I am pro-child, and I opt out
Tonight, I will be in St. Cloud, speaking to a group of parents about how and why to opt their children out of the upcoming MCA (Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment) tests.
I have also recently connected with parents in a district just north of the Twin Cities, who say they can’t get accurate information from their school about which tests their children are being given. They want help and guidance, in order to understand the tests given to their kids, which these parents say are being used to allow or deny access to advanced courses.
I am also waiting for a rural parent, who is a single mother of minority children in a largely white part of Minnesota, to get back to me. We have kept in touch since the fall, when she first reached out on Facebook, asking for help opting her children out of all the testing and test prep taking place at their school. She has questioned the principal about which tests are being given, and how to opt her children out of them. She felt her questions were not welcome, and that she was not getting straight answers. Now, she has been banned from coming in to her children’s school.
I have spoken with a suburban father, who saw the sequence of his children’s math courses adjusted to better fit the timing of the state MCA test. He disagreed with this, and struggled to get clear information from the school and teacher about why it was necessary.
I have spoken with parents in another suburban area about the role testing plays in their school district, considered one of the best in the state. One parent shared her son’s story: he is a musical kid who does very poorly on standardized math tests. Because of this, his school is taking him out of classes he loves and giving him extra math prep during the day. She didn’t know she had the right to refuse this for him.
Over the past year, since I have shared my family’s decision to opt our children out of all high stakes standardized testing, I have talked with parents, students, and teachers from all over Minneapolis and beyond about testing and opting out. I have heard from many parents who had no idea that they do, in fact, have the legal right to refuse these tests for their children.
Many parents, like the ones I mention above, have struggled to get clear information from the schools about which tests are even being given, and what the tests are for. The MAP test, the OALP, the MCA, the NWEA…not all districts use the same tests, some tests have more than one name, some are given once a year, while others are given several times a year. And now the Common Core State Standards are here, and the tests have been altered to reflect those standards. Uh-oh. This means scores may drop again, as they did in 2013.
I have also met several of the people who started the United Opt Out movement: Peggy Robertson, a Colorado-based teacher, parent, and defender of the rights and dignity of children, who writes thePegwithPen blog; Ceresta Smith, an African American parent from Florida, who got involved in the