Julia Sass Rubin, who lives in New Jersey, points out that the threat of cutting off federal funding is empty. No federal official would stop funding Title I schools, attended by the poorest children. The administrative funding for the program is $3.3 million.
Is $3.3 million a big deal? Not really. The state of New Jersey has spent over $8 million to defend Governor Chris Christie in Bridgegate.
$3.3 million to protect your children is a good deal.
Opt Out in 2016.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The 2015 total federal budget allocation is sixty-nine billion dollars. Three quarters of that sixty-nine million dollar budget is used towards financial aid, special education, and high poverty schools; otherwise known as title I schools. Therefore if there were any issues within the New Jersey title I school system, our government accountant personal’s could reallocate the extra or over abundance funds to schools that have depleted or non-existent funds. There is also New Jersey state funds that allocate towards the education systems in case of dire need. I hope I could give you proper sense of security.
When the people in charge fail to listen to citzens and continue to make bad decisions that freeze out the major stakeholders, protest is the only means of communicating with oppressive forces. Opting out send a message to our leaders that they cannot continue to hijack democracy.
Yes. If they continue to base a school funding on a “95%” test-taking rate — a rate which has severely penalized our nation’s poorest schools for many long years now — maybe the rest of the nation will stand up and break the back of this horrific game?
Florida is playing hardball with Opting Out, sending letters home to students declaring that even when the students sit down, break the seal, and refrain from answering the questions there will be punishment.
That was the strategy being pushed by Florida Opt Out movement parents to avoid causing harm to the teachers and schools.
The state is having none of it. They are running scared, and, in typical bully fashion, they are overreaching, overreacting, and overstepping their boundaries.
Many parents who were neutral are getting angrier by the minute over these heavy-handed pronouncements and they are feeling that their parental rights are being violated and threatened by overzealous state bureaucrats.
The state knows that without the FSA data the whole punishment/degradation of teachers and public schools facade comes tumbling down. Like cornered rats they are desperately lashing out, saying that students will be held back without test scores and that high school students will not be able to select classes without them.
The anger among parents is now palpable when it was largely absent with a few exceptions last year at testing time. We have whole schools in our district where parents are meeting and planning Opting Out strategies whereas last year there were only about 5 or 6 Opt Outs.
Way to go Pam Steward and FLDOE!
Stewart. Sorry, autocorrect strikes again!
So glad Julia Sass Rubin provided this New Jersey article with some nitty-gritty for assessing the threat of DOEd letter to states regarding risk of loss of fed funds for those which had less than 95% of students taking ESSA-approved annual state stdzd tests.
Let’s take a closer look at the numbers for NJ. Whalen says less-than-95% states could be sanctioned in one or more of three ways:
1. Lose the 1% portion of Title I funds assigned to administration. (That would be Trenton). Wrist slap! Total Title I funds to NJ $339million incl admin portion of… $3.3million. Excuse me while I snort. Current NJS budget is $58+ billion, of which about 40% is uncollectable from expected receipts. So we’ll add $24billion to the state’s $200-ish billionth debt. How will they even miss $3.3million?
2. Offending Title I schools could be labelled ‘at risk’, or worse, have their Title I funds reduced or redirected. This is the bassackward ed-reform that gets me mad– despite all the claims it’s ‘never been exercised’. High-income school districts receive little or no Title I funds, & are the likeliest to do well on these tests. They can opt out or not. The great majority of NJ districts receiving significant Title I funds [obviously] are in our poorest districts– mostly big inner-city schools but also poor rural schools in S Jersey; the folks who historically get the lowest test-scores. So, poor folk: whether or not you mind sacrificing months of curriculum to test-prep & testing, you’d better become test-taking robots or risk losing needed funds.
3. Offending schools may have grant $ reduced or re-directed, re: Ed Title VI ‘Flexibility & Accountability, Part A ‘Improving Student Achievement’, Sections 6111 & 6112. This is fed grant $ for devpg challenging stds & assessments, plus ‘enhanced assessments’. Can’t find data on who got it this year, but any school can apply. Let’s assume all do: total state grant $8.8million; ave for each of our 2,467 schools = $3,567… hardly worth the pprwk to apply [for context: even if all 9 schools in my pop 31k town district got their share– $10,700 total– that’s 0.0001 of our $89,000,000 school budget
What do the numbers really say as regards NJ-OPT-OUT?…
(All my comments below are along the lines of, can NJ be the next big OPT-OUT state?)
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The fed numbers say, the best hope for initial spurring of NJ opt-out is among hi-priced district parents who have no immediate stake in Title I, but do have the time, education, & career background to speak up when they observe the curriculum-dumbing-down effects of über-testing.
Anecdotally I am familiar w/several hi-priced districts in central/northern Jersey. PARCC was administered for the first time last year (2014-15).
On one hand, it was the first computerized test, administered twice during spring semester, so it caused much curricular interruption. At that point it was the teachers who noted the huge loss of time for spring projects, & time lost in regular gym, library, computer labs (due to the 4 wks facility time eaten up by testing)– but I can’t be sure that impact trickled down to parents.
On the other hand the kids sailed thro it w/o issue. I also have noted that local supts are toeing the line & pushing the importance of state assessments… The state has tamped down concerns by announcing that this yr’s PARCC will be shorter & administered once only… and scores won’t count in teacher-evaln for another 4 yrs…
All of which does not offer much promise of immediate buy-in by hi-priced-district parents
However there are other factors in play in NJ.
I. Property Taxes
NJ has the highest property taxes in the nation, which are pushed higher for upper, mid-upper, & middle class folk by our noble but expensive Robin Hood method of routing above-ave RE-taxes to poorest school districts. This means we have a broader swath of folks w/high stake in public schools (than in NY & most states).
I can only be anecdotal here, but it seems that in my immediate (central-north) area the main opt-out push is coming from nearby Montclair, which is a polyglot of hi-, lo-, & middle-income folks.. which suggests opt-out can be fruitful in middle-class areas.
And there is a huge contingent of native New Jerseyans– mostly middle-class or lower, whose folks or grandfolks settled here due to mfg jobs which have shriveled– who foresee shortly being priced out of their home state, forced into moving south or west, due primarily to high property-taxes— the majority of which go to paying for their public schools.
Many of these folk have already been pressured into the test-&-punish system promoted by DOEd & furthered by Christie. Tho many of them are knee-jerk Republicans, seems to me they are ripe for converting to Opt-Out, all they need to know is how much the tests/ test-admin cost their districts, & how thin the results, & what they are losing in terms of usable curriculum. It should be noted here that even extreme-right-wing NJ Republicans are pragmatists (as opposed to their ideological Southern counterparts).
II. New Jersey’s high Ed-Achievement Record
This goes back for many decades. NJ is accustomed to placing among the top 5 states by any measure of achievement. Currently we place #2 on NEA’s measure of lowest student-to-teacher ratio (2nd I think to VT), and #2 on edweek’s ranking of ed-achievement (2nd to MA).
This should be huge in terms of potential for Opt-Out. It tells NJ taxpayers: OK, granted you’ve been paying the highest national RE taxes– which fund your schools– and you’ve seen the results, your kids have been among the top achievers in the nation for decades.
Thinking taxpayers might reasonably conclude that NJ’s pre-CCSS state ed stds, & its system of teacher-designed tests aligned to those stds, are at the core of their decades-long high performance… AND they might get a clue, if educated on the subject, that current state buy-in to national stds & consortium-aligned assessments– whose only purpose is to ‘prove’ compliance to Uncle Sam– can only bring NJ students’ achievement lower, more in line with the norm.
III. Marzano Teacher Evaluation
OK, this could be minor in the overall NJ Opt-Out picture. It takes a student of the ed issues to focus on VAM– but I think we may have many such potential students hiding among upper-middle class parents.
