Opting Out : The Story of the Parents' Grassroots Movement to Achieve Whole-Child Public Schools [1 ed.] 9781975501518, 9781975501495

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A D VA N CE PRA IS E F O R

Opting Out "I am pleased to endorse this very important and informative book about the origins, the goals, and the accomplishments of the parent-led Opt Out Movement in New York. The public needs to know why parents like Jeanette Deutermann and Lisa Rudley devoted their time to fighting the testing regime. It needs to know how pointless the tests are. It needs to understand how a small group of parents, without financial support, were able to persuade the parents of about 200,000 students to join them in refusing to submit their children to tests that lasted for hours and had no diagnostic value whatever for the students. They and the other leaders of this movement are heroes of our age.” Diane Ravitch Research Professor of Education, New York University Founder and President of the Network for Public Education (NPE) “Opting Out documents one of the most important movements in education today. It helps us answer a crucial question: Can communities act back against the standardized testing regimes that dominate our schools? By centering the voices of community members who are actively engaged in acting back against these policies and practices, Opting Out provides us with a sense of real possibilities.” Michael W. Apple University of Wisconsin, Madison author of The Struggle for Democracy in Education “The Opt-Out movement has achieved unimaginable success given the pressure many schools place on parents to submit their child for testing.

This parent led

grass-roots movement is driven by dissatisfaction with educational reforms that rely on test-based accountability, and with the increased role of ‘edu-businesses’ and corporations in schools. This powerful book highlights the power of moms organizing with educators to push back against the state to take back our schools and re-establish the purpose of schools for democracy.” Sheila Macrine Professor University of Massachusetts Dartmouth

“Faced with a truly awful testing regime in schools, and with policy makers not listening, New York State’s fledging Opt Out organisations seemed to have little chance. This book recounts, often drawing on the authors’ personal experiences, how they mobilised and turned the tide. Crucially, Opt Out not only resisted but also sought to articulate progressive alternatives. We need such accounts of contesting neo-liberal educational reforms more than ever. A really inspiring and informative book for all who fight for public education around the globe.” Martin Thrupp, Professor of Education University of Waikato, New Zealand

Opting Out

Opting Out The Story of the Parents’ Grassroots Movement to Achieve Whole-Child Public Schools by

DAVID HURSH, JEANETTE DEUTERMANN, LISA RUDLEY, ZHE CHEN, SARAH MCGINNIS

Copyright © 2020 | Myers Education Press, LLC Published by Myers Education Press, LLC P.O. Box 424 Gorham, ME 04038 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying, recording, and information storage and retrieval, without permission in writing from the publisher. Myers Education Press is an academic publisher specializing in books, e-books, and digital content in the field of education. All of our books are subjected to a rigorous peer review process and produced in compliance with the standards of the Council on Library and Information Resources. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available from Library of Congress. 13-digit ISBN 978-1-9755-0150-1 (paperback) 13-digit ISBN 978-1-9755-0149-5 (hard cover) 13-digit ISBN 978-1-9755-0151-8 (library networkable e-edition) 13-digit ISBN 978-1-9755-0152-5 (consumer e-edition) Printed in the United States of America All first editions printed on acid-free paper that meets the American National Standards Institute Z39-48 standard. Books published by Myers Education Press may be purchased at special quantity discount rates for groups, workshops, training organizations, and classroom usage. Please call our customer service department at 1-800-232-0223 for details. Cover design by Sophie Appel Visit us on the web at www.myersedpress.com to browse our complete list of titles.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ix Foreword by Amy Stuart Wells

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Chapter One: Becoming Activists

1

Chapter Two: The Rise of High-Stakes Testing and the Opt-Out Movement: A Brief History

27

Chapter Three: Organizing to Resist the Common Core State Tests

46

Chapter Four: Technology: Promise or Peril?

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Chapter Five: Beyond the Opt-Out Movement: Current Challenges and the Future

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Resources 116 About the Authors

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Index 121

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book would not have begun if not for the support of Bob Lingard of the University of Queensland, Australia, who wanted to know more about how the opt-out movement in New York has achieved the success it has. With funding from the New South Wales Teachers Union, he traveled to New York in September 2017 to seek an answer to the question of how the opt-out movement in the United States attained its size and impact, and to apply what he learned in pushing back against high-stakes testing in Australia. He and I [David] interviewed twenty people around the state, including Chancellor Betty Rosa, Jeanette Deutermann, Lisa Rudley, Regent Andrew Brown, Rosemary Rivera, and Eileen Graham. We thank them for interviewing with us. We’d also like to thank Diane Santiago, a Warner School doctoral student, for her assistance in the initial stages of the project. The Rochester Coalition for Public Education, of which many of those involved in this project are members, also supported Jeanette and Lisa’s travel to present our research at the American Educational Research Association conference in Toronto, Canada, as well as our travel, described below, to Long Island, to video an interview of Jeanette and Lisa. We would also like to thank the Warner School for funding our (me, Zhe, Sarah, and videographer Andrew McGinnis) travel to Long Island to video a lengthy interview with Jeanette and Lisa. We also thank the others who submitted to our interviews and provided background information. I wish to thank my four co-authors. Jeannette and Lisa shared the powerful story of their years of organizing to repeal the Common Core and other high-stakes tests. Sarah and Zhe, among many other contributions, coded our research data. In addition, Zhe read every page of the manuscript several times in an effort to make the writing clear and accessible. Finally, I thank my wife, Camille Martina. Because the research and writing sometimes included five or six of us, the project was more challenging than we (or at least I) anticipated, and I often had to devote evenings and weekends to “the book.” I thank her for her support.

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Jeanette would like to thank her parents and sisters for her education activist roots and for giving her an inside look at the world of educators. She would especially like to thank her husband Erik and children Tyler and Jack for enduring the endless days and nights of forums (dubbed “bore-ums” by her children), events, and rallies, and their support through it all! Lisa would like to thank the many parents and educators she works alongside in advocating for public school education and children with disabilities. She would also like to thank her supportive family, friends, and community, who inspire her to fight harder every day for justice for all. Zhe wishes to thank all the co-authors of the book, especially her doctoral advisor David Hursh and research member and friend Sarah McGinnis for all of their hard work. She also thanks her parents, who have made countless sacrifices in supporting her education. Finally, she would like to thank her friends and boyfriend for their support and encouragement. Sarah would like to thank David Hursh for being open and willing to accept help from an eager grad student who is passionate about education. He turned that passion into something tangible. She also like thanks Zhe Chen, who has been a great friend throughout the writing of the book and someone she can always count on to be three steps ahead of her. Her thanks also go to Andrew, her wonderful and supportive husband, who continually encourages her to follow her dreams! David Hursh

FOREWORD

How our children’s learning is measured is something that too few parents, policymakers and even educators know enough about. In the last 30 years, the number of standardized tests, produced by global corporations, and their influence on what our children learn has grown exponentially as more federal and state policies are passed stating that these measures of student learning are the only ones that matter anymore. And yet, the consequences for how students' learning is measured are tremendous as test scores are utilized to make life-changing decisions about them, their teachers, and the entire public education system. Due to these high stakes, teachers, understandably, are driven to teach to the test, particularly in schools with the lowest test scores, notably those serving lower income communities with high percentages of students of color. Anything not covered on the standardized tests is much less likely to be taught. How did a democracy end up with a public education system in which testing companies—some of which are foreign owned—and not communities, constituents and professional educators have the final say in what our children learn? The story of the United States surrendering its control over how our children are educated to global corporations, and the efforts of some advocates to fight back, are profiled in this important book, which presents a case study of New York State based movement of parents, educators and local advocates to enable students to opt out of the state-mandated tests. There are important lessons to be learned from the Empire state, which has had high-stakes tests since the mid-1990s and received federal funding in 2011 through the Race to the Top initiative of the Obama Administration to make state tests even more consequential for students and their teachers. The larger context of New York and other states with similar stories is also important in helping us understand how our nation became so addicted to standardized testing and why it is so politically difficult to recover, detox and embrace education reform that supports and democratizes meaningful teaching and learning.

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How We Got Here: From a Nation at Risk to a Nation of Tests The measure-everyone-by-standardized-tests accountability movement traces its roots to 1983 when President Reagan’s Secretary of Education, Terrence H. Bell, released his National Commission on Excellence in Education’s report, “A Nation At Risk.” This report provided the narrative of critique and distrust of the U.S. public education system and the educators who worked within it that would frame bipartisan public policy for decades to come. Without a great deal of empirical evidence, the Commission reported that “the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.”1 A Nation at Risk laid nearly every problem with the economy and the society on the schoolhouse doorsteps, and led the American public to feel that Great Society era expansion of access and opportunity to students who had previously been denied their right to an education had failed. The schools and the educational professionals who worked in them could not be trusted and needed to be more closely monitored and held accountable. This powerful rebuke of the free and universal public education system had a domino effect that oddly aligned both major political parties in support of testing. In the years that followed, bipartisan coalitions of federal policy makers created and proliferated the apparatus of state standards and standardized assessments that we have today. In 1994, the Goals 2000: Educate America Act, which gave the states money to create standards and assessment systems, set the stage for the Improving America’s Schools Act (IASA). The IASA was the first reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965 to require states and local school districts to demonstrate that they were assessing students’ learning of their state standards in order to receive federal Title 1 funding, the largest pool of federal funding for education. When ESEA was reauthorized the next time, it became the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), which ratcheted up the assessment requirements, forcing states to test students each year in grades three through eight and again in high school.2 Tragically, the reauthorized version of No Child Left Behind—the 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act or ESSA—continues this overreliance on stan-

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dardized tests to hold students, educators and schools accountable. As noted in a policy brief on ESSA requirements, many states will continue to make multiple demands on a single test without attention to the limitations of testing, “and some have proposed relying heavily on test information without sufficient evidentiary support for the validity, reliability, or utility of these exams.”3 This expansion and persistence of standardized testing as the best­— and often only— way to measure student learning and achievement flies in the face of the strongest empirical evidence about the appropriate uses of standardized tests. For instance, the American Educational Research Association, the American Psychological Association, and the National Council on Measurement in Education released a joint statement on the uses of standardized testing in education proclaiming that, “Decisions that affect individual students’ life chances or educational opportunities should not be made on the basis of test scores alone.”4 This joint statement issued by three of the most prominent research associations in the field of education, sums up the research evidence on standardized tests and their appropriate uses. It echoes the frustration of millions of parents who know that their children’s intelligence and ability, their gifts and their promises, cannot be measured by one test taken at the age of four. The inaccuracy of one standardized test to measure students’ ability, potential and giftedness is reflected in the stark racial disparities in students of color in gifted and talented programs or other test-based programs. In New York City, for instance, less than 25% of the students in one-test-measured Gifted and Talented programs are Black and Latinx in a school system that is 75% Black and Latinx.5 These demographics are testimony to not only the racial disparities in income, parental education levels and access to educational resources. They also reflect the cultural biases inherent in standardized tests that only accept one right answer to questions that could be open to different interpretations when examined through different cultural lenses. We know, for instance, that the research on how people learn concludes that intelligence is shaped by culture and experience, and that the best test takers have had life experiences most culturally aligned with the test makers. A cultural lens through which tests are written and perceived suggests that rather than measure a pure or objective form of “intelligence,” they

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measure a culturally shaped understanding of who has knowledge that is aligned with those who wrote the exams.6 A 2018 report by the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine concluded that the cultural contexts in which students grow up, affect their ability to answer test questions.7 When these tests have dire consequences for students’ access to educational programs, they can also have a deep and negative psychological impact on students’ sense of themselves.

Testing as a Civil Right? Despite this powerful research evidence, policies that rely on standardized testing as the most important and often the only measure of student achievement have enjoyed strong bipartisan political support since the 1990s. An important aspect of that bipartisan support was the connections made between the testing, accountability and civil rights. In 2000, President George W. Bush spoke at the 91st Annual National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Convention, where he announced “a war on unequal education” using “standardized tests as a primary tool in the nation’s arsenal.”8 Shortly thereafter, No Child Left Behind (NCLB) was making its way through Congress with much support from key civil rights organizations. After years of advocating for federal policies that enhanced student access and increased inputs, such as school desegregation, Head Start, bilingual education and Title One funding for schools serving low-income students, these organizations were signing on to federal policies that utilized that same Title One money to force local school districts to hold schools accountable for producing outputs in the form of high test scores in reading and math.9 Many Civil Rights leaders saw NCLB’s overarching goal of bringing all U.S. students’ state test scores in reading and mathematics to the proficiency level by 2013-14 and by closing test-based gaps between African American and Latinx students and their White peers as the fastest route to meaningful equity after the input-based policies of the prior era had not done the job.10 They were also in full support of the law’s mandate to break down performance data for racial, ethnic, economic, and other subgroups to better measure those gaps.11 Many were convinced that NCLB was the

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best tool available in the post-Civil Rights era context to pressure schools and districts to ensure that all students receive a high quality education.12 Nearly 20 years later, we see that outcomes are not equal and neither are the forgotten inputs. In fact, to the contrary, the research evidence suggests that the so-called accountability reforms led to greater inequality and segregation by race and class.13 Many critics of NCLB and the accountability movement blame the unequal resources (inputs) for this failure, and that is no doubt a major part of the story. But the real failure of the movement to hold schools accountable for providing students with an education that would produce more equal outcomes, was not the concept of accountability, rather the measures used to define it. In other words, the lack of variance in the tools of accountability under NCLB—mainly standardized tests in English Language Arts and Math—contributed to the variance in the outcome data in a racial and cultural way. Furthermore, as those metrics of “good” students and schools that were generated by the test scores data were used to rank schools and districts in very public ways, these narrow measures of achievement and student ability only exacerbated racial and socioeconomic segregation and the perceived gap between “good” and “bad” schools in ways that perpetuate and legitimize segregation and inequality.14

Opting Out of a Bipartisan Reform: Risky Business This history and evolution of the testing industrial complex—a powerful lobbying force in national and state politics—molds the current context of the grassroots opting out movement and its tendency to be located in more affluent and predominantly white communities where frustration with too much testing is high and the stakes for bucking the system are relatively low.15 These were not the communities who were sold on accountability policies as the golden ticket to true equal educational opportunities. Although there have been bold efforts and some meaningful successes in expanding the opting out movement beyond its original demographic base, the need to regroup and reframe the movement to make it more inclusive is huge. Such a reframing will need to take into account the historical antecedents that have made accountability via testing the latest form of civil

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rights. It will also require Opting Out leaders, such as the authors of this book, to deeply examine the relationship between race and social class privilege and the freedom to resist, defy and rebuke. This book provides an important first step in that direction, and I hope it inspires many to follow and join, to build interracial and intercultural coalitions to save all our children from the narrow education fostered by the testing industry and sorting and ranking it exacerbates. Amy Stuart Wells Teachers College Columbia University

Endnotes 1

National Commission on Excellence in Education. (April, 1983) A Nation at Risk. Retrieved from https://www2.ed.gov/pubs/NatAtRisk/risk.html.

2

Cross, C. (2014) Political Education: Setting the Course for State and Federal Policy. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

3

Chaterji, M. (March, 2019). “A Consumer’s Guide to Testing Under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA): What Can the Common Core and Other ESSA Assessments Tell Us?” University of Colorado-Bolder: National Education Policy Center.

4

American Educational Research Association (Adopted, July 2000) Position Statement on High-Stakes Testing in Pre-K–12 Education. Retrieved https://www.aera. net/About-AERA/AERA-Rules-Policies/Association-Policies/Position-Statementon-High-Stakes-Testing

5

NYC School Diversity Advisory Group (August, 2019) "Making the Grade Part II: New Programs for Better Schools." Retrieved from https://www.schooldiversity.nyc/

6

Dixon-Roman, E. (2017). Inheriting Possibility: Social Reproduction and Quantification in Education. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

7

National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (2018). How People Learn II: Learners, Contexts, and Cultures. Washington D.C.: The National Academies Press.

8

Rooks, N. (2017). Cutting School: Privatization, Segregation, and the End of Public Education. The New Press: New York, NY. (p. 189).

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McGuinn, P. (2006). No Child Left Behind and the Transformation of Federal Education Policy, 1965-2005. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas.

10

McGuinn, P. (2006). No Child Left Behind and the Transformation of Federal Education Policy, 1965-2005. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas.

11

Reid, K.S. (August 30, 2005). “Civil Rights Groups Split Over NCLB Accountability Provisions Stirring Heated Debate.” Education Week. Vol. 25, Issue 01, Pages 1, 20-21.

12

Zamora, P. and Gonzalez, R. (June 19, 2007) “No ‘Split in Civil Rights Community’ Over NCLB.” A Letter to the Editor. Education Week. 26, (42), p. 41.

13

Mintrop, H., Sunderman, G.L. & Orfield, G. (2009). “Why High Stakes Accountability Sounds Good But Doesn‘t Work—And Why We Keep on Doing It Anyway.” University of California-Los Angeles Civil Rights Project. Retrieved from http:// civilrightsproject.ucla.ed; Koretz, D. (2017). The Testing Charade: Pretending to Make Schools Better. Chicago, Il: University of Chicago Press; Sunderman, G. (2008). Holding NCLB Accountable: Achieving Accountability, Equity, & School Reform. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

14

Wells, A.S. (2018). “The Process of Racial Resegregation in Housing and Schools: The Sociology of Reputation.” In R. A. Scott, M. Buchman & S. Kosslyn (Eds.) Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Hoboken, N.J. (pp. 1-14); Wells, A.S., Fox, L., & Cordova-Cobo, D. (2016). How Racially Diverse Schools and Classrooms Can Benefit All Students. New York, NY; The Century Foundation. http:// apps.tcf.org/how-racially-diverse-schools- and-classrooms-can-benefit-all-students.

