Common Core Means No Child Left Untested
After the first day of New York State's high-stakes Common Core aligned standardized testing, Newsday reported, "Thousands of Long Island elementary and middle school students -- in record numbers in some districts -- refused to take the state's English Language Arts exam." According to the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle in the Fairport school district where the superintendent Bill Cala is an outspoken critic of testing, "67 percent of its students" opted out. In Westchester the children of the County Executive planned to opt out of the tests and in some Hudson Valleycommunities the unofficial opt out rate hovered around 50%. In suburban Buffalo the opt-out rate in some districts reached 70%. Statewide the unofficial opt-out total is probably over 100,000.
In response to widespread protests by parents and teachers, the United States Senateis pushing forward a bipartisan bill Every Child Achieves. It would revise the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) that initiated the current high-stakes testing craze and the opt-out movement in the United States. If the Senate bill ever becomes law, students, schools, districts and states will no longer be penalized because of student test scores. States will still be expected to test students annually in reading and math grades 3 through 8 and at least once in high school, however they will be allowed to devise their own supposedly "challenging" academic standards.
While it will be good to have the threat of punishment lifted, these revisions in the law will permit some of the poorest performing states, where legislatures do not adequately fund education, to lower standards by either making tests easier or simply lowering the passing "cut" scores. They will also authorize additional charter schools, further undermining public school systems. No child will be left untested, but public education will be threatened and many children will be left uneducated.
There is also a bill (H.R. 452) in the House of Representatives to eliminate annual testing. It has bipartisan support across the political spectrum and its co-sponsors include some of the less extreme Republicans. The website Gov.us, however, gives it almost no chance of being approved.
The opt-out movement that precipitated the reexamination of NCLB is growing rapidly, but it is also a fragile coalition. It draws support from people and organizations with conflicting visions for the future of education. Conservative forces from "red states" want less federal oversight, which I think is a bad idea. The teachers' unions want student tests separated from teacher evaluations and will probably back out of the movement if they achieve this limited objective. Middle-class parents raise legitimate concerns about the stress these tests place on students but many have not endorsed broader goals such as school equity. My major problem with the tests is that they transform schools, especially lower performing schools in inner-city minority communities, into test prep academies where little real learning takes place. This includes some of the miracle charter school that boost student scores by doing nothing but tests preparation.
At the Hofstra University Conference on the George W. Bush presidency I was on a panel discussing Bush education policy with Anne-Imelda Radice, Chief of Staff to the Secretary of the United States Department of Education from 2003-2005 and Edward Rollins, a long time Republican Party political operative and a former advisor to President Ronald Reagan. When I was critical of No Child Left Behind for promoting a testing agenda in American schools and the "Houston Miracle" that turned out to be fraud, Radice responded that Bush and Rod Paige, his first Secretary of Education, Common Core Means No Child Left Untested | Alan Singer:
