Norm Scott, a retired New York City teacher, blogs at EdNotes Online. He posted today the onslaught against opt out in the mainstream media in New York City. Norm taught in low-income schools for many years. He was also the producer of one of the first anti-reform films: “The Inconvenient Truth About ‘Waiting for Superman.'”
I seriously doubt that any of the people who wrote these articles understand that the tests provide no useful information to teachers or parents. I wonder if any of them have school-age children. Teachers are not allowed to see the answers or to learn what their students got wrong. Parents get nothing more than a number (1, 2, 3, 4) and a percentile ranking. Do we really need to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to rank students yet learn nothing about their instructional needs? Do they know that the tests were designed to fail the majority of students? Can they explain why?
Norm Scott writes:
Every single link in today’s Rise and Shine is an assault on Opt-out.
Eva Moskowitz: Opt-out movement will leave students unprepared
“I really believe in the tests – I seem to be the only one left standing,” the Success Academy CEO said Friday afternoon, against the backdrop of thousands of children singing to pop songs whose lyrics were changed to extoll the virtues of learning and test preparation. Read more.
And follow up with these:
With state tests set to begin Tuesday, some are predicting that the opt-out movement will continue to grow, even though the consequences of those tests have diminished. Wall Street Journal
Plenty of New York City principals and parents still see the tests as a normal, and even helpful, part of a child’s school experience. New York Times
Some teachers have gone further in encouraging students to opt out by sending anti-testing information home to parents. New York Post
The nonprofit High Achievement New York has launched a counter-campaign, with the tagline “Say Yes to the Test.” New York Daily News
Al Sharpton says he opposes the opt-out movement because the test results help shine a light on educational inequality. New York Post, Politico New York
Upper West Side parents are still worried that opting out will hurt their children’s chances of admission to a selective middle school. DNAinfo
Success Academy CEO Eva Moskowitz said Friday that she seems “to be the only one left standing” supporting state tests, just after thousands of her students gathered for a “slam the exam” pep rally. Chalkbeat
Three Success Academy charter schools didn’t have copies of the tests last week, worrying school officials. New York Daily News
Editorial: Parents, you’ve been heard. Now have your kids take the damn tests. New York Daily News
Editorial: It’s “pathetic” to see education leaders across the city and state pander to the opt-outers. New York Post
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Wow. I’m a huge supporter of Diane, and of NPE, but I can’t handle the barrage of emails that started arriving in my inbox once I subscribed to the blog. I’m getting as many as SEVEN blog posts in a single day. It’s just too much. I’ve reluctantly unsubscribed.
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Leigh,
Just come here, read what you want and go from there!
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Yeah, just come here once a day or week to catch up. Interestingly enough, my husband who is not a teacher, is subscribed through RSS feeds and doesn’t mind one bit! 🙂
Wild isn’t it: 7-8 updates a day-a DAY!-regarding the corruption. These are our kids, the future of American democracy, we are talking about it.
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This is one of the most offensive
Al Sharpton says he opposes the opt-out movement because the test results help shine a light on educational inequality.
How about other manifestations of inequity Reverend Sharpton?
How about asking all members of the press who think the tests are essential and valuable to take the tests and publicize their scores? How about a contest to see who is brave enough to take that challenge, sit for all the tests, not just one subject at one grade level.
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Laura, Sharpton is a fraud, with a long history of back-door deals with Republicans to sabotage Democratic candidates, going back at least thirty years, when he endorsed the moronic and racist Al D’Amato for US senator over Democrat Mark Green. In 2001, he helped elect Michael Bloomberg mayor of NYC with attacks against Mark Green yet again, who was the Democratic nominee that year. The man is a documents FBI informant, and has long been a stealth operative for some of the nastier elements in the Republican Party. Wayne Barrett exposed his dealings with Republican Uber sleaze merchant Roger Stone (who is currently working with Donnie Trump) in the Village Voice years ago, charges the execrable Sharpton has never been able to refute.
That he would come out in favor of high stakes testing is to be expected, since he shilled for Michael Bloomberg and Joel Klein a number of years ago.
Rest assured that the National Action Network, the vanity group that is his fundraising vehicle, recently received a donation from one of the education malanthropists, and Al returned the favor.
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Juan Gonzalez of the NY Daily News reported a few years back that Sharpton was paid $500,000 by DFER to support charter schools
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Or: You seldom fight against what you can’t see? ciedieaech.wordpress.com/2015/09/10/lies-damn-lies-and-statistics
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Same tired old strategy of “blame the victim”. Since when is it bad for parents to be their child’s advocate? Parents, DO NOT ever back down to this criticism, your child’s future depends on your resolve.
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Thank God for Arne Duncan and John King. They pissed off the entire nation and got this opt-out ball rolling.
We owe them much.
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The NYSED tests developed by Pearson compare students and are designed to spread them along a bell shaped curve within which half the students have to be below average. The tests do not measure grade level curriculum knowledge only at appropriate reading levels. The tests are not valid measures to be used as the state claims.
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Brian Lehrer’s first segment today on his NPR show was about the opt-out movement. Sure enough the first call-in was a member of Student’s First who vigorously supported the tests with all the reformy talking points. Most call-ins appeared to support the opt-out movement. It’s too bad Diane wasn’t a call-in to counteract the Student’s First caller’s phony talking points.
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Michael, too bad I didn’t know about the show
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Brian Lehrer, and WNYC in general, have been loudspeakers for so-called reform for years now. They seem to have never met an edu-privateer whom they didn’t gladly do stenography for.
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Actually on this segment Lehrer seemed to be, if anything, a little skeptical of the Students First caller. Most callers seemed to support the opt-out movement.
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I mean, all well and good, but simple truth:
– NYC Opt-Out numbers will be super low, like last year…..perhaps even lower.
– the rest of the state Opt-Out numbers may be at best equal to last year or lower…..unfortunately either is a victory for the reform-minded of the state.
I live in a strong Opt-Out region and the talk and general push for opt-out has been tangibly lower than last year….remarkably lower. It’s been a topic among most of my colleagues. Don’t know how the numbers could be larger this year.
So, my question is this: what’s our game plan if opt-out exits the stage of meaning?
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NYS Teacher, very little of significance has changed in the testing. They still consume hours and hours. They provide insignificant information. If opt out numbers are not as high this year, parents will get fired up again next year. Most children will fail. That’s the way the tests are meant to be.
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Brian asked her about the funding for students first but she deflected saying they were grassroots and he let her get away with it. I tweeted at him to keep asking her and I bet others did too so at the end of the interview he pushed back a bit but not too hard.
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My middle school in WNY had 40% opt-outs today! A good 15-20% higher than last year.
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I’m a staunch upstate NY public-school middle-class opt-outer in a weaker opt-out region, and I see less interest in my community in opting out this year. Parents feel if their kid got a 3 or higher last year there’s no reason to opt out now. The opt-out messages we’ve heard emphasize that the test hurts struggling/poor kids, and that’s why you should opt out. That message is totally ignored by middle-class kids getting 3’s and higher. Hardly anyone is mentioning what I think is the most serious and scary problem: the TEST DRIVES/DETERMINES THE CURRICULUM, and because of it the curriculum now, frankly, sucks. And this affects EVERY child. Almost an entire quarter’s 7th grade ELA grade is based on ludicrous test prep practice. And it seems to me no parents are connecting the dots between the test and the content of the curriculum…or they simply don’t care.
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Excellent comments. I am seeing the same regarding the decline in opt outs.
Now in our fourth year of Pearson, Common Core testing – TEST PREP has become the NEW NORMAL. Budget cuts, staff cuts, program cuts, opportunity cuts – also the new normal. Give it another few years and most parents will not even know what their kids are missing.
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The idea that refusing the test hurts poor students is a ploy. They should have to explain how testing helps poor students because the reverse it true. Stack ranking does nothing to help the poor.
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I’m with you, Katy. For me, the reason to promote Opt-Out has always & still is about fighting the diminishment and warping of public school curriculum & pedagogy. Standardized– I.e., elsewhere-/ non-teacher-designed exams are by definition mediocre and remote from what is being taught in the classroom. So right off the bat they are stealing time from an already-tight schedule. IF one agrees that the state/fed must collect data, let it be occasionally, grade-span-wise. If govt must also collect annual data, let them do so by random sample– as they already do via NEAP.
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RageAgainst The Testocracy, I don’t think the parents are paying enough attention to notice the difference between the old curriculum and the new one under Common Core. And I keep thinking: do college professors have any inkling what is happening? Do they know the nightmare that is coming their way? In 6-7 years they are going to get a crop of robotic students who are even less equipped to think and write critically than before….even less imaginative, creative and innovative. Sometimes I think Common Core is designed to create robots that don’t need to go to college.
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Thanks for sharing the reason why I don’t subscribe to any of the newspapers listed in this blog piece. 90% of the mainstream media jumps to the tune of six, white male CEO’s paid millions annually. Only two of the six earn between 8 to 10 million. The rest earn much more every year.
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Long post. I hope that the Opt out movement is stronger than ever.
Here is another reason to opt out.
Test scores are collected and then marketed by greatschools.org. This non-profit is a sophisticated and well-funded system for gathering test scores and other information about students and parents, then selling that information. The website literally sells ads and licenses for access to test scores and other data on schools–public, private, and charter–with expansions planned for pre-school and daycare-centers.
This national data hog is funded by billionaire foundations unfriendly to public schools. The logos of the Gates, Walton, Robertson, and Arnold Foundations are prominently displayed. A list of 19 other supporters includes the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, Bradley Foundation, Goldman Sachs Gives, and New Schools Venture Fund among others. All of these supporters want to make public schools an artifact from the past.
Parents, if you patronize the tests, you feed the data hogs, and this one is one of the biggest.
Do not be naïve. Test scores are worth a lot of money and they are grist for publicity campaigns for projects and policies within and beyond your state. Here is an introduction to how greatschools uses test scores.
“The overall GreatSchools Rating is an average of how well students at a given school do on each grade and subject test. For each test, ratings are assigned based on how well students perform relative to all other students in the state, and these ratings are averaged into an overall rating of 1 to 10.”
“The distribution of the GreatSchools Rating in a given state looks like a bell curve, with higher numbers of schools getting ratings in the “average” category, and fewer schools getting ratings in the “above average” or “below average” categories.”
For states where ratings can also include student growth and college readiness information, the overall GreatSchools Rating is an average of how well students do on each sub-rating.” There are three sub-ratings.
1. Test Scores: “The test score sub-rating examines how students at a school performed on standardized tests compared with other schools in the state. Specifically, this rating compares student proficiency rates for each grade and subject with all schools in the state. “ (Note that “proficiency” is not defined).
2. Student Growth: This “sub-rating looks at how much progress individual students have made on reading and math assessments during the past year or more. This sub-rating is based on student growth models, which can vary from state to state. (Greatschools recycles data from each state’s value-added measure, percentile growth calculation or comparable “growth” measure. Growth is a euphemism for a calculation that requires the test scores of individual students for more than one year. These calculations, based on gains in test scores, are notoriously misleading. They assume, for example, that there are no major differences in the math and reading tests that a student takes in the third and the fourth grade).
3. College Readiness: This sub-rating combines a high school graduation rate with data about the student scores on college entrance exams (SAT, ACT). These “are indicators of how well schools are preparing students for success in college and beyond.”
Now comes the “weighting” of these dubious measures derived from test scores. Here you go. Begin quote:
Sub-ratings are weighted equally, though actual weights depend on the amount of data available per school and what grades that school serves.
For instance, a K-5 school has no college readiness data, so the overall rating would be based 50% on student achievement and 50% on student growth.
In contrast, the rating for a high school with data for all three measures would be based 33% on student achievement, 33% on student growth, and 33% on college readiness.
Each sub-rating represents how a school compares to all other schools in the state on each measure, and these sub-ratings are averaged into an overall rating.” More detail is at http://www.greatschools.org/catalog/pdf/New_Ratings_Methodology_Report.pdf
It is not surprising that this system gives the highest possible rating to the notoriously test-driven Success Academy in NY. Take a look at some other ratings here http://www.greatschools.org/about/ratings.page
Poke around the greatschools website to see how this non-profit can operate as a mega for-profit operation serving big box stores, and multiple industries— financial, real estate, charter expansions, testing and text publishers.
The gigantic “partner” basket at this website offers eclectic fare: It includes Walmart, Target, Yale Center for Social Emotional Intelligence, Survey Monkey, Forbes, US Department of Housing and Urban Development, Dunn & Bradstreet, US Department of Education, Goldman Sachs, and more .
“The website says that “A range of partners have been critical to GreatSchools’ success. We are grateful to these partners, a sampling of which can be found here.”
Look at the list and remember this is JUST a sampling and notice how partners are categorized.
CONTENT: 321 Fast Draw; Algonquin Books; Ashoka Foundation; Bay Citizen; California Watch; College Board; Common Sense Media; DK Publishing; Film Sight Productions; IDEO; Learning Ally; Learning and Leadership Center; Mind/Shift; National Center for Learning Disabilities; Parenting.com; Reading Rockets; Scholastic; Treasure Bay, Inc.; UCLA Department of Psychology; US Department of Education; Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence.
COMMUNITY AND FAMILY ENGAGEMENT: Families Empowered; Hillsborough County Public Schools; Iridescent Learning; KIPP; Magnet Schools of America; Miami Dade County Public Schools; Rocketship Education; Stand Up for Students; Step Up for Students; US Department of Housing and Urban Development
RESEARCH: Gallup Education; SurveyMonkey (see also Licensees); SRI; Rockman Et Al.
MARKETING & OUTBOUND MEDIA: Care2.com; Common Sense Media; Forbes; NBC News Education; The Bully Project; Univision.
LICENSEES: Apartments.com, Brain Pop; Digital Map Products; Dunn & Bradstreet; Fannie Mae; Maponics; Michael & Susan Dell Foundation; Military Child Education Coalition; Move Sales, Inc.; National Association of Charter School Authorizers; National Housing Trust; Onboard Informatics; Policy Map; Realtors Property Resource; SurveyMonkey; Target, US Department of Housing and Urban Development; Walmart; WolfNet; Zillow.
What do these “partners get” for signing on? At minimum, it is the opportunity to become an advertiser or license holder who can gain access to your student’s test scores—for a fee.
The greatschools website gives you some ad rates that direct you to https://selfserve.rubiconproject.com/advertise3/products/29619
At the bottom of the great schools rate page you can see that these advertising packages are offered via the Rubicon Project (bottom right of the page. Click on Rubicon Project to see what this “project “is.)
The Rubicon Project is the name for a company that scoops all of greatschools data and ratings and comments and personal information from users of the greatschools website and puts them in Rubicon’s “Advertising Automation Cloud.”
This data warehousing operation “brings buyers and sellers closer together on a robust advertising technology platform. One of the largest cloud and Big Data computing systems in the world, the Automation Cloud leverages over 50,000 algorithms and analyzes billions of data points in real-time to deliver the best results for sellers and buyers,” with 300 real-time data-driven decisions per transaction.”
Follow the money. The billionaire foundations gather the test scores and other information about schools. They are notoriously in favor of market-based education. The scores are translated into their dubious but “custom” rating scheme with direct links to Zillow (who has paid for a high end license).
The data and ratings and user data from the website migrate out from the greatschools website to Rubicon. For a fee, Rubicon facilitates rapid and custom access to the data and ratings from their “cloud,” (a data warehouse), promising clients they can “Efficiently find your target audience;” “build brand awareness,” “acquire new customers, and re-engage existing customers.”
https://selfserve.rubiconproject.com/advertise3/products/29619
I hope that this information gives parents another reason to opt out of the tests.