15

Bakeman, J. (January, 2018) “The Rise and Fade of Education’s ‘Opt Out’ Movement: An anti-testing movement redraws its battle lines.” Medium. Retrieved from https://medium.com/s/new-school/the-rise-and-fade-of-educations-opt-out-movement-13250787e7f4

CHAPTER ONE

Becoming Activists

I

n new york state, from 2015 to 2018, approximately 20% of the students in Grades 3 through 8 opted out of or refused to take the tests required under Race to the Top (RTTT). How many opted out varied by individual schools and school districts, with a few reporting under 10% and some more than 70%. When the opt-out movement began, even getting 10% of the students to opt out seemed aspirational rather than attainable, given the barriers that would be put in place and the pressure parents would face to send their children to school to take the tests. Here we aim to answer three questions: How did the opt-out movement achieve such a high opt-out rate? What effect has it had on educational policy in New York? What lessons can we learn regarding resisting harmful reform policies? To answer these questions, we begin with a brief overview of how, over the last three decades, state and federal education policies focusing on accountability through high-stakes testing have failed to achieve the promised outcomes. Student achievement has not improved, and the achievement gap between white students and students of color is no longer closing.1 Teachers are leaving the profession at an alarming rate, complaining that the regimented focus on test scores reduces education to teaching to the test. Parents report that the high-stakes consequences of standardized testing—low scores can have devastating effects on students, teachers, and schools—result in their children becoming physically sick while taking the test. We then turn to telling the story of two parent activists, Jeanette Deutermann and Lisa Rudley, and their work in heading up two opt-out organizations: Long Island Opt Out (LIOO), and New York State Allies for Public Education (NYSAPE). Their story tells how two parents became activists who asserted that they and their children were not mere consumers of 1

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education but should have a say in shaping education. Deutermann and Rudley also demonstrate how parents, students, teachers, and others can push back against the global effort to reform schools around standards and standardized tests and the privatization of curriculum and assessment through corporate-produced standardized tests and so-called “personalized learning.”2

A Brief Overview of Recent Changes in New York’s Education Policy In New York State over the last three decades, every time new education policies were implemented, they made education worse. For example, for most of the twentieth century, students could earn either a “local diploma” or a more prestigious state Regents diploma, which required passing the more rigorous Regents version of the courses, as well as the end-of-course Regents exam. But in 1996 the New York State Education Department (NYSED), in an effort to “raise standards,” began requiring that all students, in order to graduate, pass five Regents exams in four different subjects, eliminating the local, non-Regents courses and diploma. This requirement posed significant problems for many students, especially English language learners and those with learning disabilities, who did well enough to pass their courses but had difficulties with exams. In 2002, the high-stakes nature of the tests became more so as No Child Left Behind (NCLB)3 required students in third through eighth grade to take statewide math and reading exams, which would be used to evaluate schools and school districts.4 Student scores would be used to evaluate whether the schools were making Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), that is, whether the percentage of students achieving proficiency met a minimum threshold that escalated each year. Since students’ test scores highly correlate with their family income, schools with high percentages of children living in poverty were likely to fail and face worsening consequences, including reorganization or the closing and reopening of a school as a privately administered but publicly funded charter school.5 In 2009, the Obama administration used funding from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) to provide states with additional funding for education during an economic recession and to eliminate AYP as long as states agreed to adopt or develop assessments aligned with the Common Core standards. New York State “won” $700 million in funding.6

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At first, in 2011, New York opted for hiring Pearson, the primary vendor for Partnership for the Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC), to design assessments for third to eighth grade tied to the Common Core curriculum. In 2015, New York State canceled its contract with Pearson due to a growing backlash both from parents joining the opt-out movement and from the teachers’ union. In 2016, Questar became the testing vendor for New York, but the testing issues and backlash continue.7 Both this year and last, the testing had to be halted part way through because of computer problems.8 In New York, the test results were initially intended to be used to evaluate students, teachers, and schools, with 20% of an evaluation score based on the results of Common Core state assessments for Grades 3 through 8. However, basing teacher evaluations on students’ scores had numerous problems. Given that the tests were only administered in math and language arts in Grades 3 through 8, teachers teaching in other grades (i.e., kindergarten through third grade) and subjects other than math and language arts were assessed based on student scores in subjects they did not teach. That is, a kindergarten teacher might be assessed based on third-grade students’ scores on tests in language arts or math. In 2015, New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo signed the Education Transformation Act, which called for the evaluation to be based on two equally weighted measures: observations and test scores. Since the current evaluation system used third- through eighth-grade tests as the locally negotiated tests for evaluations, that became half of the evaluation matrix. Shortly afterward the law passed the State Education Department, and the Board of Regents declared a moratorium on using third- through eighth-grade tests. Consequently, unions and districts renegotiated, with most selecting a predictable, easy Regents test as a replacement. Further, as exemplified by the experiences of Jeanette’s and Lisa’s sons, if the tests themselves aren’t traumatic for the students, the weeks of test prep and pressure leading up to the tests definitely are. Moreover, because low test scores can have a deleterious effect not only on students, but also on their families, friends, and teachers, schools are becoming places of despair rather than joy. The educational reforms implemented beginning with NCLB and extending to the present are negatively transforming our schools. Consequently, students, teachers, and administrators—but mostly

