Students at two high schools in Palo Alto, California, opted out of the tests of the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, the Common Core test funded by the US Department of Education.
“For the second year in a row, both Palo Alto and Gunn high schools failed to meet the government’s required participation rates for new standardized test, the Smarter Balanced Assessment, with about half of the junior classes choosing to opt out.
“About 47 percent of Gunn juniors and 61 percent of Paly juniors submitted exemptions, with their parents’ permission, to opt out of two days of testing the week of May 16, according to Janine Penney, the district’s manager of research, evaluation and assessment.
“At the elementary level, approximately 1 percent of third through fifth graders opted out, according to Penney, and less than 3 percent of middle schoolers.
“California schools are required by federal law to meet a 95 percent participation rate. Schools with federal Title I status, meaning they have high percentages of low-income students, could face losing federal funding if they don’t meet the participation threshold. Paly and Gunn are not Title I schools.”
California high school students are smart. Don’t believe anyone who says otherwise.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
These two public high schools are often ranked at the top in the United States for academic success. The reason is because Stanford is just down the street, and many of these students are Chinese because their wealthy parents moved to Palo Alto to be near Stanford with the hope that living there would get their children into the university after HS graduation.
The competition to live in Palo Alto near Stanford has driven housing prices into the millions. A simple three bedroom house with only 1,500 square feet of floor space on a small lot often goes for two to three million dollars after an aggressive competitive bidding war. Houses in this area often go for way more than the asking price.
Because of the intense pressure on those children, Palo Alto also has had a high suicide rate among its high school students. One of the popular ways to die is to walk in front of a train. It got so bad that the city now hires guards to sit and watch easy to reach intersessions where the tracks cross and also has erected difficult to climb fencing along the rail line to keep the children out who can’t take all the pressure any longer.
Parent pressure from mostly Chinese parents on teachers to challenge their children in class is also intense. There is also a thriving private sector education market in this area because many of the children are forced by their parents to attend private classes in the evenings and on weekends to give them an edge when it comes to earning that high GPA along with high test scores that might help them get into Stanford.
I know this because my wife, who is Chinese, has a sister who went through this process to live in Palo Alto to get her two sons into Stanford. One son made it and one didn’t. The younger son ended up at Berkeley instead.
The pressure and competition is fierce in these two high schools. I wonder how many of the students that walked out were Asian. I have trouble seeing their parents supporting a walk out.
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An informative post that puts a different lens on the opt outs, but the rate is still pretty high for the juniors.
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The kids are more likely to get into Stanford if they head up an opt-out movement.
For Stanford, applicants with 4.0s and perfect SATs are a dime a dozen.
No school can resist a student who is a warrior for social justice.
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Our daughter graduated from Stanford June 2014. She didn’t get accepted to Stanford because of her SAT scores that were a little below average.
The SAT and the other reformer crap is one factor that Stanford looks at, but there are several other factors that are considered and the SAT is only one of them.
Click the following link and see for yourself what Stanford values.
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For kids in Palo Alto and Gunn who are aiming to get into Harvard, the Smarter Balanced tests are a colossal waste of time. It won’t affect their college applications, and it won’t help them get into Harvard.
AP tests do matter.
The kids who are opting out of the Smarter Balanced tests are most likely prioritizing their time, and they are spending that extra time studying for the AP tests.
I could see this choice being made across all demographics.
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Why do they have to keen spouting the threat. To date funding has never been withheld for lack of 95% participation rate.
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WASC does not require SBAC scores. WASC facilitates a self study, by the whole school community, of measuring student learning. They look at parent surveys, student suspension rates, teacher and student attendance and more. It’s one of the rare uses of data that actually makes sense in our schools. Principals who claim that WASC accreditation hangs in the balance of SBAC scores are either purposely misrepresenting WASC or are ignorant to the point of incompetent.
I am hearing that the same kinds of threats are being made at colleges. A fine arts professor told me that her college administration is micromanaging daily assessment of art students under the threat of WASC withholding accreditation.
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Karen Wolf. You said: ” A fine arts professor told me that her college administration is micromanaging daily assessment of art students under the threat of WASC withholding accreditation.”
I did not know what WASC is, so here is some background and why the administrative impulse to micromanage has invaded higher education programs.
“The WASC Senior College and University Commission (”the Commission”) is a regional accrediting agency serving a diverse membership of public and private higher education institutions throughout California, Hawaii, and the Pacific as well as a limited number of institutions outside the US. Through its work of peer review, based on standards agreed to by the membership, the Commission encourages continuous institutional improvement and assures the membership and its constituencies, including the public, that accredited institutions are fulfilling their missions in service to their students and the public good.”
Always be wary of anyone who seeks “continuous improvement.” That is a no-win trap.
“The WASC Senior College and University Commission (WSCUC) is recognized by the US Department of Education as certifying institutional eligibility for federal funding in a number of programs, including student access to federal financial aid.” https://www.wascsenior.org/about
You have to take a few steps back and realize that USDE’s power over “accreditation” for all sorts of schools requires this micro-managerial lingo and the endless paperwork. The “power” rests in holding the purse strings to federal grants for students to attend post secondary programs. Unless the school is: (a) accredited and (b) USDE has approved the accreditor students cannot receive federal aid for their education.
You can see the same jargon-filled language at the website of the new USDE approved accreditor for teacher preparation. It is the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP). This is a doozy one-size-fits everyone in teacher education, an accreditor enchanted with failed policies from the Gates Foundation and the US Department of Education.
Here is the one-size-fits all news: “Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation CAEP expects that the U.S. Department of Education (ED) will withdraw its recognition of National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) and Teacher Education Accreditation Council (TEAC) following the June 2016 meeting of the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity (NACIQI) based on NCATE’s and TEAC’s decisions not to submit renewal applications.”
“CAEP, which administers both NCATE and TEAC accreditation, allowed their recognition to expire in order to focus on CAEP Accreditation, as the national educator preparation accreditor. CAEP Standards become the sole accreditation criteria for teacher preparation in fall 2016. ”
The worst part of this convoluted accreditation system is the clear influence of money from the Gates Foundation in funding and in promoting misleading measures of effectiveness and “impact” including VAM (value added methods). CAEP and USDE want to measure a teacher preparation program’s impact by looking at the student test scores of the produced graduates of the program. There is no compelling evidence that VAMs are an accurate, reliable, or valid way to measure the “impact”of a teacher preparation program. They are not. Even so, CAEP Standard 4 offers up “evidence” to support VAM and other measures from the deeply flawed Gates-funded “Measures of Effective Teaching” project led by economist Thomas J. Kane. That project also included ratings of teachers obtained from student surveys developed by economist Ron Ferguson, and ratings of teaching based on observations of videos and the Danielson rubrics.
In other words CAEP wants programs approved based on one-size-fits all metrics known to be deeply flawed and biased. See http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/review-MET-final-2013
In fact the May Issue 2016 of Educational Researcher has a wonderful letter with the title: “VAMs are Never ‘Accurate, Reliable, and Valid.'” This is a brief and pointed refutation of the 2015 American Educational Research Association (AERA) statement on VAMs–a statistical method intended to isolate measure the contributions of teachers and leaders to student learning. The AERA statement offered up some wiggle room for VAM if “eight conditions” were met. The AERA statement said that it was “difficult” to meet these conditions.
The author of “VAMs are Never ‘Accurate, Reliable, and Valid” says: “The bottom line is that regardless of technical sophistication, the use of VAM never (italicized never) “accurate, reliable, and valid” and will never (italicized never) yield “rigorously supported inferences.”
The writer is Steven J. Klees, Former President, Comparative and International Education Society, Harold R. W. Benjamin Professor of International & Comparative Education, University of Maryland.
The peer reviewed citation he offers is Klees, S. (2016). Inferences from regression analyses: Are they valid. Real World Economics Review. 74, 85-97.
Thanks Dr. Klees.
I hope that the promoters of VAM in education, especially for “impact” measures and accreditation are paying attention.
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