Opt-Out Activists Aim To Build On Momentum In States
Above: Jessie Rothenberg, age 8, holds a sign while sitting on her father’s shoulders while protesting Gov. Cuomo’s education policies in Park Slope, Brooklyn, in March. Photo by STEPHANIE KEITH FOR NEW YORK DAILY NEWS.
Activists driving the resistance to state exams are attempting to build on their state-level momentum over the past year, while also venturing into a new political landscape that will test whether the energy behind their initial victories will last.
And they say they’re forging ahead with their plans regardless of how much support they get from traditional education advocacy groups, including teachers’ unions.
Several leaders within the so-called testing opt-out movement, which has gained considerable traction in New York and also found a foothold in states like Colorado and Connecticut, say they will continue to push parents to refuse to allow their children to take standardized exams, particularly state tests, for as long as it’s necessary.
They’ll stop, they say, when states adopt accountability policies that prevent tests from being used to rank, sort, and impose what opponents consider unfair consequences on students, teachers, and schools.
Some groups also are looking to extend their influence beyond testing fights to push in states for higher and more equitable levels of school funding and changes to K-12 governance to increase what they say is more local and more democratic control.
ESSA’s Impact
Like other education-focused advocacy organizations, groups seeking to alter testing’s place in public schools say they’re looking forward to life under the Every Student Success Act, the new federal education law that returns many key policy decisions to states. That includes application of the federal policy requiring states to test 95 percent of their students for accountability purposes.
That mandate remains under ESSA. But the newly reauthorized version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act specifically lets states decide how missing the requirement will impact school ratings.
Anti-testing advocates may have new chances for success in state capitals that offer them a smaller scale than Washington, said Diane Ravitch, the president of the Network for Public Education, or NPE, a nonprofit that supports the opt-out movement and pushes for local control of schools.
“Congress doesn’t pay attention to a grassroots group that has no lobbyist,” Ravitch said, referring to her own organization. “So I think that means we can be much more effective at the state level.”
Wielding Leverage
A rough measure of the opt-out movement’s success surfaced last month, when the U.S. Department of Education released letters it had sent to 13 states about test-participation rates that were below 95 percent, either in individual districts or statewide. In New York, home of perhaps the most robust opt-out movement in the country, 1 in 5 students eligible to take the state English/language arts and math tests did not do so in the 2014-15 school Opt-Out Activists Aim To Build On Momentum In States | PopularResistance.Org:
