Students opting out across the Island
With battle lines being drawn around state-mandated standardized testing, it’s clear that parents are taking up the clarion call to protest by way of having their children opt out of testing. As it stands, students by the thousands in both Nassau and Suffolk County are refusing to take part in the first round of common core testing that commenced last week. If Governor Andrew Cuomo and other state bureaucrats were unsure about how parents were feeling about this policy, then the thousands of students that not only opted out last week, but are expected to do more of the same this week, should make these sentiments abundantly clear.
After the first week of English Language Assessment (ELA) tests, the Garden City School District reported that out of 1,905 students that were eligible to take it, 856 or 45 percent of students refused the test. These numbers skew significantly higher than other high-performing peer districts like Manhasset (56 or 3.6 percent), Jericho (248 or 18 percent) and Herricks (228 or 12.9 percent).
According to the group Long Island Opt Out, 68,568 students have opted out of the ELA tests. But Jeanette Deutermann, who spearheads the Long Island Opt Out Facebook group and movement, said she has mixed feelings about the refusal numbers.
“I am so incredibly grateful to parents that have chosen to stand up for public schools, their children and our public school teachers by refusing to allow their children to participate in the NYS assessments this year. However, that is mixed with sadness that our classrooms have come to this. I would love for nothing more than to know that legislators, Governor Cuomo, and the State Education Department have finally heard us loud and clear as to what we want and do not want for our children’s education here in New York,” Deutermann said. “Unfortunately we continue to hear the rhetoric that ‘parents just do not understand how important these tests are.’ It is not that we do not understand the importance of knowing the progress of our children, it’s that we do not believe that these assessments are valid or useful in any way to give us that information on how they are progressing. We value the importance of child-centered, hands-on learning, and these common core assessments have robbed our children of that rich, creative learning environment all children deserve. We will continue to refuse these assessments in growing numbers until Governor Cuomo, the legislature and the SED reverses course.”
However, the State Education Department maintains that the tests are a valuable indicator of a child’s progress, and said that test refusal is a terrible mistake.
“Test refusal eliminates important information about how our kids are doing. I do not pretend that test results are the only way we know, but they are an important piece of information. They are the only common measure of progress we have,” Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch said. “We are not going to force kids to take tests. But we are going to continue to help students and parents understand it’s a terrible mistake to refuse the right to know.”
According to SED, under federal regulations, a school with less than 95 percent of its students participating in the assessment can lose significant funding.
“The state education agency is expected to consider imposing sanctions on that district, including—in the most egregious cases—withholding programmatic funds,” a spokesperson for the SED said. “What sanctions to impose must be decided on a case-by-case basis, taking into account the degree and length of time the district has failed to meet participation rate requirements and the reasons for such failure.”
However, Matt Jacobs, Regional Staff Director for the Nassau chapter of the New York State Union of Teachers, said that legally, there’s no connection between state aid and students taking the test.
“There is no provision in the law for the schools state aid or state funding to be reduced in any way, based on the number of students taking the test,” Jacobs said. “We had schools last year where more than 5 percent of students opted out, and [the district] didn’t lose any funding.”
—Additional reporting by Betsy Abraham
