WHY WE CHOSE TO OPT OUT
Thousands of children in our state are headed into schools today to take standardized tests mandated by the federal government under No Child Left Behind. Our fourth grade son won’t be one of them.
Opting your children out of standardized tests is a very personal decision, and one that has been far more difficult to make than we originally thought it would be. There has been a lot of attention given in the media lately to children who won’t be taking standardized tests and the parents who have chosen to opt them out. In response to this attention, those who have the most to gain from high stakes testing have begun to push back, even chastising parents for their personal choices.Today’s post is dedicated to explaining the personal decision we made to opt our son out of standardized testing. In writing this I don’t hope to convince you to opt your own children out of future testing. In fact, that’s why I waited until today to post this, to provide some food for future thought.
I’m an educator, an academic and a parent. In the current climate of education in the US I have very little power over my kids’ education in any of these three roles. As an educator I have watched politicians, corporations and wealthy philanthropists take more and more control over K-12 schools. No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, and the Common Core State Standards are all examples of how education is guided by those with wealth and power rather than those with wealth of knowledge.
No Child Left Behind started us down this path in 2002 by tying federal money to standardized tests. Give the tests or lose out on millions in Title I funds that go to schools with the neediest children. President Obama used the billions of dollars that were part of his Race to the Top to program to double down on NCLB by enticing states to compete for grants. In return, states were expected to adopt a common set of college and career ready standards (CCSS) and institute teacher evaluation systems that used test scores to measure teacher performance.
In the future, these test scores will be based on the Common Core State Standards, a set of de facto national standards that were created undemocratically, were not written by single classroom teacher, endured absolutely no field testing, suffer from dubious developmental appropriateness, and were forced down the necks of states by the federal government during the worst economic recession since the Great Depression.
So its no wonder that we sometimes see schools and teachers losing their minds in order to make sure that their students do well on these tests. They are required to administer them, federal monies are attached to them, their performance evaluations depend on them, and the legislatures of some states are already looking for ways to make it easier to fire them. Standardized tests are a gun that is being held to the livelihood of every public school teacher in the United States. Knowing all this makes it easier to understand why some schools have turned to disturbing practices like DATA WALLS, forcing teachers to teach from scripted lesson plans that don’t allow for differentiation, narrowing the curriculum to focus on tested subjects rather than a well-rounded education, and judging studentsby the numbers they produce.
Meanwhile, a $500 billion dollar national market has been created in education thanks to Common Core and the endless tests our states and schools purchase. The Education sector is now 9% of G.D.P in the United States. That. Is. A. Lot. Of. Money. And there is no Why We Chose to Opt Out | EduSanity: