The Miller Middle School auditorium was packed, but quiet with anticipation as the 250 people sat scattered among the wobbly red velvet seats. There’s been a national backlash against teachers, but at every sentence touting their heroism, there was a standing ovation. With each speaker, the life-size cardboard cutout of Governor Cuomo positioned near the podium was verbally hung in effigy. These were teachers, parents, activists, and community members who’d come together because their roles were being compromised, or children were anxious, or they feared corporate takeover, or they were concerned about the budget. But one thing was clear: They were all in this room because of standardized testing.
The test is the state assessments of Common Core English Language Arts (ELA) and math given in April to grades 3 to 8. The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act mandates that states assess students through those grades, and Race to the Top mandates 95 percent participation so that schools can’t pick and choose the students to artificially inflate their scores. But many people at the Ulster County Defends Public Education panel that night in February, co-sponsored by the parent-led NYS Allies for Public Education (NYSAPE) and local teachers’ unions, are part of a growing movement that advocates families refuse the tests.
There have always been state tests, ever since we first tied public school funding to them in 1965. But with the gradual adoption of the Common Core standards—an initiative to establish consistency across states’ ELA and math curricula and set the bar higher—testing has become a high-stakes game. Earlier this year, the governor came out with plans to increase the significance of test scores on a teacher’s evaluation from 20 percent to 50 percent. While the speakers appreciated accountability, there was a fear that when it’s so dictated by test scores, it could skew instruction. And they mentioned the various challenges within classrooms not taken into consideration by the tests. For example, while a student might advance to a third-grade reading level in the fifth grade, and it could reflect tremendous progress for him, he still wouldn’t pass the fifth-grade test. “Each math lesson [in the Common Core] is so full of information, you could take a week to teach it,” said panelist Kristina Flick, a Rondout Valley teacher on the verge of tears. She said it’s two to three years ahead of previous math programs, so she needs to simultaneously teach basic skills. “I’ve been labeled effective, for now. But there will come a day when I may not be, regardless of my 22 years of devoted service.”
When Bianca Tanis took the podium, the audience sat in rapt attention as she zoomed through the evidence. “On one front, our schools are being underfunded and starved of resources. On the other, our schools are deemed ineffective. Reforms have been put into place claiming to foster equity and access. But ironically, these reforms have resulted in test-driven education that deemphasizes social studies, art, music, and science, especially in high-needs schools. These reforms siphon funds from our schools, putting them into the hands of test makers. They weaken local control by democratically elected school boards.”
For Tanis, it’s personal. Her younger son is on the autism spectrum, and she knew the stress involved with being given a test he can’t read, in a separate location, without help from the aides he trusts, would actually harm him. Only 2 percent of children with disabilities qualify for alternative assessments, and the criteria are stringent. When she notified Lenape Elementary in New Paltz that her son wouldn’t take the test, there was some confusion. The school said that Tanis might have to keep him home for up to 12 days while tests were administered, since he couldn’t cognitively refuse. Tanis called advocacy groups. It was through connecting with other parents that Tanis learned of her rights. And that grew into the formation of the statewide group NYSAPE, now a coalition of groups and a central hub for disseminating information and interacting with policymakers to bring in the parents’ perspective.
Tanis believes the argument that those opting out are overprotective mothers who fear their children’s failure is patronizing. Those at the panel deemed the testing products new and flawed, and testing itself not always the best assessment of student success, or the new catchphrase, “career and college readiness.” They questioned the perception by education reformers, most of whom they claim have no experience in the classroom, as an accurate measure of a child’s performance.
Tanis feels that how we evaluate people speaks to what we want. “If we evaluate based on test scores, then the tests will dominate education. With eight-and-nine-year-old kids, there’s no way to get them to be great test takers without focusing on the test.” She says there’s a seemingly cryptic scoring process that prefers specific, formulaic answers to well-thought-out ones, and teachers feel the thinking required isn’t always developmentally appropriate.
So opting out has grown in the past three years from a handful to hundreds in the Hudson Valley, and the ranks of refuseniks kept expanding as dozens of forums took place throughout the month of March. In Tanis’s district, the New Paltz Board of Education passed a resolution against high-stakes testing. And when the New Paltz teachers’ union encouraged members to opt out, the Board of Education then passed a resolution supporting the Teacher’s Union.
Pencils Down
Lucas McCann is a good student at Mount Marion Elementary. But the tests are long, and abstaining can be challenging. For example, the 2008 fifth grade ELA test was about two-and-a-half hours—now almost five, administered over three days. “At our district, kids sit and wait it out,” his mother, Naomi McCann, says. Kids who opt out sit in the testing room and do nothing. They can’t read a book, and they must refrain from distracting test-taking students. Still, it’s a consequence he’s willing to accept. Saugerties Superintendent Seth Turner says, “I certainly have respect for any individual to exercise their First Amendment rights. But the question becomes, how do others help that person to accomplish that goal?” What drives Lucas is an ethical stance that McCann says was really child led. In fact, Lucas’s older sister, Charlotte, was the one who first brought the issue home. Both kids felt a heightened intensity around the tests, which was stressful and radiated out into the whole school community.
“No Child Left Behind requires schools to show evidence of student learning,” says Rebecca Jones, who earned an MA in teaching at Bard. “But it doesn’t require more testing necessarily. For instance, a portfolio of student work can be evidence. Some districts probably went the way of standardized testing to show evidence because it’s easier.” But as she points out, some didn’t. At the high school level, there’s the NY Performance Standards Consortium, a group of New York City schools that, with the blessing of former commissioner of education Tom Sobol, organized themselves and refined a system that operates without Regents Exams. Their curriculum is built around preparing students for the portfolio roundtable, a two-week period where parents, community members, and professionals are invited to sit at tables of four or five people, each with two students and a portfolio of finished schoolwork from each subject. Jones, who sat in on it twice, says, “The students have to defend their work, almost like you would a thesis.”
“What success in college requires is the ability to work independently and think critically, to manage time, persevere when things get difficult, and know where to go for help,” says Ann Cook, the Consortium’s director—all things their curriculum develops. And research shows that Consortium school graduates have a better-than-average college GPA and higher retention rates.
“When you don’t have the stakes attached,” Tanis says, “it’s so different.” When it comes to assessments at Kingston Catholic School, there’s no additional preparation, and the tests don’t affect teacher or student evaluations. Kingston Catholic is a private school that opts into the Common Core because the archdiocese follows New York State standards. And the teachers and administration are excited about it. They feel it helps with their mission to educate the whole child. “One of the great fallacies of Common Core,” says KCS Principal Jill Albert, “is that it’s an attempt to do away with great literature. It’s actually an attempt to put that great literature in context. While they’re reading The Grapes of Wrath, they’re also studying that time period in history, and doing a farming activity in science.” It’s what some would call project-based learning. The teachers find that, in aligning with the standards, they’re asking, “What’s another way to solve this problem? Where in real life would we use this?”
When state tests results come in over the summer, KCS teachers collaborate as students progress through the grades. Ultimately, the focus is to get a snapshot of the students’ performance. Albert admits that the state assessments are not as strong as the Common Core itself, but feels it will become with time. Cathleen Cassel, regional superintendent of the Archdiocese of New York, agrees. “That’s why it’s only one piece of the puzzle.”
A Common Core
To many, Common Core and high-stakes testing feels like a corporate takeover. There were very few teachers and no developmental psychologists involved in the creation of Common Core. It was developed by the business community and education vendor companies that now write and sell the product. Pearson, the British education publishing and assessment service, creates teaching resources, sells the assessments, and determines the scoring process, then sells the interventions when a number of children fail the test. “It’s a very incestuous system,” Tanis says.
People understand the connection between budget constraints and test scores. At the panel in February, Paul Padalino, the Kingston City Schools superintendent, remarked, “High levels of expectation require high levels of support.” When NYSAPE looked at the 17 failing districts on the governor’s list, 12 of them were in the top 50 schools with the largest funding shortfalls. “We know that poverty is the biggest indicator of school performance,” Tanis says. “All of these reforms ignore that.”
Tanis hopes that if enough people refuse the tests in New York’s public schools, it will hit a pause button in Albany. “It’s really important to value parent voices in education. Schools work best when there’s a collaboration.”
Resources
NYS Allies for Public Education Nysape.org
ReThinking Testing: Mid-Hudson Region Facebook.com/ReThinkingTesting
Common Core Engageny.org
The NY Performance Standards Consortium Performanceassessment.org
Kingston Catholic School Kingstoncatholicacademy.org
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This article appears in April 2015.
