The Education Writers Association reviews the state of the opt out movement, nationally, presenting a variety of perspectives. M
Once again, we hear the complaint that opt outs endanger the validity of the tests, but that’s nonsense if your concern is for individual living children, rather than data. No matter how many opt out, those who take the test will still get s score. The only thing that gets compromised is the ability to rank schools and districts on a bell curve. Tough.
Once again, we hear the complaint that opt out is concentrated among white families. So what? If families hate the over testing of their children, they should act on their concerns, whatever their race.
The article does not mention the reasons for lower rates of black and Hispanic participation in opt outs: fear that their school might be closed; fear of punishment; lack of information, which is spread through social media; and the Gates-funded disinformation campaign against opting out, which has misled some civil rights groups to support high-stakes testing that labels and stigmatizes children of color.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
What I don’t get about the opt-out movement is its apparent opposition to charter schools, which is just another form of opting out of the traditional public school system.
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If you don’t understand the opposition to charter schools either you haven’t been reading here or your reading comprehension is pretty poor. Diane has probably thousands of posts on that very subject. Happy reading.
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“Blog Topics” then “Charter Schools”
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Yes, but at the same time opting in to institutions that have focused obsessively, even pathologically, (arguably), on testing as a measure of educational attainment, which is why there is a correlation between supporting testing opt out and opposing charter schools.
Both strategies have similar goals–to reduce the amount of testing to which students are subjected.
Do you understand?
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The claims that test refusals are primarily White and wealthy are not accurate for New Jersey. Our PARCC refusal numbers were the second highest in the country (behind only NY) and the demographics of those who refused largely mirrored those of all eligible test takers in the state. In fact, the percentage of Black students whose families refused PARCC was slightly higher than the percentage of Black students eligible to take PARCC.
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Help me out a bit, Dienne. I read quite widely, including Diane’s writings, and don’t recall any that explain the difference between the opt-out movement and the charter movement. thanks
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pbmeyer, perhaps I can help.
When public school parents opt out, they are deciding on their own not to have their child take an exam that the parents have taken the time to look at and have found seriously wanting. The public school administration itself cannot force their child to take the exam nor force them NOT to take the exam.
Contrast this with charter schools where the administration has the power to “opt out” the students who have low scores whether the parents want them to take an exam or not. But while public school parents are completely up front about wanting their children to “opt out” of the exam and happy to explain why, the charter school that wants the student to “opt out” (i.e. disappear from the school) has to invent all kinds of reasons why the student disappeared. They don’t just make the straightforward statement that “we were having a really tough time educating the child and we wanted him gone so his test score didn’t hurt our PR.”
Does that help? If not, please let me know and I can try to elaborate more.
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PB…on Diane’s blog, click “blog topics”, then choose “Charter Schools”.
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In our area, the opt-out movement didn’t include many of the second language learners for numerous reasons. Many of the parents don’t speak the language much less read about the movement. One woman I spoke to via an interpreter- her child- had no idea what I was asking when I ask her if she was going to opt-out her children. I assumed that she didn’t have any background on the topic so I was prepared with information. I ran off information about the standardized test and all the reasons why the tests were invalid and a waste of time. I gave her the information in both English and Spanish. I also enclosed a letter she could send to the superintendent and her principal. Days later in her broken English she informed me that she sent/ handed in the letter.
Throughout LI there are heavy concentrations of second language learners – many illegals. Parents who are struggling to put food on their tables trust the school system to do right with their child. For sure the parents of the second language learner have so much to learn about their environment and the legal system, they aren’t going to challenge the school system.
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“Throughout LI there are heavy concentrations of second language learners – many illegals. Parents who are struggling to put food on their tables trust the school system to do right with their child. For sure the parents of the second language learner have so much to learn about their environment and the legal system, they aren’t going to challenge the school system.”
Mary – I read the empathy in your post. Might I suggest that “undocumented”is a less loaded word than “illegal”?
