New York appears to be in resistance mode. Governor Andrew Cuomo passed a tax cap when he first took office, requiring a 60% supermajority to raise the school budget more than 2% in any year.
Despite the millions spent by billionaires to prove to New Yorkers that their local public schools are failing, the voters gave them a vote of confidence. 98% of districts passed their school budget, some overriding the tax cap.
In addition, many new school board members were elected, including supporters of the opt-out movement and teachers.
The current estimate, reported in this story, is that the opt out numbers were as large this year as last year, that is, about 20% of all the state’s students in grades 3-8.
Opt out continues to be a powerful tide, and there is no indication that it is diminishing. As long as the high stakes testing continues, so will the opt out movement.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I am so glad to read this article because it tells us that the public has come to see that the billionaires who have taken over our whole education system didn’t have the students in mind when they made up all their curriculums. beginning with NCLB they were a mess with a total lack of awareness of the different stages of growth students go through. The brain is not fully developed when a child is born, it takes time to mature and each stage of that maturity must be respected to let the child fully develop her brain. That is what elementary school is about. Pearson has no educational background and no teaching experience yet he has come into this country and taken over the teaching of our children with the help of our secretary of education , at the time, and the billionaires who are all in love with the goods they are selling to the schools not the kids for sure. The standardized tests that they have increased at least 100 fold are Laughable because they are so badly made up. those tests were made up after the second world war. There were so many veterans who wanted to make use of the free collage tuition available to them that the colleges couldn’t take them all so they made up those tests to have a reason why they couldn’t take them all. It was a quick an easy way to solve the problem Tests made up by someone who has never even met the student and don’t have an educational background are not a reliable means of judging a student because they were not knowledgeable enough about the student’s education background. In fact some times I wonder if the billionaire really wanted it that way. Did they really want to dumb down the public schools because they were pushing private schools? Lots of control there and also control. I hope the opt-out movement grows by leaps and bounds.
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We have to continue to educate the public and push the opt out movement as well. As long as the powers that be continue to support rating and ranking with standardized tests, we have to remind people that the tests do nothing to improve education and have done great damage already. Testing is too embedded in the culture to declare victory too soon.
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The vast majority of school budgets that pass offer nothing much beyond the old “contingency” plans for minimal school funding. The 98% pass rate is not as impressive as it seems.
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