Throughout the year, political awareness of the testing issue has grown. Groups like Allies for Public Education have lobbied hard to get change from Albany, but they’ve also helped organize test refusals and protests.
It’s turned into an issue in this year’s gubernatorial race. Governor Andrew Cuomo announced a deal where New York State would collect 2014 test data, but it wouldn’t count against districts. Rob Astorino, his Republican rival, blasted the governor for failing to stand up for parents and students.
For his part, Cuomo has criticized state education officials for bungling the rollout of Common Core in New York.
Karen Cathers, a Rethinking Testing member, is a retired fourth-grade teacher from New Paltz. She retired back in 2004 when the Bush-era “No Child Left Behind” reforms started coming online. She still feels that standardized testing and teaching to the test are problems — they might even be worse under the Obama administration, she added.
She believes the testing scheme reduces creativity and out-of-the-box thinking in kids, scolding them for bringing personal experiences into essay answers and rewarding them for providing mechanical, “text only” answers.
“It’s a dangerous direction,” Cathers said. “In a democratic society, you want people thinking outside the box. You want them to be creative and imaginative and bring up dissension and other ideas and innovations.”
She sees a big problem with using student performance data from those tests to rank districts and close buildings for underperformance. Like many critics of Obama’s educational reforms, Cathers sees Common Core — especially the way it is working in New York — as diverting money from districts to charter schools.
Cathers also said she’s proud that parents, students and teachers are standing up. To her, that’s democracy at work.
“You have a right to have local control of your education, and parents have a right to decide that some stuff is baloney,” she said. “It’s part of the democratic process — which is exactly what they’re trying to destroy.”
KT Tobin is a former New Paltz Board of Education member. She’s also a mom with kids in the school district. Her household called a family meeting, outlining the situation for the kids. They let them decide, and the kids chose not to take the tests.
“These tests do nothing to improve education for our children, and in fact in many cases can be quite harmful,” Tobin said. She and her kids wanted to send a message to Albany that enough is enough.
She too is proud of the test refusals and protests. “I’m thrilled by the numbers. New Paltz has always been an activist community, and this is just another excellent example of us fighting back against bad public policy.”
What will test refusals do?
Superintendent Rice said she wasn’t sure how the state would react to the widespread protest. If a school district fails to get 95 percent of its students to take NYS assessments, it can put Title I funding in jeopardy.
New Paltz’s refusals didn’t breach that 95 percent threshold as of April 2, she added. But for state officials, not having the information will make getting the whole picture difficult.
“If a significant number of students are not taking the test, it’s obviously going to skew the results. You’re not going to get a real report out on how we’re doing on the new Common Core learning standards in the second year,” Rice said.
Anti-testing advocates want to call the state’s bluff that opting out of testing will suspend funding. Tanis said she thinks the money will keep coming and that the protests will force Albany into a position where parents’ concerns get the attention they deserve instead.
New Paltz does not use the state tests to determine grades for kids. So if a middle schooler said no to taking the test, for instance, it wouldn’t show up on the report card.
This year is the second year New York has given the tests based on the federal education standards. State scores plummeted last year when the more rigorous Common Core exams were phased in.
Protests are likely to occur again later this month when the math exams begin on April 30.
Students in Highland also refused the test, but a request for comment to the Highland Central School District seeking the exact number of kids who opted out was not immediately returned.
The fact is kids whose parents wrote the letter & refused the tests were forced to sit @ their desks & read for 2 hours.
Personally, I think the kids would have been better off if they could have gone to study hall, the library, playtime etc
Sitting for 2 hours in the room with those taking the tests seems heartless.
We know the test is hard. And we know that so much protest is people taking the easy way out. Our competitiveness globally is suffering because our kids can’t. They have it too easy. We do not challenge them nearly enough in basic skills, nor do we expect enough from them as growing young adults. Sure, folks can holler and complain all they want but in the end it is the student who fears being challenged and is only reinforced in that “can’t do” attitude by their parents who will in fact suffer in the end.
We should be expecting and frankly requiring parents and students to do more! Parents need to get involved in a positive and on-going way, not just when they want to protest something. Students should be expected to perform and take on new challenges every day.
Hiding from a test is foolish and the furor over this only demonstrates that people would rather invest time in not doing something than buckling down and doing it. I expect more from our community. A quick scan of the media and the complaints and it is easy – very easy – to say if people had dedicated as much to preparing for the tests than standing in meetings complaining our kids would have not only learned something, they would prove nay-sayers wrong and do quite well, thank you.
And yes – I’ve seen the test, I’ve talked to teachers, I know all about it – and it is wrong that we are not striving to achieve instead of dragging our feet to avoid.