"Sorry, I'm Not Taking This Test"
ONE HOT MORNING in May, Kiana Hernandez came to class early. She stood still outside the door, intensely scanning each face in the morning rush of shoulders, hats, and backpacks. She felt anxious. For more than eight months she had been thinking about what she was about to do, but she didn't want it to be a big scene.
As her English teacher approached the door, she blocked him with her petite, slender frame. Then, in a soft voice, she said, "I'm sorry. I'm not going to take the test today." The multiple-choice test that morning was one of 15 that year alone, and she'd found out it would be used primarily as part of her teacher's job evaluation. She'd come into class, she said, but would spend the hour quietly studying.
The teacher stared at her dark-brown eyes in silence while students shuffled past. "That's a mistake," he said with a deep sigh.
By her own estimate, Kiana had spent about three months during each of her four years at University High in Orlando preparing for and taking standardized tests that determined everything from her GPA to her school's fate. "These tests were cutting out class time," she says. "We would stop whatever we were learning to prepare." The spring of her senior year, she says, there were three whole months when she couldn't get access to computers at school (she didn't have one at home) to do homework or fill out college applications. They were always being used for testing.
Kiana had a 2.99 GPA and is heading to Otterbein University in Ohio this fall. She says she did well in regular classroom assignments and quizzes, but struggled with the standardized tests the district and state demanded. "Once you throw out the word 'test,' I freeze," she tells me. "I get anxiety knowing that the tests count more than classwork or schoolwork. It's a make or break kind of thing."
Junior year had been particularly hard. She'd failed the Florida reading test every year since sixth grade and had been placed in remedial classes where she was drilled on basic skills, like reading paragraphs to find the topic sentence and then filling in the right bubbles on a practice test. She didn't get to read whole books like her peers in the regular class or practice her writing, analysis, and debating—skills she would need for the political science degree she dreamed of, or for the school board candidacy that she envisioned. (Sorting students into remedial classes, educational research shows, actually depresses achievement among African American and Latino students in many cases, yet it remains common practice.)
Kiana was living with her mother, and times were tough. Some days there was no food in the house. "The only thing that kept me going to school was my math teacher," Kiana says. "The only place that I felt that I had worth was Mr. Katz's class. That's the thing that kept me going every day."
On the news, Kiana saw pictures of students and parents carrying signs reading "Opt-Out: Boycott Standardized Testing." Her high school didn't have activists like that. In the library, Kiana made flyers that read: "Are you tired of taking time consuming and pointless tests? Boycott Benchmark Testing! When given the test, open the slip and do NOT pick up your pencil. Refuse to feed the system!" She passed them out to her classmates, but they were worried that opting out would hurt their GPAs.
Kiana talked about this with Mr. Katz, who regularly met with students who needed extra help during his lunch hour and after school. One day during their tutoring session, he mentioned Gandhi. Kiana went to the library and found some of Gandhi's essays. She determined that what it took to make change was someone taking a personal stand.
Next, she researched state education rules and discovered that the end-of-course tests that Florida required in every subject were being used primarily for job evaluations. (She says one teacher told her: "Please take [the test]. My paycheck depends on it.")
The English teacher started passing out the computer tablets used to take the test. He put one on her desk. Kiana raised her hand. "I'm sorry," she said again. "I'm not going to take this test."
The noise dropped abruptly.
"You should wait until you are done with high school before you try to change the world," the teacher said.
Kiana reached into her backpack and pulled out a notebook to prepare for her psychology final.
CRITICS HAVE LONG warned that a flood of standardized testing is distorting American education. But in recent months, an unprecedented number of students like Kiana, along with teachers and parents across the country, have chosen to take matters into their own hands—by simply refusing to take part.
"This school year saw by far some of the largest numbers of families opting out from standardized tests in history," Bob Schaeffer, director of public education at the advocacy group FairTest.org, told me this spring. In New Jersey, 15 percent of high school students chose not to take state tests in the 2014-15 school year. In New York state, only a few districts reported meeting 95