Bob Bennett: Opting Out Of The State Tests Is "Breaking The Law"

And we have the winner of the "Shrillest Push Back On The Opt Out Movement Contest" - it's former member of the Board of Regents, Bob Bennett:

New York state uses the results of the annual assessments to gauge the performance of students and teachers. And if enough of their students opt out of the tests, teachers are evaluated based on their local system.

...

Education leaders say approaches like that will backfire in the immediate future, harming teachers.

“They’re breaking the law,” said Bob Bennett, a former member of the New York State Board of Regents. “And so I don’t know how much clearer to make it. This is absolutely absurd to see adults behaving to advance a political cause because they don’t like the teacher evaluation law.”

Bennett, who got whacked off the Board of Regents this year, is wrong that opting out of the state tests is "breaking the law."

You can find resources and information about parents' rights in opting their children out of the Common Core tests at the NYS Allies For Public Education website.

But here's an excellent summary:




I've been wondering how shrill the push back over opt out would get, what with Regents Chancellor Tisch, Lieutenant Governor Kathy Hochul, Governor Cuomo and newspaper editorial boards weighing in on why they are opposed to parents opting their children out of the state tests but so far, Bennett wins for shrillest.

Congratulations, Bob - enjoy your retirement.

So Many Opt-Outs They're Having Trouble Finding Space For Them All

Jon Campbell in the Gannett papers:

ALBANY – On Tuesday, about one million New York students in grades 3-8 will sit for the first of six days of state-mandated English Language Arts and math exams spread over the next two weeks.
Tens of thousands of their peers — and maybe more — won't be joining them.

A parent-led effort to opt their children out of New York's standardized tests appears to have gained momentum in recent weeks as the head of the state's teachers union and various labor-backed groups threw their support behind the movement.

Now, with the latest test-refusal effort in its second year, the question isn't whether parents will refuse the tests, but how many.

...

The state doesn't tally the number of parents who refused the test on their children's behalf. But 67,000 students who didn't take the 2014 math exam had no "known, valid" excuse, along with 49,000 students who skipped the English Language Arts test, according to the state Education Department.

...
 
Some school districts are anticipating a sharp increase in opt outs this year, particularly in areas where parent-advocacy groups have been strong — including much of the Hudson Valley and parts of western New York.

In Fairport, Monroe County, more than half of the 2,740 eligible students have already said they intend to refuse the tests. Brian Monahan, interim superintendent of the Mahopac Central School District in Putnam County, said his district is anticipating 20 percent of elementary students and 30 percent of middle-school students won't take the exams.

The numbers have grown so much, Monahan said, that it's becoming a "challenge" to find space for opted-out students to read while their peers take the exams. At least one school will use its gymnasium to accommodate, he said.

A challenge to find space for opt-out students during the test period.

Wow.

I realize that kind of thing is going to be limited to a few district, but nonetheless, it's amazing when you think about it.

No wonder Merryl Tisch, Kathy Hochul and the pro-Endless Testing regime editorial boards are so shrill over parents opting their children out of the tests.

I wonder if we'll hear from Governor Cuomo about this before it's all said and done?

Oh, wait - we did:

Cuomo, who briefly stopped by the convention, also took issue with the opt-outs.

“It would have an effect on the teacher-evaluation system. But more importantly, it would have an effect where you wouldn’t qualify for federal money,” Cuomo told The Post.

 Nothing makes Cuomo sadder than sad than screwing with his teacher evaluation system.

Message From Education Reformers: Shut Up And Take Your Test

That's the message from the pro-Common Core, pro-Endless Testing regime shills at Newsday who ran this opinion piece by some deform group called "High Achievement New York":

There is a much larger issue at stake. We should not be teaching our children that if they don't like tests, they can simply refuse them. Opting out is the wrong approach to address what parents don't like about testing.

If there are problems with the tests, then parents and communities should work together to fix them. Shielding our children from the tests sets a bad example and delays the process of making positive changes to improve what is, like so many things in our society, an imperfect system. The way to change the process is through positive ideas, not simply telling kids to refuse an academic responsibility.

