Another Big Win for Opt-Out
It looks like Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and the national Democratic Party are getting nervous. Certainly Merryl Tisch, Chancellor of the New York State Board of Regents, and Governor Andrew Cuomo are backing off. After months of threatening that high student opt-out rates on high-stakes Common Core aligned standardized tests would cause school districts to lose federal and state aid, the threats have evaporated. Poor MaryEllen Elia, the new state education commissioner and agent in charge of making the threats, has been hung out to dry.
The federal government's Race to the Top initiative mandates that 95% of the students in a district take the exams. Because of the Opt-Out movement many school districts in New York State fell below the threshold. Opt-Out is particularly strong in suburban communities on Long Island in in the Hudson River Valley.
This week Merryl Tisch announced districts with high opt out rates would not be punished. Apparently she now realizes withdrawing money from a school district "what you're doing is you're hurting the kids" and its not an "effective way" to deal with the Opt-out movement.
Andrew Cuomo, who made use of test results to evaluate teachers a cornerstone of his education policies, appears to have conceded defeat on the issue. "At the end of the day, parents are in charge and parents make the decisions."
Meanwhile, as a keynote speaker at a recent Gates Foundation fundedEducators4Excellence conference, MaryEllen Elia was strident in her opposition to Opt-Out, apparently unaware that Tisch and Cuomo were backing down. According to a transcript posted at the website Perdido Street School, Elia stated "opt out is something that is not reasonable. I understand that it can about as a result of Another Big Win for Opt-Out | Alan Singer:
