Will the US Department of Education take your school’s Title 1 funds if you opt your student out of the SBAC? Short answer, no.
There is no federal or state law that requires financial penalties to schools’ Title I funds if parents refuse to allow their children to take the PARCC tests. The federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law did include a mandate that required schools to have a 95 percent participation rate on state tests or face sanctions. The intent of that law was to prevent schools from hiding subgroups of students from the accountability structure and was not aimed at preventing parents from refusing to have their children tested.
The parents in the states of New York and New Jersey have been fighting back against the Common Core Standards for the last year and the corresponding PARCC battery of tests which is our SBAC set of tests in Washington State.
But let’s start at the beginning.
It is illegal for the Federal Government to specify a national curriculum or national test.
From my post High Stake Testing: A little history:
In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into Federal law the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) as part of the “War on Poverty” program. This bill ensured that children in poverty would receive additional funding for their school programs. The funding allocated was to include the professional development of teachers, class materials, and support for parent involvement. This federal money is referred to as “Title 1″ funding. (Note: Part of the original ESEA agreement ensured there would not be a national curriculum decided by the Federal government, but rather that each state would determine its own curriculum.) ESEA was to continue for five years, but Congress has reauthorized the bill every five years and each time it is reauthorized, members of Congress, along with the President, have made changes to the bill.
Any standardized curriculum can only be legally developed at the state or district level. Arne Duncan and his backers, particularly Bill Gates, really, really wanted a standardized curriculum throughout the fifty states. Conundrum. What to do? Have a private entity, led by Achieve Inc., create the curriculum and tests and make it sound like the states had determined the standards, thus the name “Common Core State Standards”. Thing is, no one at the state level in any state ever had anything to do with creating the standards and in fact, the Common Core Standards had not been completed when the state legislators across the country voted to have them implemented in their states. It took some slick Will the US Department of Education take your school’s Title 1 funds if you opt your student out of the SBAC? Short answer, no. | Seattle Education:
