Want your kids to opt out of standardized tests? The Constitution may be with you.
Parents are finding constitutional arguments to support opting out of standardized tests, Anya Kamenetz writes, and in many cases they’re winning. (Michael Quirk/iStock)
Anya Kamenetz writes about education for NPR. This essay is adapted from her book“The Test: Why Our Schools Are Obsessed With Standardized Testing — but You Don’t Have to Be.”
When Jeanette Deutermann’s older son began third grade, he started crying and begging not to go to school. He developed stomachaches that a doctor said were stress-related. Deutermann, a stay-at-home mom in Nassau County, Long Island, was mystified. “In kindergarten, first, second grade, he wasn’t a kid who was like, ‘Please let me go to school,’ ” she recalled. “But he didn’t have issues.”
She eventually realized what was stressing him out: the advent in third grade of high-stakes standardized testing. On top of state-mandated annual exams, her school and district had imposed many more diagnostic, benchmark and practice tests. For Deutermann, the last straw came in February 2013, during her son’s fourth-grade year, when he brought home a notice that he’d been “selected” for something called “Sunrise Academy.” Based on their scores on the NWEA, a benchmark test, some fourth-graders — gifted as well as struggling kids — were asked to come in at 7:30 a.m. two mornings a week to prep for the state exam. “For me it was a total red flag,” Deutermann recalled. “I start asking: ‘What happens if he doesn’t do well? Will he be put on a lower track? What is the consequence?’ ” She was told the test would measure the school’s performance, not her son’s.
But Deutermann had had enough. So she founded a Facebook group, Long Island Opt-out Info, that February and started organizing other parents. The next spring, nearly 30,000 Long Island students skipped state-mandated tests — one of the biggest protests in what has become a national movement.
Parents and teachers across the country — determined to reclaim local control and opposed to market-based reforms, school closures and cutbacks — are losing their patience with standardized tests. Designed to assess students and hold teachers, schools, districts and states accountable for their performance, high-stakes exams have come to define education for many kids. The Council of Chief State School Officers has reported that, on average, students take 113 such tests between pre-kindergarten and 12th grade. Even President Obama has spoken in favor of cutting back.
The new national resistance holds that these exams do not provide useful or timely information; that they are unfair to minorities and otherdisadvantaged groups; and that tests and prep are crowding out arts, science, social studies and 21st-century skills. Officials are pushing back. Yet parents are finding constitutional arguments to support their approach, and in many cases they’re winning.
There are no hard numbers. But starting in 2013, changes to teacher evaluations related to Race to the Top, a federal incentive program, as well as the adoption of the Common Core standards, triggered a new wave of opt-out protests and boycotts led by parent groups and teachers unions. A reported 60,000 students opted out across New York state last year. Organizers in Denver and Chicago also recruited many defectors during the 2014 testing season, and protests made news in Kansas, Oklahoma, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico and Pennsylvania. Bob Schaeffer of FairTest, an anti-testing group, calls the movement “unprecedented.”
This controversy goes back at least to the 19th century. In “Testing Wars in the Public Schools: A Forgotten History,” historian William J. Reese tells the story of what happened in 1845 in Boston, when reformers, led by the legendary Horace Mann, gave a very difficult surprise essay test to public Want your kids to opt out of standardized tests? The Constitution may be with you. - The Washington Post:
