National organization calls for parents to opt out of standardized testing

Valerie Strauss, Washington Post - The Network for Public Education, a nonprofit education advocacy group co-founded by historian Diane Ravitch, is calling for a national “opt out” of high-stakes standardized testing, urging parents across the country to refuse to allow their children to participate in this spring’s testing.

In a video released on the network’s website, Ravitch says families should opt out of state-mandated high-stakes testing in part because the scores provide “no useful information” about the abilities of individual students and are unfairly used to evaluate educators. She also notes that testing and test prep take up valuable class time that could be better put to use providing students with a full curriculum, including the arts.

Ravitch has been the titular leader of the movement against corporate school reform since the publication of her 2010 book, “The Death and Life of the Great American School System,” which explains why she had abandoned her support for No Child Left Behind and test-based school reform. From 1991 to 1993, she worked as assistant secretary in charge of research and improvement in the Education Department of President George H.W. Bush and served as counsel to then-Education Secretary Lamar Alexander. She was a supporter of No Child Left Behind, the chief education initiative of President George W. Bush, until she researched its effects on schools and students and concluded that it led to a narrowing of curriculum, an obsession with test prep and demoralized teachers.

Last year, the opt-out movement was strongest in New York state, where about 20 percent of students refused to take the state’s “accountability” test, but tens of thousands of students in other states did the same thing. In fact, the U.S. Education Department issued more than a dozen letters to states where opt-outs were reported, warning them of possible sanctions if at least 95 percent of all students are not tested. The 95 percent threshold is set in federal K-12 education law, first in No Child Left Behind and then in its successor, the Every Student Succeeds Act.

In New York, officials reacted to the opt-out movement by making the mandated tests shorter, removing time limits and temporarily saying that the scores won’t be used to evaluate teachers for years. Betty Rosa, the newly elected chancellor of Board of Regents, the state’s education policy-making body, said that if she had children who were of an age to take the state-mandated Common Core tests, she would keep them home on testing day.