parents across the state are informed and have said no to the high-stakes testing regime that is disrupting quality education and harming their children. With no relief in sight, opt out figures are expected to grow significantly again this year until damaging education laws and policies are reversed.
Jeanette Deutermann, Nassau County public school parent and founder of Long Island Opt Out said, “How many more children will we sacrifice to a narrow education, excessive testing, and failure, before New York calls a timeout? How many veteran, master teachers will we watch flee the profession before we untie testing from evaluations? How many schools will close before New York State recognizes that public schools are the foundations of every community? Instead of dreaming up sanctions, SED should be working with educators and parents to change course and right this wrong.”
“Governor Cuomo, the Regents and SED have been quick to judge teachers through a sham accountability system that wrongfully reduces highly effective teachers to an ineffective rating and claims public schools are failing when, in fact, they are not. But they are slow to accept responsibility for the devastating consequences of these flawed testing and evaluation measures on our children, the teaching profession, and our public schools. Threats of sanctions will not deter opt outs. Parents are onto this sham and will continue to opt out children in order to protect them,” said Anna Shah, Dutchess County public school parent.
“Considering the amount of time, resources and money devoted to the state assessment system, the resulting data does little to help pinpoint specific student, educator or school strengths and weaknesses. The entire testing system is a boondoggle to taxpayers and continues to limit our children’s educational opportunities,” stated Chris Cerrone, Erie County public school parent, educator, and school board trustee.
Bianca Tanis, Ulster County public school parent said “Chancellor Merryl Tisch has publicly stated that she would think twice before allowing a child with special needs to sit through an ‘incomprehensible exam’ and has called state exams ‘cruel and unusual’. Yet neither the Board of Regents nor NYSED leadership has taken action to inform parents of their right to refuse harmful testing, let alone curb the eighteen hours of harmful state testing that disabled students as young as eight are compelled to engage in. Until the abuse stops, opt outs will continue.”
Marla Kilfoyle, Long Island public school parent, educator, and General Manager of the BATs stated, “As research shows, test scores will not close the achievement gap. We need to begin to invest in proven strategies that close the gap, or we will lose an entire generation of children.”
“The NY State tests are an illegitimate way to evaluate kids, schools and teachers – as shown by the recent NY Times article, in which questions on the 3rd grade exam stumped the author of the relevant passage. These tests are designed to make it look like the vast majority of our students and schools are failing, when they are not. Until the state provides less flawed exams – and a better teacher evaluation system not linked to them – parents will continue to opt out in growing numbers,” said Leonie Haimson, Executive Director of Class Size Matters.
“Pearson has been fired as the state’s test vendor, yet our children will be subjected to their tests for another school year. This is outrageous. If Governor Cuomo and members of the legislature who voted to increase the contribution of test scores to teacher evaluation think this is ok, they should prove it by taking the tests themselves. Let our public officials prove that they are smarter than a 5th grader,” said Nancy Cauthen, a NYC public school parent.
NYSAPE, a grassroots organization with over 50 parent and educator groups across that state, will be calling on parents to hand in test refusal letters on the first day of school in order to reclaim their children’s classrooms and to stop the destruction of our public schools. An updated 2016 test refusal letter is coming soon.
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– See more at: http://www.nysape.org/nysape-press-release-2015-scores.html#sthash.5T5uavBg.dpuf
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Maybe make a movie about a mother who won’t let her children take the test starring Maggie Gyllenhaal called won’t back down?
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Keep opting out, & also have another rally (Google info about the one in 2011) at the Manhattan Pear$on headquarters.
Point the finger at the perps–let the public know exactly how much of their tax $$$–which are supposed to be spent on their public schools–are being WASTED on
unregulated, invalid & unreliable Pear$on tests–not to mention the unqualified test scorers & invalid, unreliable scoring rubrics (if you haven’t yet, read Todd Farley’s 2009 book {& NOTHING has changed since 2009–well, actually, it’s all gotten WORSE, esp. since Pear$on has since monopolized the ed. publishing industry} Making the Grades: My Misadventures in the Standardized Testing Industry).
In fact, ANY city/state that has a neighborhood Pear$on building(s) should be holding a protest–make EVERYONE furious, & STOP the testing THIS year!!!
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Diane,
I wish the politicians would understand that many of us believe that the Common Core is developmentally inappropriate and intellectually inconsistent. For that reason alone, TESTING TO THESE BADLY WRITTEN STANDARDS will never be acceptable.
Beth Forrester
Sent from my iPhone
>
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Beth,
“TESTING TO THESE BADLY WRITTEN STANDARDS will never be acceptable.”
To understand why any EDUCATIONAL STANDARD and the accompanying STANDARDIZED TESTS ARE COMPLETELY INVALID read and comprehend Noel Wilson’s never refuted nor rebutted total rationo-logical destruction of those educational malpractices in:
“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.
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Disappointed that this group is referring to the “achievement gap” while the Union leaders will not address the class struggle that is crushing the educational system. the achievement gap is actually shrinking as higher class students are being intentionally dumbed down, this group should not be using the language of the hedge funds.
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The only valid data from these assessments are the number of opt outs. All other data is unusable and therefore worthless. It doesn’t tell me a darn thing about my former students, and it certainly offers no insight on how to help them succeed.
These assessments are execises in the nuances of plausability, hardly approprriate for elementary aged children.
Now Elia threatens sanctions for opt outs, it’s high time we sanction the Board of Regents with immediate dismissal with the lot of them.
If my kids were still in schools, they would opt out of any assessment tied to APPR. That includes SLOs and the newly mandated back up SLOs meant to counter the opt out movement.
Elia’s listening tour is a sham, she only wants us to listen to her demands and threats. NY is not Florida.
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“The only valid data from these assessments are the number of opt outs.”
Bingo, bango, boingle!
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Folks across the state get it…When you do something that is good for kids, parents, and local school districts you do not need to rely upon threats and coercion. Next year over 50%! Sending Elia and her hollow threats out the door (along with Tisch)!
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I’ve just received the scores (ELA and Mathematics) of my children here in New York City. The scores tell me nothing. I don’t know how many questions were on the test. I don’t know if all test items were scored or whether some were thrown out. I don’t know what specific skills and understandings were measured and what areas need attention. I don’t know if a “curve” was used in determining the level of achievement (1-4). In summary, the tests do absolutely nothing for me, my wife and my children. One last thing I don’t know. How much did this all cost to tell me nothing about my kids?
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If it cost you a mil, then it cost you too much!
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Any assessment where 70% of the students fail is a poor assessment. Parents should opt their kids out.
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So TRUE.
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Any assessment where any student “fails” is a piss poor assessment”.
de nada
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