And Now from the Twilight Zone: Opting out, race, and reform | The Thomas B. Fordham Institute

Opting out, race, and reform | The Thomas B. Fordham Institute:

Opting out, race, and reform

There used to be a wry and mildly provocative blog called “Stuff White People Like.” Briefly popular in its heyday, it was described by the New Republic as a “piquant satire of white liberal cultural mores and hypocrisies.” The site’s creator stopped updating it a few years back after landing a book deal. But if it were still active, “opting out of tests” might have been right up there with craft beer, farmers’ markets, NPR, and Wes Anderson movies on that list of mores. Maybe hypocrisies, too.

A list compiled by the teachers’ union in New Jersey, where PARCC testing began earlier this month, claims that there have been more than thirty-five thousand test refusals statewide. On the order of one million young New Jerseyans are supposed to take the test, yet the state data documenting how many of them opted out won’t be available for at least a month. An informal analysis of the New Jersey Education Association (NJEA)’s list, however, shows that the highest numbers of test refusals are concentrated in communities that are affluent, left-leaning, and heavily white. 

A blue state with a Republican governor, New Jersey features a mix of affluent suburbs and pockets of deep and persistent urban poverty, including closely watched education reform hubs like Newark and Camden. Thus, the Garden State offers an interesting lens through which to view both the prerogatives and the politics of opting out and education reform. Assuming that the list compiled by the union is even directionally sound, it puts the state’s affluent white progressives potentially at odds with low-income and heavily Democratic families of color, since there is little evidence that such families are opting out in significant numbers.

My Fordham colleague Dominique Coote put the districts with the highest-reported unofficial numbers of refusals on a spreadsheet, which you can see here. As of the most recent update on March 20, fourteen districts had five hundred or more reported refusals. All but two of these have median household incomes above (usually well above) the state average. There’s no way to determine the political leanings of families of individual children who refuse the exams, but the communities with the most refusals—Cherry Hill, Livingston, and Princeton, for example—are suburban and strongly left-leaning. Only three of the fourteen top opt-out districts are Republican-majority; most are disproportionately Democrat, some extremely so. And yes, extremely white. Indeed, only one district with five hundred or more reported refusals, East Orange, is not majority white. 

Now take a look at the refusal numbers for districts that serve predominantly low-income, black, and Hispanic families—places like Newark, Camden, Paterson, and Trenton. Actually, you can't. They’re not among the approximately 250 districts on the NJEA list. Of the thirty-one so-called “Abbott Districts” in the state, named for the 1985 court case aimed at ensuring adequate education funding for schools serving poor children, only seven are on the NJEA list. East Orange, with 520 reported PARCC refusals, is the only Abbott District to see significant opt-outs. The other six range from thirty refusals in Hoboken to a single reported refusal in Long Branch.

Does that mean there are no opt-outs in other low-income districts? Not necessarily. Steve Wollmer, the NJEA’s communications director, tells me that the list represents an aggregate ofmedia accounts, reports from NJEA members in schools, and parents registering their intention to refuse the test on NJ Kids and Families, a web site set up by the union to “give a voice and organizing platform” for opting out.

“The vast majority of opt-outs are taking place in non-urban, non-disadvantaged districts,” agrees Wollmer, “because parents tend to be better informed in those districts and tend to communicate among themselves a lot more.”

Fair enough. Still, if New Jersey is a litmus test, and the move to opt out of testing remains “a thing” chiefly among affluent, white, progressive, families, it puts them on a political collision course with the low-income families of color who have been the primary beneficiaries of testing and accountability in the reform era. Blacks, Latinos, and low-income kids have generally benefitted from test-driven accountability, particularly in the increased number of charters and school choice options, as well as some promising (but not necessarily causal) upward trends in NAEP scores and graduation rates during the accountability era. Test scores have created a powerful catalyst for reform—both educationally and politically—that disproportionately benefits low-income families.

“Kids who are not tested end up not counting,” observed Kati Haycock, president of the Education Trust, one of more than two dozen civil rights groups (including the NAACP, the Children’s Defense Fund, and the National Center for Learning Disabilities) that issued a call in January for the federal role in education to “be honored and maintained in a reauthorized Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA).” The statement specifically included annual statewide tests.

Yet a story on the liberal news service Alternet named opting out one of the biggest education stories of 2014, noting that "the whole school reform machine falls down without the data." That prompted Lynnell Mickelsen, a longtime progressive Democrat and Minneapolis blogger, to observe tartly, “So do the movements around climate change, civil rights, public health, banking reform, industrial safety, economic justice and more.” All but the most hardline anti-reform activists will acknowledge that, for all the faults of test-based outcomes data, such Opting out, race, and reform | The Thomas B. Fordham Institute:

Parents Can Opt Out - United Opt Out National

Click Here to go to United Opt Out National: 

Click Here to go to the Website- United Opt Out Team

Click Here to go to the Website FairTest

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