Something amazing is happening. Parents have discovered that they have the power to bring corporate reform to a halt. They do it by telling their children not to take the test. No test, no data. No data, no punishments for teachers, administrators, schools. Opting out is a vivid demonstration of the power of the powerless.
In Washington State, an unprecedented 48,000 students opted put.
Most of the opt outs were in 11th grade.
Carolyn Leith calls this an “educational uprising.”
If state leaders don’t listen to stents, the uprising will spread.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
How long until the reformers push for criminal punishments for “abusive” opt-out parents so they can make money with their private prison’s?
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Wonderful, Washington state is handling it. Where’s California?
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California has not yet released test results, and is postponing high stakes. Eventually the day will come….
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California braces itself for a strong reaction.
http://www.nola.com/education/index.ssf/2015/08/with_common_core_scores_due_ca.html
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“We knew the opt out numbers were going to be huge. Last week’s OSPI report confirmed that. Across the state, the opt out rate for 11th grade was 49.3% for ELA and 52.9% for Math.”
From the link in the post.
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This is national, as we all know.
I want to point out that whatever happens to this movement and American opinions on education as things may shift and morph over the next 5 or 10 years, the overwhelming majority of people who oppose the triad of gunned conception and implementation of standards, testing and teacher evaluation tied to it all will not change their minds. Once you see it, you see it. And that’s it. Once you learn enough to realize something is really insane, it will always look that way, regardless of persuasion, including inflammatory fraud. Opinion could well fluctuate over the individual pieces here, but not the insanity of the whole. And the deformers need the whole enchilada for their plans for shifting teaching to a service class job and selecting or digitally animating a few thousand supposed superstars to teach through a mass techno-prism of online and blended learning.
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Here’s Lamar Alexander today:
“My view is every school should be charter in the idea that schools are a place to free teachers from excessive regulations where they can use creativity to meet the needs of every child they serve,” he said.
Is there some point where DC lets the public in on the plans or will politicians continue to run on “improving public schools” when the objective is really to replace public schools?
If we’re in some “winding down” business plan period it would be nice if they would let us know since obviously we’re not privy to what the 500 private ed reform orgs are lobbying on.
http://www.tennessean.com/story/news/education/2015/08/26/lamar-alexander-weighs-superintendent-search-charters/32318051/
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The creativity is in the funding of a new form of education. And creative means cheap and potentially profitable in multiple ways.
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Chiara,
Another way to state what Sen. Alexander said is: Every school should be charter in the sense that teachers have no unions, no job protections, serve at the will of their boss, work 50-70 hours a week, and get fired if a parent complains that they taught a “controversial” book (Steinbeck, Hemingway, Twain) or dared to mention the word “evolution.” Also, every school should be charter so that they can write their own admissions and discipline policy, taking the kids they want and booting out the ones they don’t.
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If the RheeFormers’ elected puppets threaten to punish those who Opt Out by passing authoritarian punish-to-prison laws, resistance will spread even faster—faster than the for-profit prison corporations can build new prisons.
What happens to 50 million school-age children, when 75 – 100 million parents have been sent to prison?
This will all make great media outside of the United States as a perfect example of what happens in a democracy when CEO’s own the elected representatives who are supposed to be there for ALL the people and not just the 1% and UK’s Pearson
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Well said, Lloyd–my sentiments exactly!
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I teach in Washington and most of our opt out numbers were from the 11th graders that had already passed the HSPI their sophomore year. As part of the opt out movement in SW Washington we targeted the 11th grade because we knew that there would be a large amount that didn’t see a need to take the test. We weren’t as successful for the other grades though. Hopefully it has made the parents in the lower grades consider it more because of the media publicity on it has created a larger discussion.
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Why did more students opt out of math?
I assume (hope) many 11th graders made the decision themselves and parents made the decision for the lower grades.
Did they release the test scores?
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You can find the test results here: http://reportcard.ospi.k12.wa.us/summary.aspx?groupLevel=District&schoolId=1&reportLevel=State&year=2014-15
I don’t have an 11th grader so I’m just guessing on why there are more opt outs for math. My guess is that math was tested after ELA (but I don’t actually know if that was the case) and some kids found out about opting out after taking the ELA and decided not to take math.
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Today marked three full days of professional development dealing with all the online things we can use with our students, even though our online capacity in Richmond is total crap. I teach special ed. and I cannot grade my kids the same way every other kid is graded. These kids learn through their interests and slower than others. I have to stand up for their rights and rebel against the data machine. Everything is data oriented and I am am totally overwhelmed by it all. I’m a good teacher, but I want to go into the private sector like Waldorf if all this keeps up.
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I identify strongly with the Tech Blues as sung above by Mary from Richmond. I note the absence of the discussion of tech in the data driven debate, but I consider the use of computers in testing to be a factor that makes the data less reliable. The real issue of testing is whether the test is a reliable indicator of student knowledge. This is the case whether the test is my own or from on high. In Tennessee the writing tests are taken online. When the children return to class from these tests, I always ask if they could have done better by hand (there is certainly not time to write, then type the documents). About a quarter suggest that they could have done better with a pen and paper.
Perhaps it exists, but I have never heard of a study in which the comparison of paper and pen to computer typing was the focus, but it strikes me that we wait until the age of six to ten to begin piano instruction due to varying abilities with regard to coordination and concentration. A fourth grader in Tennessee will sit at a computer and take a high stakes test. Is this appropriate?
When a test is incapable of placing the student on the spectrum of learning, there is a problem. We gave pilot PARCC tests a coupe of years ago, and teachers were asked to score them as a part of learning what would be considered in grading the constructed response portion. It wa a worthy project, though intrusive and took time from teaching the subject. I learned, however, that students who were not as knowledgeable about the subject who could write could do better than students who had a pretty good grasp of the subject but were not good writers. In addition, there was no way to tell whether the student failed to give an adequate response because he did not understand the overriding concept, or because one of the small steps along the way derailed his thinking. There is an enormous difference between a student who misses a geometry problem because he did not know the proper way to use the distance formula, and one who misses the point because he does not know what a variable is used for. Any test that cannot tell the difference between these two behaviors is certainly not useful either in evaluating a student or, even more absurd, evaluating a teacher. Surely someone would suggest that it is the teacher who should be doing this diagnostic testing, but with the intrusion of high stakes testing into the teacher day, it is an insanity to suggest further testing. Soon we only weigh the cow. She gets no time to eat.
We have not had a conversation within teacher earshot on what type of testing is appropriate. Never in the past 20 years of rising emphasis on testing. This aspect of the testing controversy leads me to believe those who think that all of this is driven by those who would benefit financially by the failure of large groups of students.
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