The Role Opt Out Will Play In Undoing APPR

A commenter at Perdido Street School blog:

 

The opt out numbers will play an important role when the new APPR eventually gets challenged in court. It's not just the missing scores but the psychological impact on students taking the tests which corrupts the scores they will still use to rate teachers.

The psychological impact of opt out cannot be overestimated, not only on students taking the tests but also on the proponents of the Endless Testing regime.

Governor Cuomo remains in denial about that:

Some testing opponents point to Mr. Cuomo’s effort as a moment that galvanized parents to opt out. But Jim Malatras, his director of state operations, said the rise in test refusals did not signal a political miscalculation on the part of the governor. This kind of reaction, Mr. Malatras said, was to be expected from any substantial shift in policy.

“I don’t think this does anything to change the accountability push,” he said.

But you can hear the concern in this statement from a reformer in the Times article on opt-out:

Robert Pondiscio, a senior fellow and vice president for external affairs at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative education policy organization, said that rather than enforcing the rules, government officials might very well retreat. 

“You could write a really good history of education writ large about our tendency in this country to go from one extreme to the other, and this has all the hallmarks of that,” Mr. Pondiscio said. “This is not a prediction, but it would not surprise me to see New York, or someplace else, go from testing every kid within an inch of their life to testing nobody, ever."

We're not at that point yet, but if and when politicians begin to pay political prices for supporting Common Core and the Endless Testing regime, we will be well on the way to getting there.

Let's make Cuomo - still an accountability lover if ever there was one (at least for public schools) - pay a price.