When it comes time to find a job, there is no "opting out." There is only unemployment. Let's make sure we are sending the right messages to our children now, so they do not face that reality in the future.

That's right, you must do what you don't want to do because it is good for you.

Sure, try and change what you don't like through "positive ideas," but if you can't (and make no mistake, you can't - education reformers do NOT listen to anybody outside of their own coterie), well, then you just have to tell your kids to suck it up and take their tests.

The message from the pro-Common Core, pro-Endless Testing regime groups these days and their political allies in power boils down to "Shut Up And Take Your Test" - life is hard and you have to do things you don't want to do.

We heard this from the Harvard public policy shill who wrote a Daily News opinion piece about how testing and evaluation are just like looking at yourself in the mirror when you're looking to gauge your health.

We heard this from Lieutenant Governor Kathy Hochul who criticized parents who opt their children out of tests because this won't prepare them for more tests in the future - like the SAT and global competition.

We heard it from editorial boards like the Buffalo News who claimed in an editorial that the opt out movement is made up of "ill-informed" parents who have been "hoodwinked" by the teachers unions (never mind that opt out began years ago and the teachers unions wanted nothing to do with it until earlier this month - that would be NYSUT - and the UFT still wants nothing to do with it.)

We heard it from Regents Chancellor Tisch who threatened parents with "national tests" if they opt their children out of the state tests, as if somehow parents can't opt their children out of the "national tests" too (which, btw, are made by the same company as the state tests anyway, so I don't see what the threat is here.)

Every day we see more and more propaganda from the pro-Common Core, pro-Endless Testing regime people who are TERRIFIED by the prospect of hundreds of thousands of parents opting their children out of the state tests this year leading to hundreds of thousands more opting their children out next year and the entire "Accountability Agenda" starving to death from lack of data.

The shriller they get, the more scared they are.

And from the shrillness we've seen this week from the pro-Common Core, pro-Endless Testing regime groups and individuals, we know they are very scared indeed.

Buffalo News Editorial: Parents Who Opt Kids Out Of Tests Are Being "Hoodwinked" By Teachers Unions

The opt out movement is parent-created, parent-led, has been around for a couple of years now and has been growing by the year.

For years, the teachers unions took little notice of the opt out movement and certainly never lent it any public support - until this year when NYSUT President Karen Magee changed course and suggested parents could opt their children out the state tests in order to starve the state of the data it needs for its education reform agenda.

In short, the opt out movement has existed for a long, long time without the support or acknowledgement of the teachers unions or their functionaries like Alliance For Quality Education or Working Families Party.

It is only since Governor Cuomo shoved through an unpopular education reform agenda (and the polling bears just how unpopular that agenda is - see here and here) that NYSUT, AQE, and WFP have jumped onto the opt out movement and lent it support.

Despite these facts, the Buffalo News published an editorial yesterday claiming that parents who are opting their children out of the Common Core state tests this year have been "hoodwinked" by the self-serving propaganda of the teachers unions:

If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it. Improvement means change and New York State United Teachers are not much into that.

That’s why the unconscionable push by the state teachers union to get parents to opt their children out of state math and reading testing is so destructive. Ultimately, it hurts students, districts and the state, itself.

Parents are being hoodwinked and New York State United Teachers is the single most influential force behind the push.

As a recent News article by Denise Jewell Gee reported, an estimated 60,000 students refused to take state math and reading tests across the state last year. Now, anti-testing organizers hope to grow those numbers to 250,000 – about 20 percent of the third- through eighth-graders in the state – this month.

Ill-informed parents are being guided by groups large and small but none as powerful and well-financed as the New York State United Teachers, which has charted a roadmap to insubordination.

While not directly prodding parents until Monday, when President Karen Magee went public with her admonition that parents opt out of the exams, NYSUT has since January thinly veiled its intentions by providing detailed information to parents about their rights and potential consequences.

Those consequences can vary, as outlined in The News article. However, not taking the tests deprives state officials an accurate picture of progress. State Education Chancellor Merryl Tisch is absolutely right: “Why would you not want to know whether all students are making progress, not just the lucky few?”

Speaking of the disparities that are made clear through testing, a quick glance at a News chart showing graduation rates, English and math assessment for 2013-14 at the five Buffalo Public Schools in line to come under a new turnaround strategy speaks volumes. At Buffalo Elementary School of Technology, 4 percent of students scored proficiently on math assessments, up from 2 percent the previous year. The English Language Arts assessments logged 4 percent of students scoring proficiently, down from 5 percent the previous year. At Futures Preparatory, 1 percent of students scored proficiently, down from 2, and 0 percent of students scored proficiently in math, the same as the previous year.

Those are stark numbers but they have to be known in order to advocate for and to formulate plans for useful change. It’s not enough to clamor for more money. To be sure, adequate resources are key to education. But New York has been shoveling money into education for decades; even with cuts in recent years, New York spends more on education per student than any other state. Plainly, money is not the fundamental issue.

There is apprehension by teachers unions about having the tests linked to performance. Parents should be aware of the full measure of that concern and how they might unwittingly help in the delinking of test scores to evaluations.

In other words, this is not just about their children’s education. It is about job security for teachers. Is it fair to put that kind of pressure on a third-grader?

Students will face a myriad of challenges when they get older. Teaching them that they don’t have to do things they don’t like to do fails to serve them in the long run. Life doesn’t work that way; not for most people, anyway.

Some parents are worried about overtesting. It is fair to continue looking at the system to see if it can be made more efficient. The same is true for how the state evaluates teachers. Both should be seen as works in progress. However, it is foolish to expect predictable improvement without evaluation.

The lies and misinformation in this editorial are simply breathtaking.

Mitchell Rubenstein, a commenter on the editorial, does an excellent job of dispensing with them:

The opt-out movement began with concerned parents, NOT with the unions. The tests do NOT provide an "accurate picture of progress", as this article incorrectly states. Parents opting out of the tests are not ill-informed. I routinely argue the policy details with educators, policy wonks and politicians. The "ill-informed" people are the poor excuses for "journalists", who regurgitate Meryl Tisch's talking points without ANY critical analysis.

The assessments have been PROVEN to be an invalid measure of student or teacher progress. There is no reason that students should be wasting their time sitting for them. See the research published by the American Statistical Society, a well respected, professional, and unbiased group, which methodically proves the tests are useless measures when it comes to teacher evaluation.

The Democrat and Chronicle has an article where actual parents talk about why they're opting their children out of the state tests and none of them sound like they've been "hoodwinked" by the teachers unions.

Instead they sound like parents concerned with the damage the Endless Testing regime and the poor Common Core rollout is doing to their children.

The job of editorial boards is to spew the lies, misinformation and propaganda of the elites down to the masses.

This Buffalo News editorial certainly does that.

We see similar editorials from the Daily News, the NY Post, Newsday, the NY Times and other papers around the state that carry water for the education reform movement (only LoHud doesn't carry water for education reform) - but I haven't yet seen an editorial as breathtakingly deceptive as this one.

That the deform shills at the Buffalo News feel the need to get this shrill and deceptive tells us a couple of things:

First, the editorial board at the Buffalo News have no problem lying to the public in order to push their agenda. 

Subscribers to the newspaper should think about that the next time their subscription payment comes due.

Second, the education reformers in this state, from the politicians like Cuomo and Hochul to the political functionaries like Regents Chancellor Tisch to the water carriers like the newspaper editorial boards are scared witless that the opt out movement is going to take off like never before and put a shiv into the Endless Testing regime they so love.

In the end, the shriller they get, the more worried they are.

Enough With The Metrics

The Guardian editorial writers wrote the following on August 15, 2008:

In this week's Guardian, a former aide of Tony Blair admitted that Sats risked turning schools into "drab, joyless assessment factories" where preparation for tests crowded out real learning.

