As protests rise over high-stakes tests, more students likely to opt out
MICHAEL BRYANT / STAFF
Yard signs in Lower Merion urge parents to forgo student testing.
This year's challenge: coming up with enough yard signs so converts to the cause can broadcast their displeasure with the coming Pennsylvania System of School Assessment, or PSSA, tests given in grades three through eight. Their opt-out message - "Our kids & schools are more than a score" - has popped up on curbsides around the affluent Main Line suburb.
Danielle Arnold-Schwartz, a Lower Merion teacher and local chapter leader of the national education activist group Parents Across America, said about 100 yard signs were snapped up for $1 each after a recent Villanova University screening of a documentary critical of high-stakes testing.
"There are people still asking for more," she said, "and it's not fully testing season yet."
The protest signs are a leading indicator that across the region, the parent-led push to opt out of standardized tests - whether the PSSAs, or Pennsylvania's controversial Keystone Exams, or New Jersey's year-old PARCC (Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers) - may be nearing a tipping point.
Earlier this month, anti-testing advocates in Pennsylvania won a major victory when Gov. Wolf signed a bill delaying until 2019 the use of the Keystones as a graduation requirement - a two-year stay that local superintendents and schools boards overwhelmingly supported. The tests were to be part of new state standards in Language Arts, Algebra 1, and Biology.
Last year, about 4,500 students in Pennsylvania sat out achievement tests; in New Jersey, the opt-outs numbered 115,000, or 14 percent of the exam-taking pool. Activists predict those figures will spike upward when the next round of tests begins late next month and continues into April. Across the country, an estimated 640,000 opted out last year in the 14 states that reported, according to FairTest: National Center for Fair and Open Testing.
Perhaps more important are the signs that elected officials, from the White House on down, are listening to the swelling criticism that excessive testing, with weeks of preparatory drills, puts undue pressure on students, robs them of classroom time for real learning, and is an unfair measure of teacher and school performance.
In a video posted on Facebook last year, President Obama said too much testing "takes the joy out of teaching and learning." In December, he signed the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), replacing the contentious No Child Left Behind law. ESSA gives states more leeway in how test results are used to evaluate students and teachers - although, like No Child, it allows for federal funds to be withheld from schools where participation falls under 95 percent.
Even Larry Wittig, Pennsylvania Board of Education chairman and a vocal supporter
Read more at http://www.philly.com/philly/education/20160228_As_protests_rise_over_high-stakes_tests__more_students_likely_to_opt_out.html#xrG3AuSTGZcyAhz4.99
