This year’s testing gets underway Tuesday, and the children of Westchester County Executive Rob Astorino, and his wife Sheila, a special education teacher, will for the third year refuse to take part in the Common Core tests.
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The other day, I sent a letter to the new NYS Regents Chancellor Betty Rosa, who has publicly expressed support for the opt-out movement.
The state Education Department commissioner is assuring parents and teachers that major changes are coming to the controversial Common Core standards, aligned state tests and evaluations.
The trust of parents is imperative because if they feel that their rights to make important decisions for children is not respected they definitely will continue to opt out in large measures and teachers will continue to teach to the tests if they fear their effectiveness will be evaluated based on such a high degree on them. She and her sister have picked up a lot of the rhetoric about Common Core testing from their parents, but they know what they’re talking about.
The AIR tests this year are about 40 percent shorter and will be given all at once, not in two separate rounds like the PARCC tests last year. Students were given fewer questions and more time.
Some parents at PS 8 in Brooklyn Heights received emails directly from teachers telling them that their kids can skip the exams without punishment. They’re test refusal activists, through and through. One of the biggest changes was a moratorium on tying test results to teacher evaluations. State math tests start next week. “I don’t want you to think it’s all done, it’s not”, Commissioner Mary Ellen Elia told a group of teachers in the western NY district of Lancaster, one of several she visited last week to detail the reforms. In one district, Patchogue-Medford, over 70% of the students refused to take the tests. For more information on how to opt out, NPE recommends United Opt Out’s State by State resources and FairTest’s: Just Say No to the Test. In the meantime, ELA opt-out numbers, at least in the the West Genesee school district, are down a little from past year.
But most districts are taking their time to give the tests.
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Lisa Rudley of the New York Allies for Public Education was not surprised to see the high numbers of refusals across the state. “Me personally? My children, I think it’s good to take tests”. State Education Department leaders have been in the midst of a line-by-line review of the standards, which critics have said are developmentally inappropriate. She said school districts are starting to get more local control. “Many teachers have posted that their students were crying because they did not have enough time to finish the test and bubbled in random answers”.
