Way out of touch and also out of their minds
New York politicians beware. A revolution is in progress.
This past week angry and frustrated parents across the state kept their third- through eighth-graders in astounding numbers from taking required but despised standardized English tests. While the final count awaits a State Education Department release this summer, a group opposed to the testing, United to Counter the Core, has been keeping score. Last year, about 60,000 refused to take these tests that cause enormous anxiety among parents and their children, and that are increasingly viewed as ineffective measures of student and teacher achievement. As of late Friday afternoon with 64 percent of the school districts in the state canvassed, the group had recorded in excess of 177,000 ''opt-outs.''
There are about 1.1 million students statewide eligible to take these tests. While the state refusal rate seems conservatively on the upside of 15 percent, there were large pockets of districts where as many didn't take the tests as did. On Long Island, for example, an estimated 43 percent did not take the tests. In the Monroe County region that includes Rochester a third didn't, and the opt-out movement was particularly strong in the heavily populated and generally affluent lower Hudson Valley and the Buffalo area.
That's not just an opt-out movement anymore. It's civil disobedience, and a step away from a growing stampede. That should make elected officials squirm, and they deserve it.
But we haven't seen the half of it yet. This coming week those same children will go back to take three days of standardized math tests — or not.
How the numbers who didn't take the English tests will impact the numbers taking the math tests will be illuminating. It's hard to imagine anything but a tumbling effect. Reports have surfaced that those English tests had a number of questions that were ambiguous, poorly designed and written in language too sophisticated for the age level, yet again. One parent said that the tests seem to be about creating failure, not measuring learning. She likened the exams to child abuse. Of course, since these tests are endorsed by Gov. Andrew Cuomo, self-proclaimed guardian of our young minds, this couldn't possibly be true.
Regardless how many show up for the math tests, what the parents have done so far is as strong a repudiation of national and state public policy as we have seen in a long time. These parents have given a resounding ''no'' to the president, our governor, Secretary of EducationArne Duncan and an entire ruling cabal of moronic billionaires convinced that public education can only be elevated by punitive measures and the cold imposition of numbers in a database.
Well, the public is not having it. Not just here in New York, but across the country. The reauthorization of No Child Left Behind in progress right now will reflect enormous national pressures to change course from a reliance on testing and the linking of teacher evaluations and student achievement to those tests. Federal funding will not be connected to meeting any federal standards, as it is now.
Here in New York, the governor; the recently departed Commissioner of Education, John King; Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch; and the regents themselves have pursued a course that has blatantly ignored what the public told them over and over again. They pretended to listen, but they kept at it.
The revolution is showing the power structure that it cannot keep poking the public in the eye with a sharp stick over this unwanted Prussian model of public education with no noticeable gain for all the pain. At some point, the public will grab that stick and shove it where the sun does not shine. We're at that point.
The immediate consequences of this revolution are not clear. But it is unlikely that the governor's coveted — by him — teacher evaluation system, which is about to become even more draconian, will survive. If even more students opt out of the math tests, the future of the entire Common Core agenda in New York is on the table.
The regents would be well served to hold public hearings before they act. Listen first. The Legislature in turn needs to take a hard look at what it just slavishly passed for Cuomo and amend or repeal. It's that serious.
Laughably, the U.S. Department of Education's reaction to New York's revolution was to vaguely threaten federal aid, and to dismissively label the revolution as ''an organized political campaign.''
Odd, since the same federal department will likely be singing an entirely different tune when it comes to these tests and federal aid in a few months.
And while political leaders as disparate as conservative Republican Rob Astorino and progressive Democrat Zephyr Teachout spoke in harmony about opting out, the difficult decision by parents to buck the system is made one child at a time.
To call that a political campaign is ludicrous, and it shows just how utterly out of touch these people are.