The Opt-Outers
What happens if enough New York parents say they don’t want their kids to take tests?
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Families and teachers protesting high-stakes testing in front of the offices of the Department of Education in April. (Photo: Greg Dunkel) |
More than a year before 7-year-old Oscar Mata was scheduled to take his first major standardized test, his parents received word from his school that he was failing. The Department of Education calls it a Promotion in Doubt letter—a well-intentioned, if blunt, method used to get families to take notice of gaps in a student’s skills.
The letter arrived in 2011, around the time of Oscar’s second-grade winter break. Before then, he had been happy at the Twenty-First Century Academy for Community Leadership in West Harlem. His parents, Andrea and Juan, had been drawn to the dual-language school, where English and Spanish learners took field trips together for innovative social-studies projects. They say that Oscar is great at math and loved science, music, and art. He loved reading, too, until he started to get tested on it.
“There was this transformation of the whole culture—and curriculum,” Andrea says. “I could see it mostly through the homework. It really looked like test prep. There were even bubble sheets.” Oscar had more than a year before the third-grade test, when students start taking the New York State English Language Arts (ELA) and math tests—but the thinking goes that the sooner they learn how to take big standardized tests and the sooner any skill shortfalls can be dealt with, the better they’ll do in the long run. Oscar, however, had a paradoxical reaction. “His interest in school,” says Andrea, “took this immediate plummet.”
She felt as if her son had been caught in a vortex: The school starts teaching Oscar differently, he loses whatever spark of curiosity inspired him to want to learn, and the school punishes him for it. He made it to third grade, but by then, test prep had come to dominate his classroom. Grand plans for science experiments and hands-on interactive projects, Andrea says, “would just kind of fizzle out and disappear because there wasn’t ti
UPDATE: Opt-Out/Refusal Guides for each State | United Opt Out National
Opt-Out/Refusal Guides for each State | United Opt Out National:
Portfolio Letter: Demand Authentic Assessment
All documents are for informational purposes only and do not substitute as legal advice or legal counsel. The information contained in these documents and this website may or may not reflect the most current developments in education policy within our nation or within each state. Information shared here is not guaranteed to be correct or complete and UOO disclaims all liability in respect to actions taken or not taken based on any or all contents of this website.
Portfolio Letter: Demand Authentic Assessment
Please consider adding this portfolio letter to your opt out/refusal letter this year. We are finding that report card grades for the 2013-2014 school year are increasingly based on corporate test scores. Student work is counting for less when determining … MORE
OPT-OUT/REFUSAL GUIDES FOR EACH STATE
All documents are for informational purposes only and do not substitute as legal advice or legal counsel. The information contained in these documents and this website may or may not reflect the most current developments in education policy within our nation or within each state. Information shared here is not guaranteed to be correct or complete and UOO disclaims all liability in respect to actions taken or not taken based on any or all contents of this website.