A Message from NYSAPE (New York State Allies for Public Education):
Please TAKE ACTION NOW CLICK HERE and share your stories with NYSED and the Board of Regents. ASK them to CORRECT the MISINFORMATION and INTIMIDATION being spread on opting out of the 3-8 grade state tests.
Despite the fact that Commissioner Elia has acknowledged that parents have the right to opt out of the state tests, NYSAPE has been flooded with emails from parents sharing stories of misinformation being disseminated by their school districts regarding test refusals. Many stories detail intimidation and bullying, as well as false claims that schools or students will be punished for opting out.
Here is the reality: NO student will have a low score entered into their records for opting out, NO school will be identified as failing because of high opt out numbers and NO school will lose funding.
The New York State Education Department (NYSED) and Board of Regents MUST HEAR from you regarding intimidation and misleading information being spread in your school district regarding your right to refuse the NYS Grades 3-8 state tests.
Here is the truth according to NYSED: “To comply with the federal law, one school academic accountability calculation still must be based on the percentage of all students who pass state tests.… But New York’s plan also creates a new “core subject performance index” that reflects the results only for the portion of students who actually take the state tests [emphasis added] If the result using the index calculation is better, that performance measure can be used to determine whether a school is targeted for additional funding and academic support. In essence, both of these measures are looked at,” Schwartz [of NYSED] told the Regents… “if we have schools that have high achievement but also have high rates of non-participation, those schools will not likely end up on our list of those schools that need to be focused upon.” [1]
Schools have a legal obligation to administer the state tests. HOWEVER, parents have the legal right to opt out their children free of coercion or penalties of any sort.
We are imploring NYSED and the Board of Regents to address these issues!
We refuse the state tests because we do not want to have our schools focus on test prep, and have our children subjected to biased, flawed exams. We demand that our schools focus instead on creating a meaningful, student-centered learning environment. If you’re in doubt about what to do, check out the video of one of our founders, Jeanette Deutermann, available here.
If you do decide to opt your child out of the tests, here’s a NYSAPE TEST REFUSAL LETTER to send to your child’s teacher/s and building principal.
Time is of the essence, as state testing is around the corner! Please TAKE ACTION NOW CLICK HERE and share your stories with NYSED and the Board of Regents. ASK them to CORRECT the MISINFORMATION being spread, and to stop the bullying of our children.
Thank you, NYSAPE
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This is completely unrelated to the topic of this post, but I wanted to direct readers to an important and, frankly, heartbreaking story about education in today’s NYT.
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Ignorance is bliss. . .
. . . especially religious ignorance. . .
. . . which is all religious training!
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FLERP!
Earlier today Diane posted about a press conference regarding this subject. You should post this link there, as it was related to the topic of that post!
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” . . if we have schools that have high achievement . . . ”
All bow their heads please in honor of the presence of “high student achievement”. . . .
What kind and level of high will be determined by the interpretive authorities of the state DoE after the tests and distributed when politically convenient.
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If I may be allowed to make a minor correction to a statement:
“and have our children subjected to biased, flawed exams that render the usage of the results of said tests to be “vain and illusory”, in other words COMPLETELY INVALID AS PROVEN BY NOEL WILSON IN HIS 1997 NEVER REFUTED NOR REBUTTED 1997 DISSERTATION:
“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. (updated 6/24/13 per Wilson email)
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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“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.” — as you corrected me elsewhere, it is not the score of a student, but the score of the great or shoddy work of the student.
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Yes, that is a better way to look at the score. At the same time the scores still suffer from all of the errors and fallacies as shown by Wilson that render any usage to be COMPLETELY INVALID.
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YES, OPT OUT … very important! Wish ALL the students across this nation have parents or guardians who OPT THEM OUT of those tests.
Real story: A student I know bubbled in ALL the D’s on every test. Her results? PROFICIENT. Honest, can’t make this stuff up.
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BTW, the mother did opt out her daughter, but became very sick and had to go to the hospital. The school principal made her take the two days of tests she missed before her mother went to the hospital. This middle school student stayed with a neighbor (parents are divorced) while mother was in the hospital fighting for her life. See the bullying? Unbelievable.
What this young female went through, no one should have to go through.
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