Fred LeBrun of the Albany Times-Union is one of the most thoughtful commentators on education in Néw York state. He knows that Néw York’s test-and-punish regime is a disaster. Unlike the Néw York Times editorial board, he hails the opt out leaders as heroes.
Civil disobedience is justified when your elected representatives turn their backs on you and refuse to listen. Opt out is a beautiful and intelligent response to a ridiculous testing regime that undermines education and demoralizes educators.
Fred gets it. He writes:
“So much rests on such tiny shoulders.
“And make no mistake while you pack those lunches, it’s all about a political agenda being crudely and arrogantly imposed on education across the country. We know who the banner carrier has been here in New York.
“Of all that Gov. Andrew Cuomo will have to answer for after he finally vacates his current post for whatever cave will have him, near the top has to be the damage he’s done to public schooling in New York.
“With his trademark heavy hand, Cuomo has politicized public education down to every student, and for our times and state, singlehandedly taken the pleasure and satisfaction out of learning, and teaching. Not to mention he put new and needless pressures and anxieties on tens of thousands of young parents caught in the middle of these wars.
“All in the name of the most misused word in the dictionary: reform.
“Although we can indeed thank Cuomo for helping make New York No. 1 somewhere on the public education scoreboard.
“We lead the nation in opting out of high-stakes standardized tests, primarily because those privatized tests of questionable merit were rammed down our throats earlier here than in other states…
“So, look for another tempestuous spring on the Opt Out front, with numbers refusing the tests increasing.
“That’s despite empty threats the feds may withhold some Title 1 funding. Empty because the emerging bipartisan will of Congress for the coming reauthorization of Race to the Top is to detach fiscal consequences from opting out of standardized tests. A response to an emerging public will.
“Long term, things are looking up. The Cuomo fiasco will collapse. Commissioner Elia promises a committee including parents and teachers will look hard at New York’s Common Core plan with an eye toward changes. That’s a necessary step in the right direction.
“The Board of Regents is growing a brain on the subject as its membership changes, and the Legislature is likely to become emboldened to make right what they voted poorly on when Cuomo had them over a barrel.
“Much of this is driven by what Opt Out has accomplished. We owe them a great deal.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
From the magazine, Mother Jones, the Sept./Oct. 2015 issue, “Sorry, I’m Not Taking This Test”, about the “growing number of kids saying: Enough”.
In the past 5 years, the magazine’s readership has grown ten-fold. Can the L.A. Times report the same?
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Albany’s newspaper calls out the gov!! The emperor has no clothes. Thank you TU and Fred LeBrun for doing what the NY Times and Washington Post were paid not to do — report the truth.
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Don’t be so quick to thank TU, not everyone is as informed as Fred LeBrun.
http://blog.timesunion.com/opinion/precious-pause-in-test-war/33146/
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But TU lets its writers report. NYT silenced Michael Winerip by reassigning him off the education beat.
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That is true, but many of his articles are behind a pay wall, the negative articles on TU are not.
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Do you have a link to a story or even any anecdotal proof that Winerip was reassigned from education to silence his voice?
Tricia, you can often work around paywalls by searching through Google News, at least for items that have been published recently. TU’s putting editorial columnists behind a paywall isn’t unusual.
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I think this is in the category of “Cuomo failed the bar four times” and “Apparently Rachel Maddow is close friends with Eva Moskowitz.”
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Tim
Thanks for the Google tip.
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In the Cincinnati Enquirer today, the headline on the front page is John Kasich’s teacher problem.”
He is campaigning on a record that wrongly says he ” championed” an overall increase in the state education budget when in fact, he did a line item cut of $88 million. He is proud of sending more money to charter schools, and private school vouchers. He is proud of the takeover of the Youngstown school district and “accountability measures for educating kids, such as the third grade reading garantee.”
The criteria for the takeover of Youngstown schools, if left inplace, would enable the nullification of school boards in favor of takeover managers in almost all large metro district in the state. In addition to having no proven efficacy for education, this tactic is another version of voter suppression…kill off direct-democracy at local level, eliminate school boards.
Kasich doesn’t think he needs to pay attention to educators who are critical of his policies. The Enquirer quotes him: ” I don’t know who these people are, but it doesn’t matter. We’re doing better in Ohio.”
In addition to making the front page headlines, and soliciting plenty of comments from teachers, the reporters pointed to the national news that $1 billion of Ohio’s dollars go to about 380 charters that have little or no accountability and plenty of scandals.
In addition to that content, the Enquirer published a long and well- written commentary “State must stop micromanaging schools,” by Jim O’Conner, a high school social studies teacher. This exposed the many absurdities and shifting policy mandates in Ohio, where 50% of a teacher’s evaluation come from scores on statewide tests, tests are graded by temps, and scores not delivered until the fall. Further, no information from the tests is available for teachers to read, analyse.
O’Conner givea a well-deserved shout out to the 41 district supervisors who have organized to Lobby against the absurd policies being foisted on them, mainly at the state level, but also from federal officials.
This it say that local news here, and for the first time in recent memory, is doing a good job of exposing the frauds and absurdities in policies and claims about education, devoting about 37 column inches to the topic. The reporters were Hannah Sparling and Chrissie Thompson.
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His ego has led him to run for president. Who needs another leader that wears blinders and refuses to accept reality?
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Opt out parents are the agents for resisting abusive standardized testing. They are the ‘shock troops’, the front guard of the resistance movement. ‘ They will bring about changes in public policy. . We can hurl research findings and policy studies at the deformers, The simple truth is that the Opt out movement strikes fear into the hearts of the deformers. Parents will not be bamboozled or fear the rhetoric,threats and invalid research thrown at them. They will not be bought out by either big big money privatizers, false promises made by charter school advocates or threats made by state or federal education officials: they will protect their children. In that regard, I direct your attention to the resistance of community parents to the lack of a public high school choice in the Dyett School hunger strikers in Chicago. Mike Klonsky writes about this struggle in his progressive blog “Small Talk”:http://michaelklonsky.blogspot.com/2015/08/dyett-hunber-strikers-keeping-public-in.html
By protecting their children they are also protecting the continued viability of public school education.
We must find a way to DIRECTLY support Opt out parent groups. Words are not sufficient. What can we do? What will we do? Perhaps, that is the next task we must shoulder.
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Who can blame parents for wanting to protect their children against endless, useless testing? The test and punish regime is demoralizing to everyone involved and has no diagnostic value. I wonder if Cuomo and Elia will dream up some other punishments for schools with large numbers of non-participants. The governor needs to step back and reassess his position as there is a fine line between being a leader and being a bully. He needs to listen to the people of New York that elected him.
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80% of parents didn’t opt out, including almost everyone who lives in a big city and those in the most affluent cities. What about their voices? Are they a mere inconvenience?
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Nobody is an inconvenience, but parents should still be able to decide what is in the best interests of their children.
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More likely than not many of those 80% know very little about an opt out option. The schools do their best to not publicize opting out and many actively discourage it through punitive policies against the individual student who opts out.
Many students opt out anyway by other means than a formal opt out.
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I agree that opt-out will lead to changes of some kind, but one element of LeBrun’s analysis is wildly incorrect: “That means much of that motivation for opting out — poorly written, age inappropriate standardized tests — persists.”
New York’s tests were lengthened and made far more difficult starting in 2010, and endless test prep has been going on for much longer than that. There was no such thing as opting out back then, not when scores cratered in 2010, and not even when they cratered again in 2013.
Opt out didn’t explode until test scores were tied to teacher evaluations, and it was fanned by teachers, principals, and superintendents actively pressuring families to opt out. No school or district has had the courage to stand up and put an end to test prep.
LeBrun also seems unaware that the leaders behind opt out aren’t interested in “backing the testing down to a constructive learning and teaching tool.” They want the tests eliminated, period, and for the public to rely solely on the word of people working in schools to judge how well schools are performing.
A family should have every right to opt out. They should not have the right to dictate that everyone opt out. The opt out message has fallen flat in the state’s largest cities, where parents are understandably wary of a movement centered in non-integrated districts whose legislators have bitterly fought any attempts to give more funding to the schools that need it most. And it has also fallen flat in the highest funded, highest performing districts that shower their kids in resources in a way that would make Dewey proud. These very disparate settings represent a firewall for opt out.
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Tim, please don’t conflate the three issues together. They are interrelated, but not the same.
Issue 1: the BS tests
Issue 2: teacher evaluations
Issue 3: opting out.
Parents created and lead the opt out movement, and have since its inception. Those who opt out want to have that choice, and are opting out for a variety of reasons, some of which are the poorly made tests themselves and their developmentally inappropriate construction. They may opt out because of the punitive and ineffective method of teacher evaluation.
The teachers themselves have their own feelings about the tests, the evaluations, etc. NYSUT, which may have most public school members as members but in VERY FEW WAYS represent their members came out in favor of opting out last spring, but that was the first official act of that happening. Most teachers, myself included, are prohibited from discussing opting out with our students, their parents, or even on social media. In my school, about 30% of the teachers with students opted their kids out, not far from the statewide average. In my experience, the general public still remains largely unaware of all the issues, but that numeris shrinking as the numbers of hose who opt out is growing.
Those who support opting out simply want that choice, and by making that choice, not causing bad consequences to fall on their schools, districts, and teachers. Your last assertion falls flat, however, in that many wealthy districts, especially downstate had high rates of opting out, not surprising because that was where the movement began.
Those parents who make the choice to opt out are as thoughtful and informed about the issues as those who choose to opt in. That said, it’s easier to opt in and go along to get along than it is to opt out however. Those who opt in may be completely unaware of the issues, so the default setting is to allow Johnny to take the exams. Those who opt out have done some homework and studied the issues to bring them to their choice. So there is some difference between the two camps.
This is civil disobedience on a scale not seen in decades, and it will grow despite all the efforts the state and federal governments bring to bear to stop it, as well as the millions spent by the wealthy education de-formers whose ROI will be affected by the increasing resistance to all they peddle.
The fact that over twenty percent of NY families chose to opt out is impressive, because they are refusing governmental dictates. So what if 80% goes along? This is a big movement now. Next year will be the turning point IMO. If the numbers rise once again, especially in an election year there will be major changes made.
I think that’s likely.
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rockhound 2, I’m looking right at the test refusal database. Bronxville, Briarcliff Manor, Manhasset, Ardsley, Edgemont, Scarsdale, Irvington, Chappaqua, Byram Hills—these are among the most lavishly funded, well-resourced school districts anywhere in the US. They are the districts people are referring to when they say that our nation’s top public schools are the best in the world. They are funded entirely by punishingly high local property taxes—the median property tax bill in Bronxville, e.g., is more than $40,000. Residents of these towns obsess over education and educational current events. They know full well about opt-out; they opted out of it.
The timeline for opt-out is clear—we had years of BS tests and high failure rates and tons of test prep, and opt-out wasn’t anything but a fringe movement. It took off at the exact moment it was decided that test scores would be used for teacher evaluations. Many superintendents and principals became vocal supporters of opt out, and while teachers may not have been talking to kids about it inside the classroom, the “T” in PTA stands for teachers, and plenty of PTAs across the state passed resolutions and otherwise facilitated and promoted opting out.
Whether it started out this way I don’t know, but the loudest and most frequent voices of the opt-out movement seem to be looking to have tests eliminated entirely. If the opt-out movement wants maximum buy-in from the majority of families who didn’t opt out and likely never will (this pool not only includes the vast majority of families in the big cities and elite suburbs, but also parents in high opt-out districts whose kids score well), the message has to be brought back to the center: the tests should be shorter, they should be of higher quality, they should be made publicly available in their entirety, and they should not be prepped for for more than a day or two. Like parents at most of the super-elite private schools, most public school parents feel that standardized tests are a valuable supplement to classroom assessments.
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Tim those school districts you named – the best in the country- are being called mediocre and with the new tests more students don’t meet standards than score above them. Parents are being told by Cuomo that their schoo are inferior to charter schools like Success Academy – since Eva Moskowitz loves to point out how her students “out scored” those poorly educated Chappaqua kids.
But those well educated parents aren’t fooled into thinking if their schools were just like Success Academy and prepped and made children feel misery things will be better . They reject that premise because the tests are so poorly designed. But if you believe the tests are wonderful thing to teach to, I agree the parent should choose a charter scho where your child will definitely be taught to pass them.
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NYC Public School Parent,
Any affluent suburban district could get the same results as Eva’s Success Academy if they could figure out how to exclude the children with extreme disabilities, the English language learners, the behavior problems, and others with low scores. They could start test prep in November. When newcomers arrive in the district, they would not be allowed to enroll in the local schools (it’s called “backfilling”). It is the secret of success.
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You are wrong, Tim. More parents are opting out because the tests are not “more difficult” they are more ambiguous. In fact, if you wanted to see the past NY State exam, the exam, it its entirety was posted on the website. Now, you only get Pearson’s “selected questions” and they can’t even manage to cherry pick a few passages from the 3rd grade ELA exam without having a bunch of terrible non-answerable questions. Notice that 70% or more 3rd graders could answer 3rd grade questions that required reading comprehension. Notice that 50% of the students missed the ambiguous questions where, unless your teacher had prepped you to put aside logic and pretend the question was asking something it was not actually asking, a students’ “guess” may or may not be correct. It proved nothing. And the notion that TEACHERS are supposed to be spending their time training 8 year olds how to be stupider so they can not think too much about why an answer isn’t really an answer and pretend it is? Why would you think that is a good thing, Tim?