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pbmeyer2014,
The opt-out movement aims to get rid of the harmful standardized test that are aligned to the CCSS. Just because they are against the CCSS standardized testing doesn’t mean they don’t appreciate their public school. They are two different issues and related only in the way the Powers that Be look upon the results of the tests. Negative results will give them the freedom to close the public school and hand it over to the privateers. However, if enough parents opt-out the Powers that Be won’t have the ammunition it needs to close the schools.
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Sorry pbmeyer, that response was meant for 4kupsdad.
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To pbmeyer2014
If Dienne would be busy to explain the difference between the opt-out movement and the charter movement, then I would be happy to try to differentiate the difference for you.
In very simple and plain English language,
1) The OPT OUT movement is to restore the whole child education in which children in K-12 will have proper and appropriate resources, fund and curriculum level to learn within children’s pace of learning from ELL, disability or special Ed, general or AP (Applied program) and IB program (International Baccalaureate). Also, the OPT OUT movement is to sustain and to improve Teachers’ tenure rights or their due process rights for a protection in speaking out for students’ rights.
2) The Charter movement is created and manipulated by all business tycoons in order:
a) to LOOT public fund that supports Public Education and educate all children regardless their parental income, ethnicity, religion, education and political creed
b) to DEGRADE teaching profession by hiring unqualified people without criminal and educational background check-up.
c) to intimidate and threat children with all military punishing style.
If you know more than what I know from all parents and veteran educators, welcome to express your knowledge and experience. Back2basic.
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Back2basic –
You are just the best! Thank you.
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I appreciate the attempts to explain the differences between the opt-out and charter school movements. Unfortunately, to my ear it sounds like name calling not reasoning. In fact, both the opt-out and charter school movements are variations on a theme: democracy in action. The opt-outers are parents who don’t like these tests and, in great American style, have mobilized and voted on the subject with their feet. They have sent a message and had an impact on policy. Charter school parents have also mobilized and voted with their feet. The claims that the opt-outers don’t impact the public school system is inaccurate; as is the claim that charter parents don’t impact the public school system. I think both camps are pro-public school and both camps are operating within a still-healthy democratic system. Only the future (our kids grown up) can say which camp is doing the most harm. –pbm
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Peter Meyer,
One big difference between the opt out movement and the charter school movement is that the opt out movement is parent-led and has no money.
The charter school movement is funded with billions of dollars collectively from the anti-union Walton family foundation, the Gates Foundation, the Dell Foundation, the Broad Foundation, the U.S. Department of Education, the Fisher family foundation, the Helmsley Foundation, the Wasserman Foundation, the John Arnold Foundation, the hedge fund managers, as well as support from the Republican legislatures in states across the south and midwest.
Because the charter movement has so much money, it can spend many millions on propaganda and marketing to persuade parents that they must sign up for a charter or their child will lose his/her chance for a successful life.
To claim that the two movements both represent democracy in action is not accurate. The parent-led movement is democracy in action. The plutocrat-led movement is not.
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Diane, though you may be correct about the funding (I’ll take your word for it), both operate within the democratic system we now have, flaws and all. I can appreciate the anti-corporate arguments, but the fact is that we have a political system that recognizes corporations (big and small) and their owners (and shareholders) as stakeholders in the American political system. (in my experience as an elected member of a public school board, I was appalled by the outsized influence of teacher unions on the education process, which seemed as anti-democratic as you seem to think the corporations are.) I suppose a president Bernie Sanders would change some of the dynamics that now give business owners and financiers a place at the legislative table, but as a student of the American experiment, I see the current fights over education policy and practice wholly within the tradition of democracy bequeathed to us by the folks who won the War of Revolution and negotiated the peace that was the Constitution, Gates, Weingarten, Brown, Broad, et al. best, –pbm
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Peter,
As you know, I am a historian of education. Never in the history of education in the US has there been a concerted effort by corporations, foundations, and the federal government to fragment public education and weaken the teaching profession.
You think that is a good thing. I don’t.
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Diane, and never has there been as powerful a labor movement at the heart of public schools in America as we have now. There is plenty of evidence to suggest — it’s in the books you wrote! — that the fragmentation and weakening happened long before Eli Broad and Bill Gates came on to the scene.
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Peter Meyer,
I know you hate labor unions but please explain why the state’s with teachers’ unions –Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Connecticut-have the best academic performance, while the state’s that don’t permit unions have the worst.
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pbmeyer2014,
I think it is odd that you are ignoring the fact that charter schools opt out their own students by getting rid of them before testing time.
That isn’t “choice” except for the students whom charter schools think are worthy of being chosen by the school.
Sure, a parent can “choose” a charter school, which can choose to make their child just as miserable as necessary to get him out before he takes the test that the charter school uses to demonstrate its worth.
If you believe that is “choice”, then you also believe that insurance companies can be free to get rid of patients as soon as they get sick in the name of “choice” because the sick patient can “choose” another insurance company if there is one who will take him. i wonder if it was your child who got cancer if you would be promoting the notion that there is absolutely nothing wrong with your health insurance company dropping coverage because there is an underfunded public hospital were your child can be cared for by nurses and doctors who have 75 other patients and you will watch your child linger getting no pain relief or treatment. Does that sound harsh? Well that’s what you are promoting for the low-income families who are kicked out of charters in the name of “choice”.
But choice works very well for healthy children who have strep throat and the hospitals that are getting rich by taking resources to “treat” those healthy children by relegating the kids with cancer into underfunded public hospitals where there is one nurse for 50 patients. And if you are promoting that, then I guess your values speak for themselves and you would also support the faux “school choice” for the easiest and cheapest to educate students.
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“. . . that opt outs endanger the validity of the tests. . .”
How can opting out “endanger the validity of the tests” when those tests have no validity whatsoever to start with?? They are COMPLETELY INVALID.
It would behoove all to read and comprehend what Noel Wilson has proven about that invalidity in his never refuted nor rebutted treatise:
“Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine.
1. A description of a quality can only be partially quantified. Quantity is almost always a very small aspect of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category only by a part of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as unidimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). The teaching and learning process falls in the logical realm of aesthetics/qualities of human interactions. In attempting to quantify educational standards and standardized testing the descriptive information about said interactions is inadequate, insufficient and inferior to the point of invalidity and unacceptability.
2. A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction. And this error is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).
3. Wilson identifies four “frames of reference” each with distinct assumptions (epistemological basis) about the assessment process from which the “assessor” views the interactions of the teaching and learning process: the Judge (think college professor who “knows” the students capabilities and grades them accordingly), the General Frame-think standardized testing that claims to have a “scientific” basis, the Specific Frame-think of learning by objective like computer based learning, getting a correct answer before moving on to the next screen, and the Responsive Frame-think of an apprenticeship in a trade or a medical residency program where the learner interacts with the “teacher” with constant feedback. Each category has its own sources of error and more error in the process is caused when the assessor confuses and conflates the categories.
4. Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.”
In other words all the logical errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.
5. The test makers/psychometricians, through all sorts of mathematical machinations attempt to “prove” that these tests (based on standards) are valid-errorless or supposedly at least with minimal error [they aren’t]. Wilson turns the concept of validity on its head and focuses on just how invalid the machinations and the test and results are. He is an advocate for the test taker not the test maker. In doing so he identifies thirteen sources of “error”, any one of which renders the test making/giving/disseminating of results invalid. And a basic logical premise is that once something is shown to be invalid it is just that, invalid, and no amount of “fudging” by the psychometricians/test makers can alleviate that invalidity.
6. Having shown the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, of the whole process Wilson concludes, rightly so, that any result/information gleaned from the process is “vain and illusory”. In other words start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity (except by sheer chance every once in a while, like a blind and anosmic squirrel who finds the occasional acorn, a result may be “true”) or to put in more mundane terms crap in-crap out.
7. And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”
In other words it attempts to measure “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?
My answer is NO!!!!!
