Who's Out?
Proponents and opponents are both right about who is opting out of standardized tests.
Speculating about how many and what kind of students were opting out of standardized tests was a fun education parlor game this spring. Highly energized proponents claimed the opt-out movement was a diverse cross-section of public school students. Critics responded that, no, it was a movement of affluent white parents and not that many of them. And, as usual with education debates, most Americans said, "what?" Now, though, we have actual data from opt-out ground zero in New York State, released late last week, and it turns out the proponents and opponents of opt-outs were both right and wrong about what happened.
About 20 percent of eligible test takers in New York refused to take the tests; that's about 200,000 students. Here's the state's official description of who they were:
[READ: Failing Tests]
Department data show that students who did not take the 2015 Grades 3-8 ELA and Math Tests and did not have a recognized, valid reason for not doing so were more likely to be White, more likely to be from a low or average need district, and slightly more likely to have scored at [the two lowest performance levels] in 2014. Students who did not take the test in 2015 and did not have a recognized, valid reason for doing so were less likely to be economically disadvantaged and less likely to be an [English Language Learner].
Refusers were also more concentrated in some communities and charter school parents (who are disproportionately low-income) were unlikely to opt-out. So it turns out opt-out advocates were right that the number of parents opting-out was larger than most people realized. But the critics were right about the opt-out movement's lack of broad diversity and its base being more Whole Foods than community empowerment. Punchline: It's a lot of students but they're mostly better-off white students (who had previously not performed well on tests).
The lack of diversity of the opt-out movement is awkward (especially because its leaders consider themselves upright progressives) and may appear to be a liability, but, in purely political terms, it's actually a strength. That's because – just in case you haven't been paying attention – if most education stakeholders or our political leadership more generally were genuinely concerned about the poor, our education system would look radically different than it does today. The interest of more privileged Americans tends to drive the debate and education politics. If the political struggle on test opt-outs becomes civil rights groups and reformers against well-heeled parents who don't want their kids taking standardized tests then bet on the parents.
[READ: Tests Are a Part of Life]
So what now?
State and federal officials are facing pressure to take a heavy-handed approach to tamp down the opt-outs by sanctioning schools or the state education department. That's a mistake and will only escalate things. (In addition being a lousy political strategy, I’m biased here because I do think parents should be able to opt-out of tests if they want. It’s ill-advised in my view, but requiring parents to do something they don’t want to seems even more ill-considered. I also think that principle extends more broadly to other choices for parents.)
The opt-out movement, to the extent it is a movement, is organized around what it's against and anger at the status quo. It lacks a positive agenda about what it is for (and don't hold your breath for an embrace of an alternative accountability strategy like school choice). In general, movements like that are hard to sustain in American politics, but one surefire way to perpetuate them is to create easy targets. If I were a leader in the opt-out movement I'd be praying nightly for a clumsy or coercive response from public officials. A new outrage keeps people riled up and will help broaden the campaign from a well-financed and organized advocacy strategy in a few places like New York to something more national.
Instead, a focus on more transparency about tests and communication about what tests do and don't do and how they actually work might go a long way toward deescalating things. The reality is more complicated but also more mundane than the rhetoric and pronouncements of all the amateur psychometricians on Twitter and Facebook. (Standard disclosure: I've been involved on this issue in few capacities as a parent and a professional. I was a state board of education member in Virginia, and so interacted with assessment companies in that role. In the past few years I've consulted for Data Shows Opt-Out Students Are More Numerous But Not So Diverse - US News:
