Two local union leaders in New York—in Mahopac and the Saranac Lake District—urge parents to opt their children out of the state tests because they are a waste of time and money.
They write that while the state has shortened the tests by a day and hired a new vendor, parents should opt out and do what is right for their child:
”And yet, have any of the changes reduced the impact these tests have on students? More importantly, are the tests, and the data they produce, having any positive impact on teaching and learning in our schools? In our view, the answer to both of these questions is an unqualified “no.” The tests aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on.”
There are serious questions about the validity and reliability of the tests, about computer testing, and about how accurately the tests measure student ability.
They conclude:
”In our view, there are compelling reasons to refuse the 3-8 state tests again this year. If you’re new to the testing, and have concerns about the state tests as we do, you’re not alone. Hopefully your school district has notified you of its protocol for refusing the tests. If not, you should know that to opt out, simply send a letter to your child’s principal prior to the April 11 start date.
“We’re committed to doing our part in helping rebuild the trust that parents, students and teachers have in the state Education Department. The same is true for the approximately 20 other teacher union local leaders from around the state who comprise an ad hoc coalition in support of the views expressed here. Yet until meaningful changes are made to the broken system of grade 3-8 tests, civil disobedience in the form of opting out will be necessary. Here’s hoping that this year’s round of protesting finally results in SED listening to the collective voice of parents, teachers and students.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This is a state and local issue, but it is also an issue that needs to be taken into the halls of Congress and organized to show the shameful policies embedded in ESSA. Until states are free of the false belief that tests have value as an “accountability” measure, this expensive non-sense will go on. Civil disobedience on this matter needs to be scaled up.
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On April 16, 2015 Juan Gonzalez wrote that opting out of the English Language Arts exam was a startling act of civil disobedience.
Three years later we should have buried these tests, not let them hang around because the stakes have been lowered or they have been shortened (Two cyanide tablets please instead of three). And let us not watch them morph into computer-based tests–the latest “new and improved….”
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Check out the discrepancy in results from tests in 3-8 to those in high school in NY. Very hard to justify: https://www.timesunion.com/news/article/As-grade-3-8-exams-commence-controversy-continues-12812363.php
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This is very interesting. Thank you! It speaks to how political passing rates are and have always been.
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In most NY school districts, accelerated 8th grade math students take 9th grade algebra 1; the vast majority of whom do not take the actual grade 8 assessment. So, the top 10% to 20% of math students are culled from this data. It is common for 95% to 100% of accelerated math students to pass the algebra 1 exam. However, the real reason for the large discrepancies lies in the Regents cut score for passing algebra 1: +27/85 (32% correct) = 65% passing score!. If some of those 8th grade pass rates were maintained on the algebra Regents test, high school graduation rates would be unacceptably low. Further proof that the testing racket is a complete scam.
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Man if you think that discrepancy is tough to justify just wait until you see the discrepancy between those Campbell’s Law–tainted Regents scores and graduation rates vs the number of kids who are prepared for college and careers!
https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/diploma-disparities-high-school-graduation-rates-in-new-york-city/
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Does anyone here remember how “ready” they were for college and/or career when they graduated from high school? Anyone who says they were ready to fly from day one is lying. Industry used to be responsible for turning raw recruits into valuable employees. I don’t ever remember my parents expecting K-12 schooling to make us career ready or, for that matter, college ready. In college, it was possible to test out of the most basic courses in a subject area, but the beginning level courses were not considered remedial. Now expectations have kids so anxiety ridden that they are going to implement standards for social-emotional development as well!!? Get the people out of policy decisions who think children are a product to be consumed by industry.
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speduktr
The notion that one goes to college for a ticket to a lucrative career has created the student debt crises. After all are there any limits to what students and parents are willing to pay for their future.
Then comes the reality that the ticket was a lotto ticket for most.
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The mountain of student debt is the result of the withdrawal of state aid
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dianeravitch
That too . But 30% attend private schools and how many attend public schools paying out of state tuition.
The draw of the CUNY system when I went, was free tuition. Makings that system one of top choices for NYC HS grads who had the grades. Probably the same for the University of California system .
You could spend your first 2 years undeclared to figure what you wanted to do . You could spend 4 years and decide in graduate school. Or even after starting a career . In the good old days when employers trained their employees or paid for that training . Now they would rather complain about skills shortages . Of course wages do not rise to attract those with the skills from other employers . Which is what Adam Smith would say happens in a shortage.
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When I was in high school I could be admitted to a very selective college having taken Trig as my highest math. And the Trig I took had less content than public school 10th graders today are supposed to learn in Geometry. My algebra knowledge was basic.
Fortunately, since I never was required to take any math class to prove that I had any working proficiency of calculus, or even geometry or trig, I had no problem getting a college degree in a humanities subject. As did all my high school pals who had no interest in math or science.
And I could still do that today, as long as my family was rich enough to send me to a private college where little math is required.
But if I was poor, and my only choice was a community college, I’d be forced to prove how much high level math and science I knew and told that I needed to take a bunch of “remedial” math classes to graduate.
Even if I didn’t need any of that math to pursue the field that i wanted, just like rich kids don’t need that math to pursue their careers. Luckily for them, if you are rich enough, you are exempt from having to learn it before being allowed to take the college classes you want.
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The State of New York has a long and sordid history of manipulating the cut scores for its tests to deliver the results that they want. They get into hot water, however, when the scores are so low that they have to make the cut scores absurdly low in order to get the number of passing students that they want. If one graphs these cut scores from year to year, one ends up with something that jumps around like a gerbil on methamphetamine. The whole thing is a scam.
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Completely correct. When Michael Bloomberg was mayor, the cut score needed to reach Level 2 was set so low that kids could pass it by guessing. Bloomberg had identifying students to be held back if they were at Level 1. When, based on cut score games, it became nearly impossible not to reach Level 2, he claimed credit for educational wisdom and policies that lowered the number of holdbacks.
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“…he claimed credit…” Use the test-score game to manipulate the system, rig the results, and take personal public credit. That pretty much covers the entire past decade and a half of “educational” policy across the nation.
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“In 2016, for example, a mere 24% of 8th graders were rated proficient in the math tests”… “In 2017, 72 percent of the state’s 9th graders passed the state’s Algebra I Regents exam, according to state statistics compiled by NYSUT.”
Where’s the contradiction? 24% scored roughly 88% or above [NAEP “proficient”], 48% scored 65%-87%, 28% failed.
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Why only 2 union leaders, not NYSUT speaking as one voice on this? Thank god for the lower-Hudson area. I am ashamed that the central-So Tier area I grew up in– still as always a pocket of liberalism surrounded by conservatives– has been silently enduring (as far as I can tell).
This was my response at the article: “You phrase it well as “helping rebuild the trust that parents, students and teachers have in the state Education Department.”
“Why would local voters have any trust in a state DOE which turned our pubsch sys on its ear well over a decade ago (w/o so much as a howdy-do to the municipalities which bear the brunt of publicsch costs), importing unvetted stds & aligned hi-stakes computerized assessments/ evalns by unfunded mandate? The whole wrong-headed ed-reform pckg was imported from the fed w/o notice to or input from voters, has cost towns plenty in hw/sw investment, while decreasing classroom learning time, & reducing kids’ investment in their own achievement by imposing tests that are mere data-collectors for the state/fed but have no impact on their own GPA?
“Regain trust by opting out of this crap. Meanwhile, locals can only express opinion by opting their kids out of tests…”
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Why, indeed.
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These tests are a massive fraud perpetrated against our country. They do not measure what they purport to measure, but because of the incentives built into state systems, they drive everything in K-12 in the US. They have turned our English classes into useless test prep and have laid waste to the English language arts. Our nation’s students are now experiencing not novels and the writing of papers but an empty, vacuous quotidian nightmare of endless test-prep exercises based on random reading passages and questions modeled on those from the tests. A few testing companies and computerized instruction vendors are raking in billions of dollars from this scam, and our educrats and politicians are clueless about what’s actually happening. It’s a disgrace.
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And the “standards” on which these tests are based are a joke. They are what one would have gotten if one had asked a committee of small-town real-estate salesmen to write new standards for ELA based on what they vaguely remembered from their own K-12 educations. They are common in the sense of being vulgar, base, mediocre, unimaginative, and rooted in fundamental ignorance of how reading, writing, literature, speaking, listening, grammar, and thinking work. They were paid for by an American oligarch and written by a committee headed by a man with no experience as a teacher of English at any level based on a cursory review of state standards that were already pedestrian. These moronic “standards” have dragged all ELA instruction down to their level, and they have strangled any progress or innovation in ELA in its cradle.
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The extraordinarily poorly conceived “standards” were paid for by the oligarch because he wanted a single set of standards, imposed from the top-down upon the entire nation, so that he could have one set to correlate online computer instruction to, for he is in the computer business. These standards, and the question types that appear on the tests based on them, have in effect BECOME the curriculum in English classes in the United States, and the opportunity costs have been staggering. At this point, an entire generation of students have had any real instruction in ELA stolen from them.