One final note with Wilson channeling Foucault and his concept of subjectivization:
“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self-evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.
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Did the Education Writers Association mention which schools have the highest percentage of white affluent students who aren’t taking the exam and not because the parents are opting out, but because the entire schools are opting out?
In NYC, that would be the private schools, who 100% of the students at many private schools are opting out of the exam because their administration doesn’t like it. Have the Education Writers Association looked closely at why educators who rich and highly educated people pay huge amounts of money to educate their children would be opting out 100% of the (mostly white) students in a single school?
Maybe the Education Writers would like to compare Dalton or Trinity or Collegiate (with 100% opt out rates) with private schools like The Epiphany School in Manhattan, which DOES opt-in to the state exams. Yes, despite the claims otherwise, those private schools are perfectly free to opt in to state tests. At The Epiphany School, the students all take the exam, despite it being a private school. Their results aren’t particularly good and would likely be trashed by the charter school advocates who brag about their 100% passing rates that every school is supposed to achieve. Are the other privates seeing how poorly The Epiphany School students do and opting out their own students so they aren’t put to the test? Maybe the Education Writers Association might wonder about that. Because either the Education Writers Association support the private school administrators who think the state tests are poppycock, or the Education Writers Association is very concerned that private school administrators are afraid of their own students being measured against public school students. I wonder which position the EWA holds.
But I think the Education Writers Association should make special mention of their admiration for the many Yeshiva schools who also opt-in to those state tests that fancy private schools like Trinity are afraid to give their kids. Of course, many of the Yeshiva schools have some pretty bad results and most certainly the pro-testing groups think they should be shut down (or maybe they think they should be given more taxpayer dollars — yes that’s it!)
But I’m surprised that any people concerned about white parents opting out would not mention how many private school administrators are opting out their students.
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pbmeyer – opting one’s kid out of the tests does not hurt anyone else. Opting your kid out of public school – and expecting the public to pay for your private (charter) school *does* hurt others – the ones left behind in the public schools.
Furthermore, both tests and charters are a way to privatize public education, they just come at it from different angles.
Not everyone who opts their kid out of the tests is opposed to charters, and not everyone who is opposed to charters is opposed to the tests, but there is a great deal of overlap, especially among those who see the overall agenda of the “reform” movement – privatization and profiteering.
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So, not taking an invalid test will make that test yet more invalid? Is that a like a double negative, negating the negation? (A shortened verzion of Duane’s response.)
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Like!
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Christine Langhoff in regards to your comment,
“Mary – I read the empathy in your post. Might I suggest that “undocumented”is a less loaded word than “illegal”?”
Thanks for the suggestion; you are so right!
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This is from Education Post:
“What Corporate America Can’t Build: A Sentence describes the plight of top companies spending billions of dollars to send their well-educated employees to remedial writing classes.
Sprinkled throughout the article are hilarious examples of poorly written, sometimes incomprehensible, e-mails written by people who hold advanced degrees or are even executives. One message looked like lyrics penned by the dearly departed Prince.
They were funny until I started to wonder how people could get all the way through graduate school and still not be able to master the basic skill of writing a clear sentence. Once I thought about what these literary gaffes said about our educational system, my chuckling stopped.
A recent report reveals the significant gap between how well we think students in the United States are doing and how they’re actually doing.”
Notice anything? They carefully avoid any criticism of higher ed. The piece is about “well educated people”-people with graduate degrees.
Ed reform lays this problem on K-12 schools. I think it’s because higher ed is more prestigious- higher ed is filled with people LIKE ed reformers. Shouldn’t they be asking why none of these employees learned this is 4 or 7 or 8 years of college? Why is everything the fault of public schools?
Why do they so carefully exclude powerful or prestigious people? Because it’s harder to attack the President of Ohio State than it is an assistant principal in Cleveland.
They always punch down.
http://educationpost.org/we-cant-even-write-a-complete-sentence-and-heres-why/?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=Stnd&utm_content=TwStndCantWriteCompleteSentencesCb5
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