Instead of using Sats as a snapshot assessment of how pupils are doing, schools end up teaching to the test because of the confused double purpose of the exams. As well as checking on the progress of individual children, the results end up defining the standing of the school - once they are collated into league tables. What gives the tables their power with parents is the seeming precision of the numerical rankings. But that precision is entirely spurious. Academic analysis suggests that year-by-year chance fluctuations in pupils' ability overpower any real differences in performance for the majority of schools. And much of the real variation that can be discerned is down to the social mix of the pupils, as opposed to the quality of teaching. There have been worthy attempts to recognise good teaching in tough areas by creating new tables which adjust the figures to take into account, among other things, the number of children entitled to free school meals. But such approaches are inescapably arbitrary, not to mention hard to understand.

Earlier this year ministers floated plans for a new battery of metrics, covering everything from bullying to drugs. They would do better to reflect that there should be more to education than arithmetic alone.

The geniuses at the NY Times wrote today

Education Secretary Arne Duncan has been pushing the states to create rigorous teacher evaluation systems that not only judge teachers by how well their students perform but also — when the results are in — reward good teachers while easing chronic low performers out of the system. More than half the states have agreed to adopt new evaluation systems in exchange for competitive grants from the federal Race to the Top program or greater flexibility under the No Child Left Behind law.

These incentives are long overdue. As things stand now, according to a study by the New Teacher Project, a Brooklyn-based policy group, many school managers make no distinction between high-performing and low-performing teachers. The result is that poor teachers stick around while good teachers go elsewhere or leave the profession, frustrated because they are not promoted, rewarded with better pay, or even simply acknowledged.

That clearly needs to change if the new evaluation systems are to have any impact on the quality of the teacher corps.

The study covered four large urban school districts consisting of more than 2,100 schools and nearly a million and half students. It measured about 20,000 teachers by how much academic growth students showed in a given year. On average, the highest-performing teachers — about one-fifth of those studied — helped students learn two to three additional months’ worth of math and reading, compared with the average teacher, and five to six months more compared with low-performing teachers.

No questioning of the metrics by the geniuses at the Times - of course the tests measure what we say they measure, of course the scores mean teachers who "add value: to their students' scores are "good" and teachers who do not are "bad," of course the "bad" teachers should be fired and the "good" ones rewarded with extra money and of course "incentives" will make teachers work harder and improve the test scores (and thus learning) of students.

All based on false premises of course - teachers are not working hard enough now but if you incentivize them, they will work harder. Test scores measure good teaching and can be used to evaluate teachers. Merit pay will keep the "good teachers" around and demoralize the "bad ones (which may push them out of the system.)

Sigh - most teachers do not want these things. Most teachers want Washington and the states to stay out of their classrooms and let them teach the way they know how to teach. They want the micromanagement of teaching from the districts to stop. They want the states and districts to stop changing policies every two years so they can actually see if something is working as opposed to just changing stuff for change's sake. They want to stop being demonized in the media and by the politicians for the things that are out of their control.

Most of all, teachers want to be evaluated rigorously but fairly. Value-added measurements with high margins of error and wide swings in stability based upon error-riddled standardized tests are NOT rigorous or fair ways to evaluate teachers. Basing teacher pay on these will not incentivize the "good" teachers to stay and the "bad" ones to go.

Most of the teachers I know who have left over the last five years have been fed up with the jive coming out of first NCLB and now RttT - the endless testing, the overreliance on metrics, the endless reforms that "hold teachers accountable" but let students and parents slide on accountability, and the refusal of the people in charge at the city, state and federal level to take responsibility for their policies - whenever something goes wrong, it's always the teachers' fault.

In short, teachers want to be treated with respect and appreciated for the hard work they do day in and day out in some very challenging circumstances.

And they do not want to be evaluated using metrics that do not measure what the people running things say they measure.

The geniuses at the Times (the $88 million dollar losing Times, btw) believe metrics can be used to quantify "good teaching" and "bad teaching," reward the "good teachers" and push out the "bad" ones and make the system a better one.

If metrics were the sole measurement of quality, the $88 million dollar losing NY Times is clearly a failure in the world of newspapers.

But the Timesmen and women do not see it this way, of course - metrics apparently matter in education, but not so much in journalism.

We would be better off if we got some of the The Guardian writers to speak truth to the "geniuses" at the Times about the value of metrics.

Or if we just solely judged the $88 million dollar losing Times by metrics and shut the whole thing down - like a "failing school" with "bad test scores.