And predictably, the standards-and-testing regime has produced, over a twenty-year-period, NO STATISTICALLY SIGNIFICANT INCREASE IN AVERAGE TEST SCORES, so even by the measures lauded by the standards-and-testing reformers, that regime has been an UTTER FAILURE, so much of a failure that even the meretricious stooges at the Fordham Foundation, who are paid to tell lies about how this crap is working, are now saying, “Well, the scores are flat, but at least we have this foundation (standards and testing) in place.” I would be ROFLMAO if this weren’t such a tragedy for our nation’s kids, who at this point have never experienced what an English language arts classroom is supposed to be like, who think that reading and writing = mindless test prep exercises, day in, day out, for 12 years.
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Sorry, that should be the Thomas B. Fordham Institute
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CX: an entire generation of students HAS had
I do wish WordPress allowed one to make simple corrections like this.
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I want that edit button more than you.
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That would be “more than you do.”
Unless you are saying that you don’t want me. LOL
But I suspect that you saw that but couldn’t fix it. LOL. Always enjoy your comments, Joel.
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I have an edit button and I often use it. My advice. Read carefully before hitting SEND
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And the tests themselves are utter pseudoscience, like phrenology or astrology. They aren’t valid or reliable, and they couldn’t be, for they are based on “standards” that are utterly vague and thus not operationalizable, even if the testing companies were actually doing real validity and reliability testing on them, which they aren’t. The whole thing is a sickening scam, and it’s time that it was stopped.
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I’ve come to think of these “standards” and the tests based on them as a kind of intelligence test. No one with any sense (or knowledge of the relevant subjects) could take them at all seriously. They should have been laughed off the national stage at their inception. Our nation’s English teachers know how bad they are, but those suffering souls are very poorly paid and are afraid of losing their jobs in the Stasi-like climate that the testing regime has created in our schools.
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And the teacher’s unions sold our nation’s teachers out, taking money from the same oligarch who perpetrated this fraud and becoming his mouthpiece.
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Far more complicated than that . The dynamic runs through much of the labor movement .. It is known as “value on display” in other skilled unionized sectors . The short of it says . “Our members are worth the wages and bennifits they receive because of the value they bring to the work place” .
So lets take Long Island . Teachers on Long Island are for sure in the top 10%-15% of wage earners . To support those wages and bennifits ,LI is one of the highest taxed regions in the country . That is not a problem in my wealthy district . Where the school budget always passes and the wealthy are getting a bargain basement price for an education that rivals elite private schools . Three district students won the Seamans competition, students perform well . …. ….
But if you go to nearby districts wages are still high . The economic dynamic changes . Tax payers struggling to get by see high wage teachers and through no fault of those teachers mediocre to poor performance of the students. Politicians who are unwilling to face the economic realities that have created these inequalities, demand that the teachers solve the problem, through test performance holding teachers and schools accountable. . The response of the Union is what can we do to accommodate you . Our wages and bennifits are justified by the professionalism ,”value” we “display” . We are willing to work with you to preserve these bennifits.
Of course the flip side of that is low wage low tax states where the schools are underfunded and the Teachers unions are weak . The wages and benefits are not sufficient to survive on . But that same dynamic exists, if we show you value will you reward us with bennifits we deserve?.
The union movement is not now, in this country, nor has it ever been a National movement . I would venture a guess to say that in most National Unions the membership would be lucky if they knew the name of the President . They are elected by the Local Unions not the members . They focus on the general frame work not the nuts and bolts of negotiations . Those are local matters . It really matters very little to me what Lonnie R. Stephenson says , look him up you will know my Union. My fellow local union members would have to do the same.
So what if instead of negotiating with the teachers in Oklahoma . The state gives those teacher 48 hours to return and the fires those teachers who refuse, willing to lose the remainder of the school year and rebuild a private charter system over the summer.Pointing to their disservice to their student by violating the law and striking . Because the alternative to “Value on Display ” is confrontation and are Teachers unions up to that confrontation . In the last 40 years few unions have been . Even the districts this article is about are not being confrontational they are talking about what the value should look like to parents. Confrontation would be walking out on the day of the tests.
I would not want to be the Union leader who had to make those decisions that severely impacts the lives of members and the future of the Union. Verizon was a National strike that succeeded . ATT only a one day job action . Are teachers wiling to stay out a year as Spectrum workers in NY have over Pension and Medical bennifits that the most highly paid CEO in the nation refuses to pay. Are they willing to push the barriers set up to pen them in and close down seventh avenue as 10,000 construction workers did last Wednesday . Sending the NYPD into retreat . Confrontation is coming back to the Labor movement how it ends or when it ends who knows.
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“There are serious questions about the validity and reliability of the tests, about computer testing, and about how accurately the tests measure student ability.”
Actually, no, there’s no question at all. The tests are, in fact, invalid, unreliable and they don’t measure a thing.
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Exactly
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