Opt-out parents have a point
Middle-class parents are right to question whether today's education reforms will help their kids.
A new phrase has rapidly become familiar in schooling: “opt-out.” Across the nation, hundreds of thousands of students are refusing to take state reading and math tests, usually at the behest of their parents. In New York, 200,000 students have opted out of this spring’s state tests. Some New York districts have had more than half of their students refuse to take the tests. Polling suggests that half of all New York voters say they support the families that have opted out of the tests. Meanwhile, more localized opt-out pushes are bubbling up in states including New Jersey, Colorado and California.
Opt-out is partly antipathy for the Common Core standards and the new Common Core-aligned tests. It’s partly a sense that students are taking too many tests. It’s partly due to agitation by teachers irate that the test results will count heavily under New York’s new evaluation system. While there’s really no way to know whether we’re witnessing the leading edge of a national wave or a temporary, localized backlash, New York officials and their allies have generally raced to dismiss opt-outs as a blip.
They’ve chalked the situation up to the imaginings of conspiracy theorists, the ravings of malcontents, parental ignorance and teacher union machinations. This all sounds familiar. It was the same reaction that greeted initial concerns about the Common Core or, more than a decade ago, those raised about No Child Left Behind. In fact, this familiar diagnosis may tell us less about opt-out than it does about the myopic nature of contemporary education reform. By and large, education reformers have seemingly concluded that it’s fine to ignore or alienate middle-class families.
After all, today’s school reform agenda was crafted with the troubles of the inner-city in mind. It focuses on ensuring that low-income and minority children who had been “left behind” would master essential skills and graduate high school. The overriding mission has been to take dysfunctional schools and make them functional. The goal is admirable. However, the diagnosis and remedies are configured for a particular set of schools and students.
It turns out that many suburban and middle-class parents have issues when those reforms are extended to the schools that educate their children. This has been taken as a sign that these parents are ignorant or selfish. As U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has put it, “Pushback is coming from, sort of, white suburban moms who – all of a sudden – their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were and their school isn’t quite as good as they thought they were, and that’s pretty scary.”
Reformers see parental skepticism as irrational. The fact that 70 percent of the nation’s parents consistently give their child’s school an A or a B simply shows how blind they are. The fact that 68 percent of parents don’t believe standardized tests help teachers teach or that just 31 percent think it’s a good idea to use test results to evaluate teachers serves only to underscore their ignorance.
But there’s another possibility. It’s that these parents are being reasonable when they worry that the reform agenda, whatever its merits when it comes to schools steeped in dysfunction, does more harm than good for their kids. Reformers have tended to dismiss this possibility, while seeking to convince middle-class parents that their schools are much worse than they may realize.
Oddly enough, suburban parents seem oddly ungrateful for these efforts to help them see that their children’s schools actually stink. When reformers wonder why these parents don’t get it, the usual culprit is “messaging.” And the usual solution is better PR.
But maybe the parents do get it. Maybe they figure that having their child sit for a dozen hours of testing, as part of an effort that seems to be narrowing their school’s curriculum, doesn’t add a lot of value. Maybe these parents aren’t convinced that the results of these tests will be used in ways that benefit their kids. Using those test results to identify “effective” teachers so that these teachers can be more “equitably” distributed (e.g. moved from middle-class schools to low-income schools) sure doesn’t seem designed to help middle-class kids. It’s no great wonder that middle-class families can regard the reform agenda as hostile, when it doesn’t feel irrelevant.
Maybe the solution is not to berate these parents, but to ask what they want for their children, find ways to help make that happen and seek opportunities to promote reform that benefits a broad coalition of low-income and middle-class families. Here are three simple ideas to start.
State officials can be vastly more transparent about whether and how state tests results are used to improve the education of all children. This would include a much more aggressive effort to solicit parental concerns about test length and content, take those concerns seriously and address them.
Those designing accountability systems and teacher evaluation should champion a vision of school excellence that stretches beyond reading and math scores. Amid the focus on reading and math scores, much of what parents want for their children can get lost. Reformers would do well to celebrate a vision of excellence that more consciously includes the arts, world languages, citizenship and history.
Reformers should spend less time scheming how to redistribute good teachers and more on growing the number of great teachers. Today, there are extensive efforts to recruit teachers into impoverished schools but almost none in recruiting promising teachers who want to teach in other environs. It’s not an either-or. We can recruit both the missionaries and those who just want to teach calculus.
Historically, in the American system, the social reforms that last have been those that also serve the broad middle class. The nation has tended to be far less generous with reforms that pit the middle class against the poor. Today’s school reformers have been slow to learn this lesson, and have suffered for it. Opt-out offers a chance to start getting this right.Opt-out parents have a point - AEI: