Fred LeBrun, a columnist for the Albany Times-Union, wrote a terrific column about the power of the parents who opted out.
Without the pressure they exerted, Governor Cuomo would never have appointed a commission to review the Common Core standards and testing.
Without the force of their numbers, the state education department would have proceeded to evaluate teachers by student test scores, despite the research proving its invalidity.
Opt Out parents caused Cuomo’s poll numbers to plummet, and that got his attention. Poll numbers can outweigh hedge fund cash.
Here is part of LeBrun’s perceptive column:
According to the latest Siena poll, education has jumped to the top of the list for what matters most to New Yorkers, ahead of jobs, taxes, and that perennial favorite, governmental corruption.
Granted, education is a wide umbrella covering higher and lower ed, funding, curricula, charter schools, and a lot more, plus the poll indicates the greatest concern for education is held by downstate Democrats.
They’ve got the numbers to dictate the poll. But at the least we can reliably say the poll affirms how important public education consistently remains for upstaters and downstaters alike.
When it’s that important to voters, it’s critical to politicians.
In the brash youth of his governorship, Andrew Cuomo confidently swaggered to war against teachers and the “educational bureaucracy,’’ which it turns out is mostly parents, by trying to impose a cockamamie Common Core system that brutally punished school children and a punitive and grossly unfair teacher evaluation system, all in the name of “reform.”
Washington, in the embrace of billionaire advocates of privatizing public education, applauded.
So did New York hedge-funders promoting charters.
The governor used all his cunning and considerable available resources to get his way, and even beat up the Legislature to become complicit.
Yet he got his ass handed to him. By whom? By the most potent force there is in public education, the public.
Cuomo’s poll numbers fell through the floor. In December, the governor sent up the white flag and sued for peace with a landmark Common Core review commission report that made 21 splendid, common sense recommendations to put New York public education back on track.
In his State of the State this year about all he had to say on the subject was urging the Board of Regents to pass all 21 recommendations.
That’s exactly what the Regents should do, and we have every high hope they will once two new progressive members of the 17-member Regents are appointed by the Legislature, and once the Regents leadership becomes more enlightened and attuned, which is also imminent.
There are several factors behind why the governor lost the war, including a change of heart in Washington, but high among them is the Opt Out movement that last spring kept 220,000 New York pupils from taking the state’s ridiculous standardized tests.
Opt Out has been the most powerful in-your-face, can’t-ignore referendum on the governor’s policies since he took office.
So here’s the irony of Opt Out for the governor, post-truce.
If there is another Opt Out uprising this spring, the popularity fallout will still be the governor’s to reap even though he has been forced to see the light and change course. In the public’s eye he remains the architect of that dismally failed model for public education.
It should come as no surprise that Opt Out is a very real possibility again this year.
That’s because there’s a Grand Canyon between the considerable rhetoric of change we’ve heard and the reality of where we actually stand with altering or eliminating high stakes testing and the Common Core, teacher evaluations, and inappropriate pressures on our youngest citizens.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
And the best part about opting out is the parents don’t have to come to grips with their own Johnny/Sallie not being at the top of their class!
Horse manure!
Señor Swacker: interesting—no?—that the same person that summarily dismisses your well-founded criticisms of standardized testing as “metaphysical excuses” comes out with a vacuous bromide as useless as an alleged fever for all parents to stack rank their own children against all other children.
I can say with certainty from personal experience that it is not only not a universal feature of all parents at all times in all places in all circumstances, but also that parents can say the opposite depending on how issues are framed and what is at stake and so on.
And the best part of abandoning even the pretense of “data analytics” is that one can resort to “metaphysical excuses” as meaningless as forcing on every parent the notion of forced ranking of young people.
Neat trick, huh?
🙄
One doesn’t even need to come up with a number for the numerator and a number for the denominator to give us a stat on how many parents think that way.
You know, plus or minus a margin of error of 13 percent to 90 percent.
“I reject that mind-set.” [Michelle Rhee]
But admit it: we knew she would say that.
😎
P.S. I do, however, take issue with one of your points. You have given horse manure a bad name. Remember: used properly it can help your garden grow. It’s actually useful for something.
On the other hand, “metaphysical excuses” for forced ranking kids is…
I almost forgot the ‘Rules of the Road’ for this blog. Don’t want to be an unruly guest in this particular online living room so let’s leave the rest of the sentence up to another “metaphysical excuse” called “imagination.”
😏
Doesn’t really matter. Top in rigged test doesn’t put you in top of the class.
Your cluelessness is becoming legendary here VAgsp.
Common Core test scores in grades 3 to 8 were never used to determine “top of the class”. Based on arbitrary cut scores, students are ranked as follows:
NYS Level 1: Students performing at this level are well below proficient in standards for their grade. They demonstrate limited knowledge, skills, and practices embodied by the New York State P-12 Common Core Learning Standards for Mathematics that are considered insufficient for the expectations at this grade.
NYS Level 2: Students performing at this level are partially proficient in standards for their grade. They demonstrate knowledge, skills, and practices embodied by the New York State P-12 Common Core Learning Standards for Mathematics that are considered partial but insufficient for the expectations at this grade. Students performing at Level 2 are considered on track to meet current New York high
school graduation requirements but are not yet proficient on Common Core Learning Standards at this grade.
NYS Level 3: Students performing at this level are proficient in standards for their grade. They demonstrate knowledge, skills, and practices embodied by the New York State P-12 Common Core Learning Standards for Mathematics that are considered sufficient for the expectations at this grade.
NYS Level 4: Students performing at this level excel in standards for their grade. They demonstrate knowledge, skills, and practices embodied by the New York State P-12 Common Core Learning Standards for Mathematics that are considered more than sufficient for the expectations at this grade.
Sample Scaled Score Designations
Grade 4: 137-282 = 1 283-313 = 2 314-340 = 3 341-405 = 4
Grade 8: 124-286 = 1 287-321 = 2 322-348 = 3 349-400 = 4
These are not criterion referenced tests. Scores do not indicate % of items correct. They do NOT provide any useful information for students, teachers, or parents. Even Governor Cuomo has called the scores “meaningless.”
There is now a four year moratorium on the use of Common Core test scores. They cannot be used to retain or place students, they cannot be used in teacher evaluations (local exams are used instead), and they cannot be used to punish schools. Why would any parent want to put their child through these 8+hours of testing for “meaningless” scores that do nothing to improve teaching or learning. In fact VAgsp they now have a 3 year record of FAILURE in NYS. They have produced chronic, institutional artificial failure rates that have inflicted all harm and no good. They waste time and they waste money and they waste opportunities that never see the light of day. The fog of testing has not inspired one single student in 15 years
I think that the imminent verdict from the Sheri Lederman case must also be considered a factor. Recent developments indicate that the state is running scared.
I for one, don’t feel much bite has been taken away from Quid Pro Cuomo’s law. It seems to me that VAMs will still determine much of a teacher’s rating no matter how much you kick the can down the road or put lipstick on that pig. Let’s hope that the parents won’t be fooled. As a teacher, my advice to parents is to kill the testing machine which continues to suck so many resource from your children’s education- opt out!
I love the zany contradictions of ed reform. Here’s John Kasich:
“I propose taking 104 federal education programs, putting them into four buckets and sending them to the states. I have been clear from the very beginning that I support high standards and local control. That’s exactly what we do in Ohio. Our state school board approves the standards, and the local school boards are the ones that create the curriculum,” Kasich said, adding, “I am for total local control.”
He literally took over an entire city school system with a vote where there was no debate and they rushed it through in 48 hours so no one in the public could read it.
It gets better! The law they used to remove local control in Youngstown? That’s just the start. They have big plans to expand it to other cities.
I cannot remember a governor in this state who has shown less support for public schools or public school students. He will leave Ohio public schools worse off than the day he arrived. He contributed absolutely nothing to the existing system of public schools and actually harmed a lot of public schools. It’s a net loss for the people in this state.
It’s nice to see “the right of the people…to petition the Government for a redress of grievances” in action and what’s more, actually having an effect. This is how it’s supposed to work, this is what politicians don’t want to deal with, actually doing their jobs, doing the people’s work and getting re elected based on that work, not on riding the donor class’s coat tails while carrying their water.
Except that Cuomo has not really changed course, but just (temporarily) tweaked things, with the connivance of UFT mis-leader Michael Mulgrew, since the law remains unchanged, and test scores are still 50% of our evaluations.
There was no change of course, just a temporary tactical retreat, smoke and hot air.
True, but Optout and movements like it tend to thrive and grow in the face of such pathetic and venal deceptions. There’s only so far into the corner that Cuomo can paint himself.
Modern Day School Reform: A world with apparently no end to the endless proliferation of smoke screens and shell games…