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parents—have been organizing to resist the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and exams. This book tells the story of that resistance and how parents, students, and teachers are pushing back against the testing regime. Here, two of the co-authors, Jeanette Deutermann and Lisa Rudley, relate how they became part- to full-time education activists resisting the Common Core and high-stakes assessments by arranging for their own children to opt out of the exams and encouraging other parents to do so as well. They resisted not only the curriculum and exams but also the way in which the Common Core promoted collecting students’ personal data and developing computerized “personalized learning” using algorithms.9 This reduced the role that students, teachers, and parents played in determining what and how teachers taught and students learned. Those opting out aim, therefore, not only to end the standardized exams, but also, as we will describe in later chapters, to replace them with a pedagogical approach and curriculum that resonates with the whole child. As a result of the efforts of Jeanette and Lisa and thousands of parents like them over the last four years, about 20% of the students required to take the Common Core exams have opted out.10 Over one-fifth of students were withheld from the tests by their parents, which is remarkable given the pressure placed on parents to conform to the testing mandate. Further, having a 20% opt-out rate statewide and an average of 50% opting out in the two suburban Long Island counties undermined the usefulness of the tests for assessing teachers and schools, effectively (as Lisa said) “throwing a wrench in the system,” and forcing policy changes. Jeanette and Lisa, as white suburban moms, could conform—but don’t—to former Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s description of those opting their children out as “white suburban moms who—all of a sudden— their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were and their school isn’t quite as good as they thought they were.”11 Duncan dismissed parents’ complaints and reminded them that, to him, their job was not to critique the standardized testing and educational policy. Instead, he said: “Parents can serve in at least one of three roles: partners in learning, advocates and advisors who push for better schools, and decision makers who choose the best educational options for their children.”12 Parents, Duncan asserted, are to be optimal choosers in a market, selecting good schools for their children from “virtual schools, charters, and career academies.”13

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However, Duncan has little understanding of Jeanette’s and Lisa’s motives. They weren’t complaining that their schools weren’t as good as they thought they were. On the contrary, they felt that it was Duncan’s testing policies that were diminishing the quality of their children’s education in the public schools that they had been supporting. By talking with other parents and teachers, they learned that not only their children, but many other children, were being harmed by the tests, enough so that they described the harm as “an epidemic.” The tests, they realized, were not an individual problem, but a systemic problem that required real changes. Duncan’s dismissal of the parents’ concerns effectively drove parents to organize and resist the Common Core standards and exams.14 Moreover, Duncan was not the only education policymaker who dismissed parents, students, and educators. When Jeanette, Lisa, and thousands of other parents, students, and teachers spoke up against the Common Core at hearings around the state, Commissioner John King and Chancellor Merryl Tisch rejected whatever concerns parents had as demonstrating that the parents did not understand the Common Core standards or exams. Indeed, in interviews with us and in public statements, Regents and Commissioners have stated that the resistance to the Common Core curriculum and exams resulted from rushing them into place, and that the opt-out movement would fade away once parents and teachers understood the reforms. However, five years later, there has been little indication that familiarity has bred acceptance. Rather, familiarity has bred contempt. The resistance and inability of policymakers to even hear the concerns of parents and teachers, as will be described herein, led parents and teachers to launch the opt-out movement as the only way to attract the policymakers’ attention. If the policymakers weren’t going to listen in forums, then having students boycott the tests and thereby render them useless and a waste of time and money in evaluating students, teachers, schools, and school districts might get policymakers’ attention. This chapter, then, begins to tell the story of two parents who, until the Common Core, assumed that the school was doing the best for their children. But they, along with other parents, began to realize that their schools were being transformed to focus on raising test scores, even when such a focus undermined teaching and learning. Jeanette and Lisa thus set out with other parents and critical educators to change educational

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policies by speaking out against the Common Core Standards and exams whenever they could. (Note: When we quote from Jeanette’s and Lisa’s stories, we italicize their words.)

Jeanette Deutermann’s Story The Common Core exams radically transformed my older son Tyler’s feelings about school, and consequently my own. Until third grade, when the Common Core state standardized tests began, Tyler had not complained about testing and did well in and enjoyed school. But now, in 2011–12, under Race to the Top (RTTT), the tests would be used to evaluate students, teachers, and schools. Consequently, I, along with other parents, began to hear from teachers, administrators, and our own children about “the test, the test, the test.” I began to wonder, what is this test? I don’t remember tests being such a big part of elementary school. Why is it such a big deal, suddenly? Usually the tests come and go, are written by teachers or diagnostically for the teacher to assess a specific issue, reading level, or IQ. Often students don’t even know it’s being given ahead of time. It’s generally not a big deal; the kids don’t talk about it; the teachers don’t talk about it; and parents don’t talk about it, especially for these youngest students.

Tyler and the Common Core The first year Tyler took the test, I had no idea I had the option to refuse the test for him. In 2013, in third grade, he sat for more than 9 hours over the course of 6 days taking these assessments. I remember those being very unhappy and stressful days in my house as my son worked through those grueling 6 days. That was the only year either of my kids took one of these New York State standardized tests. The test came and went, and the classroom seemed to return to normal for the remainder of the year. The results were almost forgotten entirely until a notice came in the mail at the end of the summer. No detailed description of my son’s academic strengths or weaknesses, nothing that a parent could use for deeper understanding, just a score of 1 to 4. My son scored a “high 2, low 3.” I vaguely remembered hearing that anything below a 3 meant “failing” and “remediation.” I was suddenly nervous that he would be placed in remediation classes that I knew he didn’t

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need; he was a good student who did well on classwork and teacher-created class tests. I remember a feeling of dread when I called the teacher and close friend asking, “What does his score mean?” She replied, “I have no idea.” It was brutally honest, and frankly disturbing. My friend then stated, “It honestly means nothing to me since your son and the rest of these kids aren’t even in my class anymore!” Tyler’s fourth-grade year had started, so I asked his teacher, “What do those scores mean now, for this year?” He responded the same, “I don’t know. Nothing, really.” Tyler’s third-grade teacher was only allowed to view the assessment as the students were taking it. She could not view it before or after. Nor could she discuss the questions with parents or even other colleagues. Given that the test results are only released after the students move on to the next grade, the teachers never saw the results for their current students. Until then I hadn’t seriously questioned what these tests were for. I sent my children to school each day confident that they were getting a great education and that whatever they were doing in school was absolutely for their benefit. Sure, I questioned the little things: “How much recess do they get? What kind of food is being served in the cafeteria?” and “What should they wear for art class days?” I questioned the little things, never thinking to question the big things. The thought that my son spent so much time thinking about, preparing, and taking a test that literally had no benefit to his education or even informing his teacher about his needs made me sick to my stomach. He was only 8 years old when he took that test. Why did I subject him to that? This makes no sense. The questions came easier at that point. I started questioning everyone and everything: the teachers, other parents, and the administrators. During this period of outrage, I still had no idea I had an option to refuse participation for my son. So I decided to ask my sister, a middle school teacher in my district, and who administers these very same assessments. “What is up with these ridiculous assessments?” Her answer was even more disturbing. “Oh, these tests have nothing to do with the kids. They’re being used against teachers and to label ‘bad’ teachers. This isn’t about evaluating Tyler. They’re evaluating me based on how he does on the test.” Surely this couldn’t be true. Surely they wouldn’t be using these 8-year-olds to evaluate and punish their teachers.

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My father was a physics teacher in a public school, and my other sister is a school psychologist. I’ve been surrounded by educators my whole life, so I have more access to educators than most parents. My sister began educating me about the new evaluation system. To me, it made no sense. Every teacher will have kids in the class that will score a 1, and kids that score a 4. Which one would you use to determine whether a teacher is good or not? Do you take an average? What if a teacher had been given more struggling students because he/she had success with those students? What about teachers who purposely teach in high-needs districts? What about special education teachers? Gifted teachers? Teachers had to show growth. How does a student at the top show growth? What about the special needs student who may not show growth on a standardized assessment but is flourishing with all other important life skills being taught? How does that make any sense? Tyler did not score well on the test. Many of his friends did not score well on the test. Was there something wrong with the students? The teachers? Or the test? He very clearly had testing anxiety. Does the arbitrary teacher evaluation formula account for an 8-year-old’s test anxiety? The more my questions were answered, the more none of it made any sense. [Indeed, as we describe in the next chapter, Commissioner of Education John King stated that the passing score on the test—a “3”—was set so high that only about 30% of the students would score at the proficiency level, which was the passing rate for that year. The passing score was set so high as to classify 70% of the students as “failing.”]15 By now my son was halfway through his fourth-grade year. The Common Core curriculum was now being implemented in the classroom in the form of modules that included lesson plans, material, and content uploaded to the New York State Education Department.16 While the 2013 spring test date loomed, teachers were desperately trying to learn the new content and standards themselves, at the same time as they were teaching it in their classrooms, or “building a plane while it is flying.” Walking into the school building you could sense the fear and anxiety amongst the teachers. Many were talking about having absolutely no idea what to expect on this year’s assessments yet knowing that the results placed their careers at risk. That anxiety flowed directly onto the students in the classroom. It was obvious that this new system of reforms was hurting teachers, but now it was clearly hurting children as well. Students typically sense a teacher’s anxiety and

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become anxious themselves. You cannot negatively impact teachers without negatively impacting their students; they are inextricably tied together. My son was directly affected by these reforms. The months before the first day of testing in 2013, my son began complaining of stomach pains. Every night he would curl into a ball, saying his stomach hurt. Initially, we thought it could be related to food, but then the doctor ran various blood tests and checked all the possible causes, and nothing showed up. It was determined that it was stress-related and he was having anxiety about school. At school, teachers were gearing the whole curriculum toward these tests, and if it was assumed it wasn’t going to be included on the test, it was disposable. At school, teachers were using language like, “You have to do it this way or else it won’t be right on the test.” Homework had become a nightmare, and most nights involved breakdowns, broken pencils, and fights when I would attempt to show my older son how to add, subtract, multiply, or divide numbers. He would insist that it had to be done in multiple confusing steps, when one simple step would result in the correct answer. Long-answer math questions were often worded with trick language, making it impossible for a child just learning the process to understand the application. It was heartbreaking to watch my son attempt his homework while wiping tears from his eyes so that he could see his paper. This wasn’t challenging him; it was needlessly frustrating him to the breaking point. This is what it felt like every day to push my child to work on math problems that were clearly grade levels above his learning capabilities. Two months before the Spring 2013 test, my school sent out a letter saying, “Your son has been selected for a Sunrise Learning Academy!” Any student that was flagged as potentially having a low test score was “invited” to come into school for this “Sunrise Learning Academy!” Had we won the lottery? Who else had been chosen? I quickly learned that any student who scored low on the computer-based Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA) Measures of Academic Progress (MAP®) test was picked for Sunrise Learning Academy. The scores of this test were taken at face value and were being used to determine the needs of individual students, even though the scores sometimes mistakenly identified gifted students for Sunrise Learning Academy. Sunrise Learning Academy involved going to school early 2 mornings a week to receive intensive test prep sessions for 2 months. Given how he felt

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about going to school these days, I was more than apprehensive about telling him about this. I carefully approached the subject, saying, “The school would like kids to come in a little early and work on your math and ELA for the test. What do you think?” This typically stoic and rarely emotional child of mine physically crumpled to the floor and started crying hysterically at the thought of going in early to do even more math and ELA, which he and his friends had all begun to despise. This child who had never, not once, complained about going to school before, who rarely showed emotion, was now a child who hated school, was suffering from anxiety, had meltdowns while completing schoolwork, and was now lying on the floor in despair. Just that week I had been researching further into these assessments, trying to learn all I could about why education had changed so drastically in New York State and the rest of the country, and why my child had to be subjected to these assessments. I had come across an interview of a parent, Chris Cerrone, who explained that he opted his children out of state assessments. At the time I had seen that interview, I was interested and curious, and had more than a few questions about just how this was done. Knowing about this option would very soon become key to an important decision. Right at that very minute, while seeing my son crying on the floor, I said, “Stop. Get up. No more crying. You’re not doing this ‘Learning Academy’ nonsense, and you’re not even going to be taking the test.” Shortly after the decision to opt out was made, my son’s stomach pains stopped, and we no longer discussed homework in terms of preparing for “the test” or giving any credence to the test in my house. That was the beginning of what would become the most amazing, heartbreaking, inspiring, emotional, and empowering chapter of my life.