The Marzano Evaluation System was piloted in NJ in 2011-2012, & expanded to all districts in2013-2014, just 2 yrs prior to implementation of PARCC. And those who study VAM understand that while NJ PARCC scores may have been moratorium’ed, Marzano’s byzantine system is still in effect– Sep testing [45-min per subject] to see where students are at, vs the the [easily-gamed] projection of where they should be in June/accompanied by another 45-min test in every subject. [Über-testing! Add it to the annual tests…]
Simply as a member of a regional chorus I overheard among colleagues [who happened to be local district teachers] in 2013: the initial Autumn paperwork (which got started a month late in my town) reqd filling out 37 pages of curricular goals etc. I picked up on the local patch that some parents were onto the new system & disliked that their kids’ teachers were burdened off-hours by state pprwk, taking away from teaching energy.
Given what a BS system this is [it duplicates MBO systems I was required to administer in 1980’s biz projects– a system long debunked & abandoned by biz], I cannot help but think many educated career parents in the upper-mid class– who pay outrageous RE taxes but can’t afford to send multiple kids to private school–
would jump onboard not only opt-out [once they have the stats on what it’s costing them to dumb-down their kids’ ed]– but SLO VAM as well.
“In the heart of a child, one moment …. can last forever.”
About this testing …
There is no virtue in making children so brave that they might withstand the idiocy of adults. Nor is there any virtue in lying to children so as to protect adult ridiculousness. And when adults trip over their own commandments and reason away the subtle wounding of children … then they themselves have committed a great sin.
Childhood is an extraordinary moment. It has its own sanctity because it is the maker of first memories … and we make big deals of firsts in our lives. And first memories should never be ugly. Not ever.
But what has become of us? Why have we arrived at this moment when children become fair game in an adult controversy? Instinct tells us never to place children in the middle of a muddle. But here we are … hearing unbelieving tales of adult unfairness that seem such the antithesis of what is expected from the guardians of our children.
Life is a long frustration. The great beauty of maturity is that we learn to keep our cool and to react only to the most insistent frustrations. Adults learn to separate the important from the unimportant … and it prevents us from the nasty human inclination to settle on easy scapegoats … and then to punish the weakest and most vulnerable.
Scapegoats are born of frustrations adults cannot control … and we have loads of frustration surrounding this wretched reform. But frustration is never a green light to exercise a disturbing dominance over the smallest of the small. If that is the first impulse of an adult, then they are in a queer orbit.
Children cut off from pizza parties and ice cream treats because their parents exercised their right right of refusal? Little humans in little desks made to sit and stare for hours … in of all places … a school? Children confronted by some towering goliath … insisting that they revoke their parents’ own wishes?
What the hell is going on here? Where is the wisdom in gluing children to desks for hours as they squirm their way through some asinine educational gauntlet that has no real purpose other than to pay homage to some testing god? Who thought that a good idea?
This is a mess that cannot be unmessed. When will we start all over … and get this straight?
Is this how children should ever be treated? Are there not school campaigns to disarm bullies … and to champion kindness? Have those champions vanished? Were those just paper heroics? Empty nonsense? I sense adult ugliness seeping through a holy firewall behind which childhood is protected. It seems too many are now comfortable liars … even with children. And worse, some have become hypocrites.
There is never an excuse to scar a child. And if you’re in the child business … that sort of action condemns you to a special sort of hell.
For children, school is a majestic cathedral. A near shrine where every minute should be crammed with as much wonder as a minute might hold. To disturb that atmosphere is to violate the inviolate,
A school has no place or space for anyone unable to plug into their memory bank for recollections of their own childhood. If one cannot stay linked with with the memories of their own past, perhaps they shouldn’t be in the memory-making business at all.
When one’s memory of childhood evaporates, so does one’s empathy. And that is a signal to move on.
“Childhood is a short season.” Give it its due.
Denis Ian