Greatschools has test data from every state, has a map of district boundaries searchable by zip codes, and it is seeking data well beyond that required by state or federal regulation such as such as schools safety, cleanliness, and parent involvement.
Do not feed the data hog. Do not make the billionaires smile. Opt of the tests.
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“Test scores are collected and then marketed by greatschools.org. This non-profit is a sophisticated and well-funded system for gathering test scores and other information about students and parents, then selling that information. ”
Seriously? Isn’t that against a federal law? Also, how detailed is this database? Do they have, for example, the actual correct and incorrect answers of a child (so not just the total score but actual answers to questions)?
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Exemplifies today’s journalism: political pronouncements & issue-related opinion covered as if reporting facts, like the migration of birds or a traffic accident.
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I AM SO VERY PLEASED (and personally shocked) to say that yesterday (April 4) one of our news channels here in Denver actually covered an OPT OUT meeting with no humiliating/denigrating comments; it was generally a straightforward human interest piece and it was produced NEAR THE BEGINNING OF THE NEWSCAST, not tucked away into the last few minutes. I am still in shock. You can find the piece by going to youtube and then typing in Denver 7 News Opt Out into the search box.
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Thank you RageAgainstTheTestocarcy for your accurate statement – “Give it another few years and most parents will not even know what their kids are missing.”
According to my mother’s GOLDEN advice, those rich technocrats inadvertently harm themselves from DAMAGING CREATIVITY of many upcoming American young generations WITH ALL NONSENSICAL TESTING SCHEME. There will not be any middle classes to exist within 10 years from today because all young Americans are becoming submissive robot-workers
All CORRUPTED leaders in religion, public educational administration, and charter businesses will lose their freedom sooner or later in their golden age. There are no kindness or caring in education except money robbing, and racial business-warriors.
I guess that what goes around, will come around. It would happen within this life on earth to these corrupted and crooked leaders who promote global control, and who will become the hunted in lieu of the hunters. It is just horrible to think of greedy corporate and leaders kill each other over money and power that they cannot even carry with them after the death.
It is so simple to provide/educate all children with 12 innocent years in a whole child education concept. Society will become better place to live in the old age. Back2basic
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Back in the ’60s, the “establishment” didn’t like the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement. After all, it was Robert Kennedy, as Attorney General, who had Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. bugged.
In the 70s, they didn’t like the environmental movement, or the women’s movement, so one heard the term “the Me generation” applied as a pejorative.
In the 80s, they didn’t like the resistance to intervening in Central America or the Freeze movement, so Morley Safer and 60 Minutes attacked the World Council of Churches.
In 1992, Roone Arledge, supporter of Bill Clinton, used ABC News to attack Jerry Brown on the eve of the New York primary, saying that Gov Brown oversaw drug parties at the governor’s mansion in the 70s.
Things don’t change.
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At least back then we had investigative reporters, whose work revealed actual scandals (not Beyoncé had a wardrobe malfunction or what Trump said yesterday).
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“Every single link in today’s Rise and Shine is an assault on Opt-out.”
Is this what Chalkbeat sends out every day? If yes, it must be state specific, since I didn’t see any article today about opt out in Rise and Shine digest.
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There is a Chalkbeat in NYC, in Tennessee, in Indiana, and in Denver.
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Did anyone else notice that the families interviewed in the Kate Taylor New York Times article were all Asian immigrants? Hardly a representative sample.
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Thought you might be interested in this (see link below from yesterday’s AJC). More shenanigans out of Georgia.
Do you know, by the way, that while the OSD legislation allows for 4 different options for managing (the up to 20 per year) schools taken over by the state, at the same time, Georgia’s DOE applied for a federal grant to kick-start 20 new charters over each of the next few years, based on the passage of the OSD? #1 – there was never any intent for state management and eventual return to local control, and #2 – they’re applying for (and got) federal funding to charterized every OSD school, before the initiative even passed. Fun factoid.
Best,
Leigh Dingerson
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