The Turning Point of My Life—My Story of Resistance The work was just beginning. My older sister Carolyn, the middle school special education teacher, had been closely following all of this as well, and had also decided that opting out was the way to go for her two elementary children in a nearby district. Now we were two. But how do we do this? How do I approach the school? Do we get others on board or just opt our own children out quietly? I reached out to other parents like Chris, whom I had seen on social media and the news. These parents had already figured

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out a loophole in the testing system and used it to effectively refuse to have their children participate. When testing became tied to student test scores, New York State had to account for students (mostly middle school) who just simply pushed the test away and said “no.” Rather than holding that against a teacher and unfairly skewing the evaluation scores, a code was put in place to indicate that the student “refused.” This code meant that no score would be given. Not a zero, not a one, but “no score,” or a 999 code. These brilliant opt-out pioneers realized that rather than the student refusing to take the test, parents could refuse on behalf of their children, speaking for them preemptively. The logic was beautiful and undeniable. After figuring out what I could do for my son, I asked for a meeting with my son’s principal. I explained my complete opposition to using my children to assess their teachers; my dismay over what seemed like the complete integration of test prep into the curriculum; the effects this was having on Tyler; and my plan to fight back. The principal listened intently, seemed amused by my passion, and never argued with me or tried to talk me out of it. She suggested that I sit down with the rest of the administrators and explain all of what we had just discussed. A week later I was sitting in a room with the school superintendent, the director of curriculum, director of special education, and the principal. I remember feeling intimidated, but also completely resolved. I was looking around the room and saw sympathetic faces. I was not going to be fighting for my rights today, but merely explaining how and why I was going to opt my child out. I was not very active in the Parent Teacher Association, hated public speaking, and generally liked to stay in the background. I wasn’t exactly shy, and was somewhat confident, but this was definitely way out of my comfort zone. However, I didn’t have a shred of doubt that I was doing the right thing for my child, so forging ahead was the only option I would even consider. I began by saying, “Respectfully, I’m not here to ask for permission, as being Tyler’s parent IS my permission, but I’m here to inform you what my intentions are and how I have the right to do what I’m about to do.” These words have been given out as advice to thousands of parents who are looking to successfully refuse on behalf of their children. We do not ask for permission but are rather informing of our intent. At the end

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of the meeting, I expressed to this team of administrators that I planned on informing other parents about what was going on with these reforms and how they could protect their own children. My principal, who later became our superintendent, expressed to me years later that she saw a bit of what was to come in my eyes that day. I knew a large group of parents of children in my son’s grade, and we usually all hung around after school talking while the kids played in the playground. Many days the topic of discussion was how stressed these little ones were and how so many of them no longer seemed to enjoy school. I continually reported to them what I had been discovering about the New York State assessments and the Common Core Curriculum. I believe many of them were skeptical that the education system would knowingly implement reforms that had no research behind them or that were completely inappropriate for our kids. They weren’t quite ready to believe that what they were witnessing in their children was due to these factors. I have found over the years that this is largely a coping mechanism. When you think that something is hurting your child and that thing is something so big and insurmountable, it’s easy to desperately want your head to stay in the sand. What changed was when I offered a solution—opting out. I knew that in order to get the others on board, I needed to have some one-on-one conversations. The first was with my friend Liz. We met at a coffee shop in town. I had printed out a few articles that had impacted me on this issue. One was written by a group of principals opposing the assessments and tying the assessments to teacher evaluations. The second was a letter written by a local principal to his students’ parents explaining his opposition to these new assessments. After about an hour of discussions, Liz’s exact words were: “I’m in.” One down, a million to go. One by one, each of my friends in my son’s grade decided to opt out.

Long Island Opt Out: The Start of My Leadership Role in the Opt-Out Movement One rainy weekend day around this same time, my sister Carolyn and I had been tossing around ideas on how we could educate larger groups of parents about the toxic tests and how they all had an option to refuse. I had been using Facebook for a few years and was a member of various “groups” and

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“pages.” I decided that starting a Facebook group page would be the best way to spread the word quickly and efficiently to large groups of parents on Long Island. The name “Long Island Opt Out” was an obvious choice, but I was really concerned about not coming across as being too demanding or forceful, so I added the word “info” at the end. It seems like a little thing, but to me, it made all the difference in being an educational resource—a place parents could go not to be told what to do, but rather to get the information they needed to make an informed decision. The choice to make it a Facebook group vs. a Facebook page had to do with the way in which I wanted to interact with members. A Facebook “page” is primarily meant to just share information. A Facebook “group” is much harder to moderate, but allows members to interact, discuss, and debate. In the early days, we filled the Facebook group with research articles, videos, news stories, and lots of posts explaining the logistics of why and how to opt out. However, in the beginning, opting out wasn’t as simple as submitting a letter to the school. Some school administrators and even some educators resisted informing parents of their rights. Consequently, we have had to engage in a yearly struggle to overcome barriers that administrators placed in our way. We have had to think outside the box to circumvent the ways in which the State Education Department was instructing schools to intervene and discourage opting out, as well as to increase participation on the state tests. While this was being managed on the local level, beyond helping parents in my own and surrounding districts, I was also trying to help those across Long Island and even the state. It was a frantic spring, and it became an overwhelming task to manage all the different issues popping up in each individual district. Just before the state assessments that first spring, the New York State Principals’ group had written an open letter of concern and held a forum called “More Than a Score” at a local university. Long Island principals such as Carol Burris (New York State Principal of the Year), Sean Feeney, Don Sternberg, and Superintendent William Johnson all attended and supported the opt-out movement. Other panel members included Leonie Haimson (Class Size Matters) and Nikhil Goyal, who have both become colleagues and friends. Thousands of teachers and parents packed the auditorium that night, and you could feel that something had shifted. Teachers and parents were cheering as educators and administrators criticized

