Many parents and students are fed up with what they view as excessive standardized testing. Will the burgeoning opt-out movement save Colorado schools—or endanger them?
Hollywood agents would never cast Zach Cheikho in the stereotypical rebel role. The 16-year-old maintains a 3.5 GPA at Denver’s South High School and speaks in a measured manner that brings to mind airport public service announcements. With his glossy, dark-rimmed glasses, he seems more likely to play the sensitive, bookish kid in a smart, quirky coming-of-age story.
But, as it turns out, Cheikho is the kind of politically motivated rabble-rouser school administrators have come to fear in recent years.
Since the eighth grade, Cheikho has refused to take most standardized tests—and he’s campaigned for other students to boycott testing too. Last March, he spent his lunch periods distributing opt-out letters to fellow students, many of whom signed the handouts and filed them with South High’s leadership. “The tests take a huge amount of time away from actual classwork, and I just feel like I’m being cheated out of my education,” Cheikho told the audience at First Christian Reformed Church in Platt Park, where he was invited to speak as part of an opt-out panel discussion this past May. Fellow panelists included two Denver Public Schools (DPS) parents, two DPS teachers, former DPS board member Jeannie Kaplan, and Peggy Robertson, an Aurora Public Schools teacher who co-founded United Opt Out (a national organization that urges families to “choose to refuse”). “The opt-out movement is about civil disobedience,” said Robertson, prompting applause.
In the nation’s larger school districts, including Denver Public Schools, students take an average of 113 standardized tests each by the time they graduate. Most are administered between grades three and eight, when kids typically take 10—and as many as 20—standardized tests per year. Critics say it’s too much, for many of the same reasons Cheikho cites.
But with students’ test scores determining which schools receive the exalted top status and which get restructured as a result of poor performance, schools do all they can to produce favorable numbers—including pressuring kids to show up. Cheikho, whose mother supports his protests, says South’s administration confiscated his fliers. A parent on the panel says she was told by principal Peter Castillo that her son wouldn’t be welcome at K–12 Kunsmiller Creative Arts Academy the next year if he opted out. (Castillo disputes this account and says students who opt out of testing because of personal beliefs are not penalized.) An audience member later explained how a man removed her daughter from math class, told the seventh-grader she couldn’t return until she took the TCAP test, and wouldn’t let her call her mom when she asked. “The principal at Skinner [Middle School] told all the eighth-graders that they wouldn’t be allowed to walk at their continuation if they didn’t take the tests,” another parent said (Skinner’s principal says no students were denied participation). “Can they do that?”
The response was a chorus of angry replies: “No!”
If you’re savvy to the varying grades of graphite, that’s likely because you grew up taking the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills, which required the use of a No. 2 pencil to fill in bubbles answering multiple-choice questions. Following their 1935 debut, the tests gave administrators and families a way to assess academic achievement based on a national standard. The goal was to give schools the ability to compare results against this standard, so that a test score in Alabama meant the same as the equivalent score in Wyoming.
The No Child Left Behind Act, which former President George W. Bush signed into law in 2002, put some teeth into testing. Federal requirements amount to 17 standardized tests—one each year in reading and math from third through eighth grade, and one round of English, math, and science tests in high school (typically in 10th grade). If students don’t show annual improvement—with, for example, this year’s seventh-graders outscoring last year’s—the school is subject to sanctions, such as allowing students the option of transferring to other schools, replacing school staff, and, after six years without betterment, completely restructuring the school. “An accountability system must have a consequence,” Bush said in 2001. “Otherwise, it’s not much of an accountability system.”
With an increased emphasis on testing, the state and districts have layered on even more exams to try to forecast student performance and boost it appropriately. The 2012 Colorado READ Act instituted three literacy tests each year for kindergarten through third grades (children who are proficient on the first test can skip the remainder of that year’s exams), and districts administer their own interim Pop Quiz | 5280: