but here's something less pleasant to contemplate:
Given the current state of our primary schools
we seem to be raising a generation of fools.
We shouldn't allow children to think they know best--
avoid hard study then refrain from taking a test.
Too much too soon democracy in education is a curse
that could ultimately lead our Republic to reverse--
I wonder, since we're nearlythere already today,
what would our learned Founding Fathers say,
if we become a land of the not-so-dumb leading the dumber?
We need to correct such misplaced rule by number;
and our teachers should not be made into scolds
resisting mob rule from ten to fourteen-year-olds.
HZL
8/13/15
This year, the third under the new benchmarks, just 31 percent of the state’s students passed reading tests and 38 percent the math. Both results were slight improvements from last year but far below the passing rates under the easier, pre-2013 tests. With such a high test-refusal rate, any comparisons from year to year may now be somewhat skewed.
Officials were quick to note that 80 percent of eligible students took the exams. Still, that was a sizable drop from the year before, when 95 percent of students took the tests.
20% of New York State Students Opted Out of Standardized Tests This Year
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At Public School 19 in the East Village on Wednesday, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced slightly improved test scores for New York City’s students, saying they showed his policies were working.CreditMichael Appleton for The New York Times
More than 200,000 third through eighth graders sat out New York’s standardized tests this year, education officials said on Wednesday, in a sign of increasing resistance to testing as more states make them harder to pass.
The number of students declining to take the exams quadrupled from the year before, and represented 20 percent of all those eligible to be tested, according to data from the State Education Department. The statistic not only showed the growing strength of the “opt out” movement against standardized testing, but also put immediate pressure on state and federal officials, who must now decide whether to penalize schools and districts with low participation rates.
While opt-out groups had closely estimated, based on surveys, how many students declined to take the test, the figures released on Wednesday were the nearest to an official count. The Education Department said that about 900,000 of the 1.1 million eligible test-takers took the exams, while the rest skipped without a “known valid reason,” such as an illness.
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About 200,000 New York State students eligible for testing sat out at least one of the state’s standardized exams this year, education officials said.CreditEmma Tannenbaum for The New York Times
“Twenty percent of students cannot be called a fringe element,” said Loy Gross, co-founder of a refusal group called United to Counter the Core. “We’re getting the general public to understand that there are valid concerns about testings, and about the curriculum, and the direction where N.Y.S.E.D. is going. And that’s a good thing.”
New York was one of the first states to introduce tests based on the new Common Core academic standards. This year, the third under the new benchmarks, just 31 percent of the state’s students passed reading tests and 38 percent the math. Both results were slight improvements from last year but far below the passing rates under the easier, pre-2013 tests. With such a high test-refusal rate, any comparisons from year to year may now be somewhat skewed.
Officials were quick to note that 80 percent of eligible students took the exams. Still, that was a sizable drop from the year before, when 95 percent of students took the tests.
“Without an annual testing program, the progress of our neediest students may be ignored or forgotten, leaving these students to fall further behind,” the chancellor of the State Board of Regents, Merryl H. Tisch, said in a statement. “This cannot happen.”
Federal law requires 95 percent participation in the annual assessment of third through eighth graders, and districts that fall below that threshold can face sanctions from their state and the federal Education Department. The New York education commissioner, MaryEllen Elia, said the state was in discussion with federal officials on how to proceed after coming in so far below the mark. Ms. Elia said that federal funds’ being withheld from districts with low participation rates was a possibility.
Dorie Nolt, the press secretary to Arne Duncan, the federal education secretary, said in a statement: “It is the responsibility of each state to meet the obligations of federal law and ensure that all students are assessed annually, and the New York State Department of Education takes this responsibility very seriously. We will continue to work with New York and look to their leadership to take the appropriate steps on behalf of all kids in the state.”
Politically, however, pressure has been mounting on lawmakers to give the opt-out movement a wide berth. Last year, the New York Legislature forbade school districts from basing promotion decisions for students on test scores, and from putting them on their permanent records. There is no legal right in New York to remove one’s child from the state assessments, but no law prohibits it either.
The movement has also been weighing on Congress this year as it debates revisions to the law known as No Child Left Behind. A House bill says that the students who opt out will not be counted against their state’s participation rate. A Senate proposal does not go quite so far, but it would allow states to create their own test-refusal policies.
In New York, the annual assessments not only measure student learning and the success of education policies, but also are a key component of how schools and teachers are evaluated, especially now. The large increase in students opting out coincided with a push by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, a Democrat, to make teacher ratings more dependent on test scores, a move that was unpopular with teachers’ unions and many parents.
In New York City, the pressure to perform is particularly acute. Mayor Bill de Blasio’s authority over city schools was extended for just one year during this past legislative session, so his leadership of city schools will be re-evaluated in a few months. (His predecessor, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, last received a six-year extension.) The state recently placed 62struggling city schools into a stewardship program, which means that if they do not improve, they will be taken over by a receiver.
New Test Results Show Increasing Resistance to Testing
Data released Wednesday shows a significant increase in the number of students in New York State refusing to take the state’s standardized tests in 2014-15.
Percentage of students in each district that did not take standardized testsLess than 5%5% to 50%More than 50%No data
2013
2014
2015
Buffalo
Albany
Westchester Co.
Rockland Co.
N.Y.C.
Long Island
The Brookhaven-Comsewogue district was one of the first to have a majority of students refuse.
The refusal rate in New York City was 1.4 percent.
In the city, 30 percent of students passed the reading test and 35 percent passed the math, both slight improvements from the year before.
Mr. de Blasio, a Democrat, posited that the city’s gains were evidence that his education policies were working.
“The building blocks we put in place all are contributing,” he said at a news conference on Wednesday, “and will contribute much more going forward to the progress we will make.”
In the newly released statistics, education officials framed the opt-out movement as more prevalent in white middle- and upper-middle-class districts, with Long Island a particular hot spot. In New York City, the refusal rate was less than 2 percent. Many civil rights groups haveexpressed concern about the movement, saying it risks eroding the integrity of data necessary to ensure that all students, especially those from disadvantaged communities, are being educated in decent schools.
“As much as people may not like testing, it’s the only way available for us to document and to hold schools and school districts accountable,” said Marc Morial, president of the National Urban League. “We can’t close the achievement gap unless we know what it is and where it is and how big it is.”
The State Education Department also noted that students who scored at Levels 1 and 2 last year were more likely to sit out this year than students who had scored at Levels 3 (which is considered passing) and 4, a sign that the increasing difficulty of the tests might have factored into some parents’ decisions.
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Kathleen DiLieto, until recently the president of the Parent-Teacher Association at Terryville Road School in Port Jefferson Station, on Long Island, said that when her older daughter first sat out the tests two years ago, in third grade, she was in the minority, but that by this year, most of her classmates joined her in opting out. In her school district, 79 percent of students did not take the tests, one of the highest opt-out rates in the state.
Ms. DiLieto said she had heard from teachers in her family, speakers at events for parents in her area and even her local superintendent that the tests demanded skills that were too advanced for the age of the children taking them.
“These tests are developmentally destructive for our kids so I just didn’t want my children to go through that,” she said. “I just didn’t want them to experience something so negative and so stressful in their lives at their young ages.”
Schools in and around the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Park Slope and Carroll Gardens registered some of the highest numbers of refusals in New York City, according to city and state data. At the Brooklyn New School in Carroll Gardens, just 49 students took the English exams, while 298 did not.
While the figures released on Wednesday established New York as the center of the opt-out movement, it has begun spreading as other states switched to Common Core-aligned tests this year. In New Jersey, for example, 5 percent of students did not take the tests this year. In Colorado, where a new state law requires that districts allow parents to excuse their children from the state tests, 5 percent of seventh graders did not take the social studies test this year and 6 percent of eighth graders sat out the science test, state officials said.
Parents in New York can usually obtain their child’s scores from their schools or superintendent’s offices; in New York City, they are also available on a new website to parents who have signed up for access.
Overall scoring patterns in New York State remained largely unchanged, with black and Hispanic students making small proficiency gains but remaining at least 20 percentage points behind white test-takers. And while 52 percent of students passed English exams in so-called low need districts, only 11.5 percent of students passed in Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse and Yonkers, the state’s four largest cities after New York.
Charter school students performed slightly worse than the state as a whole on the English exams and slightly better on the math. But those in New York City did better on both than charters elsewhere in the state. At Success Academy, a fast-growing network of city charter schools known fora demanding approach to instruction and test preparation, virtually every grade tested had at least a 50 percent passing rate, with half the grades achieving at least 85 percent.
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