And parents are questioning why there is this ambiguity. It’s almost as if the state is trying to convince parents that their teachers are bad. Rigor in testing is good. Poorly written questions and ambiguous answers are bad. And the current common core designers – at least in NY State – seem to be stupid enough to mix up the two things. I’m thrilled parents are opting out since Andrew Cuomo and his appointees have told us how terrific and valuable and well-designed these tests are and insisted they are perfect to judge your child and his teachers. It is only the opt out movement that will stop this.
If you don’t believe me, read the NY Times and see how many of their well-educated adult readers couldn’t answer a basic reading comprehension for 8 year olds. If a college educated adult has to go through all kinds of cockamamie contortions to “prove” how one answer is better than another, then there is something terribly wrong with a test that it supposed to see whether 8 year olds are learning.
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Tim says: “New York’s tests were lengthened and made far more difficult starting in 2010, and endless test prep has been going on for much longer than that.”
Tim you are mixing up certain charter schools, who HAVE done “endless prep” since before 2010, with the public schools, which have not. Some test prep – yes – to teach kids how to fill in bubbles and make them familiar with test design. It was not “endless” and in all but a few public schools, was a minimal part of a day a month before the exam.
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I just checked my email archive to see what records I have of when test prep began at my kids’ elementary school. The emails go back to the 2008-2009 school year. My daughter wasn’t in the testing years back then, but I still received a lot of blast emails about what grades 3, 4, and 5 were doing. I was surprised to find that test prep for the 2008-2009 school year started in early December.
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Weren’t the tests given in January back then? When did they change it to later? And the prep was far less. Flerp are you really stating that your child’s school does no more prep now than 6 years ago? That makes your school quite unique unless it is a charter school. Why your need to insist that parents care more about protecting teachers than their own kids’ education? Why Tim’s insistence that the most well educated parents do this? I love how critics of opt out call parents stupid. Shame on them.
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I don’t know — were they given in January in 2008-2009? If so, that would explain the early prep dates. If not, it wouldn’t.
I’m just telling you the facts that I know from my own experience; let me know what you know from your own experience about how much prep there was in the late 2000s. If you didn’t have school-age kids in NYC public school at that time, maybe someone else here who did can weigh in.
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I agree, the opt out movement is a clear sign of civil disobedience to laws and policies made without the public’s input or approval. So it comes down to something as simple as this, if you don’t want your child’s data all over the place and your child tested instead of taught, opt out.
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Well-stated.
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We also owe parents a local, whole child assessment as an alternative. Without that, we are just another version of the Tea Party
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Tim,
I oppose community dollars (intended for education), going to Silicon Valley for measurement tools that haven’t been linked to better student performance. The Gates’ plan for computerized education is not in the best interests of children, which is proven by the fact that his kids’ schools reject his plan. Linked, for-profit tests and curriculum, i.e. schools in a box, are not how I want my local tax dollars spent. I don’t want my community to suffer the economic loss of middle class jobs, which have enabled financial independence for women. The replacement plan, with large classes and technicians, or isolating home instruction, is for the benefit of tech and test companies and, not for society.
Promises of jobs for students, as a result of the standards/testing/accountability is the grandest fraud. If the reformers, believed in their product, they would put their fortunes in an escrow account as a guarantee for the promised jobs.
If teachers, despite threats against them and, despite union betrayal, are participating in the opt out movement, I offer them a profound thank you for their courage, in behalf of community citizens like me.
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And many people here are trying to reason with Tim because?
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Comments addressed “Tim”, establish context. Commenters like me see it as an opportunity to express opinion, not convince one individual.
If I could persuade Tim, I’d recommend he change jobs, to sell a product that is not fatally flawed and one, people actually want or need.
He’s selling in a market, artificially propped up by profit-seeking tech and test moguls, and libertarian oligarchs. When the market is dependent on political bribes to shaft taxpayers and harm the families of the 99%, it doesn’t bode well for the product’s salesmen.
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Very true on what Fred said. Trouble is, yesterday on his show he exclaimed that Eva Moskowitz should or could be the next governor of New York State due to the ‘breathtaking’ (sic) results from her charter schools in New York City !!
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Steve,
I wish someone would tell Fred LeBrun that Eva’s charters do not have the same children as the public schools. They don’t have the same proportion of students with disabilities or English language learners. They counsel out children who disobey orders, or they suspend them again and again until their parent(s) withdraw them. They don’t add new students after a certain grade, so the number who get to eighth grade is much smaller than the number who were in third grade or K. They begin intensive test prep in November for the April tests. They have high rates of attrition for teachers.
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The Syracuse (NY) Post put out another clueless editorial, I responded. Made online version…don’t know if it will hgit print.
http://www.syracuse.com/opinion/index.ssf/2015/08/opting_out_made_a_point_but_ed_board_isnt_getting_it_your_letters.html
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