Opting Out

A new movement is occurring in New York Public Schools.  Due to parents' outrage at the rigor of the most recent standardized tests, a growing number off parents are preparing to "opt out" of this year's testing.  According to Diane Ravitch's blog post Common Core Tests in NY Spur Opt Out Movement, action has already begun.  Several thousand parents, teachers, and administrators have already protested the cause.

I am incredibly torn on this issue.  Part of me relates back to my earlier post, NY State Testing- How High Should They Set the Bar?.  My gut reaction is to argue that although the tests are incredibly difficult, they still serve a purpose.  Tests will motivate teachers to push their classes to learn more and hold them to a higher academic standard.  In addition, children can still be compared with other children who take the test.  Therefore, just because a child scores lower on this test than they did in the past, every child taking this test is scoring lower.  Most likely, children will still score in the same percentile rank (top 10% of NY testers, bottom 10% of NY testers) regardless of their percent correct score.

In contrast, expectations need to be realistic.  I am sure that some of the standards being tested are above and beyond the academic reach of the average student.  Perhaps the tests can be adjusted after another year or so to test understanding at a more realistic level.

That being said, opting out creates an entirely new issue.  My prediction is that the majority of parents who are boycotting testing are parents of students who once scored in the academically elite category and have since dropped down to failing.  I don't anticipate a lot of parents of students who failed the old exams, and continue to fail on the more rigorous exams, to contest the new testing.  If this is in fact the case, the testing results this year will be incredibly skewed.  This will create the opposite of the normal standardized testing issue.  It is rumored that schools try to remove their lowest testing students from data in one way or another, in NY the higher students may be the ones missing, leaving data incredibly inaccurate.