Parents and the Opt-Out Movement

~ Laura

Forgive me for coming back to the topic of parents and the PARCC exam. There is so much politics right here outside my front door. I can’t help talking about it.

Yesterday, Jonah came home with a screen shot of a hand-out that parents were distributing outside the high school, which told kids that they should not take the PARCC exam in three weeks. He said the parents were arrested, but that might be a teenager exaggeration. The cops may have simply asked the parents to leave. I’m not really sure about the reaction from law enforcement. Everything else — the handouts, the parents — is true.

School districts are preparing separate rooms for kids who arrive at school, but will not take the exam. There is a lot of confusion about whether or not federal funding for schools will be cut, if there is a large number of families that refuse to take the test. The teachers’ union is launching an ad campaign against the test.

Just fascinating politics.

Published by Laura

28 thoughts on “Parents and the Opt-Out Movement”

  1. I’m glad, honestly. I think the threat of losing funding is the only thing that will make the powers that be pay attention to valid concerns about standardized tests and correct them.

    By the way? Nearly seven hours of testing is insane for fifth-graders. If a test can’t figure out what a kids knows in under three hours, find a better test.

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  3. I’d want to hear about the follow up on the police response. There are rules about loitering/distributing literature at schools (I think the last case I saw was on religious tracts).

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    1. I’m going to guess that the place the parents chose to stand had more to do with a combination of 1)ignorance about any law concerning loitering/distributing literature on school grounds AND 2) the identification of the least snowiest place to stand (probably the closer you are to the school building, the more likely to find ground cleared of snow) THAN any decision to engage in civil disobedience.

      But those are just guesses. I’m several states away.

      I don’t know what is creepy about going to the school to hand out flyers. It only makes sense to go where your “audience” is. When a school levy is coming up, volunteers are on the sidewalks outside of our school buildings (that is, as close as they can legally get to the building) handing out flyers to parents driving in and out of the parking lots; same thing for when the junior high PTO has their annual mattress sale (certainly the strangest fund-raiser I’ve been exposed to). They know the legal limits because they are affiliated with the school and the administration advises them.

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      1. I think that maybe asking other peoples’ children not to take a test is quite a bit different than PTO fundraising.

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      2. MH – That is content-based discrimination and a violation of the First Amendment, although public schools do have more discretion to discriminate than most public spaces.

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    2. Ever walk through mid-town Manhattan, especially near Times Square? (please note, only walk through that revolting area to get to MUJI store.) Somebody is always thrusting a flyer at you. I don’t claim to know the laws about handing out flyers in public but it is apparently permissible at least some times in some places. I’m assuming that there is a legal place for these parents to stand with their flyers, or some sort of permit they can apply for — if there isn’t, then they have to be willing to do the civil disobedience thing, and all that implies.

      The opt-out flyers are just information, what the families do with it is up to them. I throw out junk mail entreating me to do all sorts of things — buy our pizza! take out our credit card! — everyday, don’t you?

      I just don’t get what is so sacrosanct about the PARCC.

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      1. There’s the MUJI in the Flatiron district around the corner from City Bakery and near ABC Carpet & Home and Fishes Eddy. Smaller but much more pleasant.

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      2. I have no idea what is so sacrosanct about it either. I first heard of it this week. But I am fairly certain that, legally permissible or not, handing out flyers to kids (as young as 13 or so, I’m guessing) asking them to not take a test will do more to increase support for the PARCC (or to decrease support for the anti-PARCC people) than 600,000 bionic Arne Duncans.

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      3. Believe me, I’d rather have gone to one of the other stores but I was on a very tight schedule and in between another stop in mid-Manhattan and dinner in Riverdale. It was the only location that made sense during an all-too brief visit from the Midwest.

        I did get to walk over that singing/chanting/moaning sidewalk grate on that traffic island in the middle of TS, so at least there was that lovely moment.

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  4. There’s probably a great deal wrong with the test. And it’s possible and even likely that it shouldn’t be administered. But however bad the test is, a bunch of upper middle-class parents protesting and getting arrested over it is silly and worthy of more than just an eye roll. It is just a test. It’s a scene that feels worthy of inclusion in a movie in the American middle-class ennui genre of film (a la The Ice Storm) because of the characters’ lack of perspective.

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    1. If you created a Venn diagram, they would overlap with the parents who are all angsty at their children’s soccer games.

      They need a hobby. Or some redirection to the town that Laura mentioned where kids are showing up at school hungry.

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      1. All of the middle-class parents I know who are concerned about this are concerned about the poorer kids too (and by the way, schools here include both middle class and poor kids). You can always do more – and by “you” I mean you as well as me as well as them: stop taking your kids to soccer games or reading blogs or paying attention to what your own kids are doing in school, etc., etc., and worry about other people. Being an activist about an education policy that affects every child in the U.S. is hardly self-absorbed. Not that there aren’t self-absorbed people involved, or that the strategies might not work. But this “self-absorbed middle-class parent” is, if not a straw man, just one of any number of people who might be working on this issue.

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      2. af – point taken. Flippant comment made by me on my way out the door.

        What I meant was the small subset of active/involved parents who can’t see beyond their own individual child’s circumstance. I’ve been on school boards and it’s a challenge to recruit board members who are able to put their own situation aside and look at the issues as they affect the community.

        I stand by my belief that angry/angsty soccer parents who take it far too seriously should really play in their own adult league. It’s mean to be a fun, fitness experience for the kids.

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      3. There is a lot of great and very important parent activism related to education. Affluent parents protesting at their own child’s school still feels like a sort of silly and selfish act. But most of parenting is selfish, and I think that for the most part that is fine, and that there can be unintended positive effects to that. There is also no need to pretend that motivations to undertake causes that end up benefiting one person’s own children and their close peers are really for the greater good of all of children. (Admittedly, I know nothing of these parents’ motivations and why they are choosing to protest.)

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  6. The politics is truly fascinating, though. I disagree about the role that UMC, angsty parents play, though. I think they can change things for good, though there are definitely times when their interests don’t mesh well with the interests of others not similarly situated. We have a strong testing discussion going on in our state (where the tests *will* be required for graduation) and I find the NJ discussion interesting, too.

    I am finding the analogies between the public policy communication questions in informing on vaccines and on standardized testing fascinating. I’m especially fascinated because my opinions on the core questions in the two debates are quite different (I whole-heartedly support the vaccines; am ambivalent about the standardized testing, in ways that can sound similar to vaccine-laggers, though not vaccine-antagonists).

    I realized that one of the statements I made on vaccines, years ago, that I trust the immunologists/epidemiologists who tell me vaccines are the right choice, compared to my views about the specialists on the testing issue an interesting one to ponder. On the first level, I think my issue is that I do not consider the testing specialists specialists in education, since I trust the teachers over the theorists. Flipping the analogy back to the doctors/immunologists, I think the difference is that most doctors also support vaccines, and, that vaccine administration does proceed according to guidelines, while I think most theoretical teaching interventions aren’t practiced the way they are preached (for practical reasons of time and money and individual variability, of both teachers and students).

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    1. I think you are on to something. It’s near impossible to find any sort of medical professional on the anti-vaccine side but pretty easy to find professional educators of all sorts — from pre-school teachers to college professors who study the history and philosophy of education — sounding the alarm about high-stakes testing and the PARCC tests in particular (I think there is an argument to be made that PARCC is the highest-stakes of them all).

      For a small instance, just the other day, the NYT’s Letters to the Editor included half a dozen or so from professional educators, both current and retired, against high-stakes testing, and that same day, my local paper had an op-ed by a local superintendent against high-stakes testing. These are people in the trenches, highly-credentialed, deeply informed, and very experienced. Not that appearing on editorial pages is the ultimate measure of the worth of an idea, just as an illustration that everyone can go check themselves as proof that it isn’t “just some moms” (my local paper is the Cincinnati Enquirer if you want to check, but good luck with their paywall).

      Anyway, so there are some not-perfectly informed parents out there? So what? Focusing on them, and wondering if they are the same people who get bent out of shape when their kids’ sports teams aren’t scoring, is a red herring.

      Try reading the arguments against these tests at places like FairTest.org, Mercedes Schnieder’s blog, Valerie Strauss’s column in the Washington Post, goggle Carol Burris or Susan Ohanian, and yes, go over to Diane Ravitch’s blog or take her book, the Life and Death of the Great American School System, out of the library and look at the Billionaire’s Boys Club chapter. In other words, spend a few minutes reading something an expert wrote? Is that too much?

      Disclaimer: my kid’s on an IEP and he’s almost through with high school. The PARCC tests will have a very, very small direct impact on him. He will have to take just one of them, next year in American Government. My district will also be giving some of the Smarter Balanced tests but not to his grade. I don’t have a personal dog in this fight. This is a topic I am interested in and am following. I don’t do Facebook and have next to no idea what my fellow local suburban moms think or know about these tests.

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  7. I peeked in at a Facebook test-activism page in NJ, and I think there’s a lot of interesting information there, as there is at our local school blog (which is not primarily about test-activism, but includes that topic, along with some other similar themes about education reform, charter schools and specific discussion of our own school district). I get a large amount of my local information from our school blog, which is run by a woman who cares about her own, relatively affluent, children but also about the ideals of public education for everyone.

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    1. Teachers’ opinion on the common core and this test are extremely divided. And that’s only in the past year, when the teacher evaluations got dropped in state legislation. Before that, this program had a 76% approval rate from teachers. It was endorsed by the major teachers unions.

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      1. So, lots and lots of teachers who are “in the trenches” think this is a great program. Talked to an asst principal last week, who thought that these protesters were crazy.

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  8. How many parents are we talking about? I found an article which mentioned 60,000 last year in New York. That’s quite a few, if true, but… I don’t know. It seems to be one of those issues which drive some people to take strong positions.

    Could you point me to the moment when parents opted in to the Common Core system? Surely, if they can opt out, there must have been a point at which they agreed to the new standards?

    Everything I’ve ever found indicates that scholastic achievement correlates with family income. If the children of the UMC do the best, why assume their parents are mistaken to object to the changes? The Common Core does not seem to have raised the standards my children would have been held to–the MCAS are thought to have been more demanding. The MCAS were only a 10th grade level test.

    Assistant principals think all parents who show up at school board meetings are crazy. Quiet school board meetings are a reliable sign of a well-run district. Parents show up, become activists, and protest when there’s trouble in the district.

    One last thought. The Common Core is intended to be a national standard, but our communities are very different from each other. The pro-Common Core video was a head-scratcher. Do I worry about competition with the children in Shanghai? No. However, some communities in the US do worry about competition with Asia. In those communities, child anxiety is a real issue. It’s not over-protective parents; it’s serious debates about which level of academic pressure is appropriate for K-12 students. Because there’ve been suicides. Search for Gunn High School in Palo Alto to find some of the current debate on the issue in that town. http://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2015/01/28/students-to-board-its-not-gunns-fault

    Nervous type-A behavior does correlate with success. Parents who believe they can change things if they speak up will not be quiet if they see their nervous type-A children suffering from severe anxiety. I know there are children in our town who are seeing therapists to deal with issues related to anxiety and perfectionism. It’s not selfish for the parents to assume that if their child is suffering, other children are suffering too.

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  9. Do you really not worry about competition from Asia? I don’t worry about it, precisely, but I do believe that by the time my kids are in their careers, that competition for most elite jobs will be world wide and that the labor market will be international. It’s already true in STEM, and my belief is that it will become more so. Say, for example, a local startup Urbanspoon, a restaurant review/search site, was bought out by a Indian company.

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    1. (I’ll leave a longer comment later.)

      No, not really. I think the xenophobic, fear-mongering comparison with Asian schools always leaves out the cram-school part of the comparison. I don’t think that spending one’s entire childhood chained to a desk prepares one to be an independent, curious, educated adult. I’ve been amused recently to read of grown up “tiger children” who use their high-falutin’ educational credentials to be tutors to the children of millionaires in NYC. I love education, but there’s a certain type of winner-takes-all style of education which restricts human potential.

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      1. Yep, I was wrong.

        Ok, so a longer comment…

        I looked at the beginning of the sample test. I didn’t slodge all the way through it, but the teacher’s description of the first section on DNA is on the money. I’d recommend taking a look. My thoughts…

        1). Will an intelligent middle class kid have any problem with the exam itself? Other than terminal boredom, a non-intuitive computer system, and a really bad case of “what was the point of that?” No. There will not be legions of upper middle class parents tearing their hair out about the exam.

        Even a basic acquaintance with the existence of DNA and one episode of CSI would be all the background knowledge one would need to pass the first section. Despite the vaunted “high standards”, there’s no sign of them on the test.

        2) As the results will be important to schools and administrators, preparing for the test will distort school instruction in all but the most UMC communities, in which the parents will annoy school boards to no end with complaints about the low level of classroom materials.

        3) I don’t have a dog in this fight, as we left the public system some time ago. If the other tests are as bad, and if they reflect the Common Core, I predict the rise of history and current event clubs in UMC communities. Mothers with experience in journalism, etc, will run seminars in how to write essays which are not 5 paragraph essays nor admissions essays.

        4) If I did have a child in a public system, would I encourage him to skip the exam? Well, I’m known to be averse to conflict, so probably not. On the other hand, I wouldn’t object to other parents refusing the exam. I can’t see any way it will reflect what kids can actually do. I’m pretty sure my kids could have passed it in middle school, on the basis of what they learned from their pleasure reading.

        This exam will tell you nothing about what intelligent high schoolers know, or can do. The attempt to cram general cultural knowledge into English classes will devastate children’s grasp of the elements of good writing, literature, narrative, memoirs, grammar, conventions commonly observed by educated writers, the ability to detect an unreliable narrator.

        I wouldn’t be surprised if the plan were to eventually have the tests scored by computers, which will lead to unintended consequences.

        5) I suspect this will turn out to be a disaster. It will confirm the value of growing up in an educated household, but due to its emphasis on close reading, there will be very little teachers will be able to do to close the gap in test results. Even a test which relied upon students memorizing geographic facts would show more respect for teachers. So the profession will lose many good teachers, because they’ll be punished for their students’ performance on a test which is based on whether or not the students can read well enough to apply their Standardized Test SkillZ.

        6) If you have a child taking this test, make sure he or she reads the questions first, then hunts for the appropriate words in the passage. It’s trivial, especially if the kid is a typical child of educated parents. Use the time gained to write a longer essay. Check to see if the essays receive extra credit for repeating points raised in the reading passsage in the answer, rather than, you know, analyzing anything.

        tl;dr the English test does not raise standards, but will devastate instruction. Prepare to afterschool so your child can write a business letter.

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