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the State Department of Education for implementing high-stakes testing in response to the federal regulations. We weren’t rogue parents fighting against our public schools. We were now warriors fighting FOR the public school system, alongside educators who needed our help. Educators who needed us to be their voice. By then our little Facebook Long Island Opt Out17 page had exploded to a few thousand members. I remember hitting 500 and thinking “Oh my god, 500 people are paying attention!” That night at the forum I stood on line to ask a question, and when I said my name into the microphone, the crowd began cheering and stood up. Tears flooded my eyes. I had no idea that so many families were already being impacted by what I was doing. It was a needed inspiration to forge on, even in the face of so many mounting pressures and obstacles. That first week of testing in 2013 was a blur. I spent every minute of every day answering phone calls, emails, and Facebook messages from panicked parents whose children were either forced to sit for the test, or because they opted out, forced to stare at the walls for 3 hours a day during testing, or students who sat for the test only to leave the school at the end of the day visibly shaken or literally in tears. My own fourth grader sat and read a book along with many of his classmates. He was one of the lucky ones with a school district and administration that put the welfare of the children first. There was no way to calculate how many opted out that first year. All we knew is that it was well over a thousand on Long Island, with the majority coming from the Rockville Centre School District, led by their school superintendent and principal, who spoke at the “More Than a Score” forum. Not every district was supportive of parents’ decisions. Those parents who were told “you cannot opt out” were furious upon reading in the local newspaper and on Facebook that, in fact, parents did opt out successfully. Many vowed to never again participate in these state standardized assessments. After our first opt-out testing season, I realized that I simply could not maintain the amount of work needed to coordinate every one of the 124 districts on Long Island and navigate through all the various issues each individual school and district had. I began asking for volunteers to represent each district—whom I called my “liaisons”—and these parents would become my steering committee and the backbone of the LIOO organization. Opt-out leaders around the state, also feeling overwhelmed, discussed the possibility of a meeting in a central location with the idea that we needed to

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coordinate our efforts. Most of us were parents, and some were educators. Most of us had other jobs and were trying desperately to squeeze our activism into our already-busy lives. Coordinating our efforts was a necessity. Our loosely banded group of accidental leaders hailed from Buffalo, Syracuse, Albany, Westchester, New York City, and, of course, Long Island. Syracuse, being the most central location, was chosen as the setting for the first meeting. In July of 2013, this scrappy group jumped in their cars and made the trek to Syracuse, meeting at a Wegmans grocery store. Wegmans is an upstate favorite, with a dinerlike café in each store—in other words, a free meeting space! We finally met in person the Facebook personas we had come to know. We discussed the different possibilities for the group of opt-outers, asking questions such as: Should we become a non-profit? Should we raise money? Who would be on the board of directors? How much time and money would it take? Should we fold into an already-existing organization? Our group felt that becoming a non-profit simply wasn’t what we wanted. Money was certainly needed, but who would donate that money? To whom would we be beholden? Adding any more formal jobs to our insanely busy lives didn’t appeal to anyone. We voted to keep things informal, yet organized. The name “New York State Allies for Public Education,”18 or NYSAPE, was born. We started a website that is a central hub for all of our collective information and vast amounts of resources and tools.

Lisa Rudley’s Story Like Jeanette, I became intrigued with opting out as a form of advocacy because of my son Max’s experience. In 2004, Max, then age three, was diagnosed on the autism spectrum. Upon hearing that diagnosis, I quickly began to advocate not only for him, but also my friends whose children faced challenges, and then for children and parents I didn’t know. I also began to gather resources on healing my son’s mind, body, and soul, and to read the research on autism and its possible causes, including the role that vaccines might play. Shortly after his diagnosis, we learned that Max was allergic to all the vaccines, which led me to research whether we could opt him out of the school’s mandatory vaccine requirements. We could and we did.

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Therefore, my first experience opting my children out of a “mandatory” school requirement began not with the movement to opt them out of the Common Core exams, but from vaccines. This initial act led to my desire to understand the rights of students with disabilities and their parents in the special education system in public schools. As a parent, I now wanted to understand the structure of schooling, and how policies were created and contested.

My Son and the Common Core For the first decade after his diagnosis, the schools accommodated Max by placing him in an inclusion class that was co-taught by a special education and a general education teacher. However, at the beginning of 2013, when the Common Core standards, exams, and curriculum were first implemented, everyone started to exhibit stress, in part because teachers and principals would be evaluated primarily on their students’ scores on the Common Core exams.19 Low scores would decrease a teacher’s chances of achieving tenure and might require that even experienced teachers with previously excellent evaluations would now undergo professional development programs to remedy their deficiencies based on students’ scores on one test. The tests had become high stakes for everyone.20 The pressure on Max to do well had increased, and he was now acting out in ways that we hadn’t seen in years. He was pulling at his hair, becoming more and more distant in class, and becoming extremely irritable. In response, I assessed every aspect of his life from the foods he was eating, to what occurred on his bus ride to and from school, to his daily classroom schedule. My blood began to boil when the teachers shared that not only did the standards increase in difficulty by two to three grade levels, but also that Max would have to take the new Common Core tests that were aligned with the more difficult standards and that the classroom teaching would be geared toward raising the test scores. Because Max was so distraught by the fast pace of his co-taught inclusion class that was supposed to be modified to respond to his needs, we shifted him from his inclusion class of 28 students to a “resource room” of four students with moderate disabilities in the hope that having fewer students in the classroom would give teachers more time to prepare him for

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the tests. However, Max missed his classmates from the inclusion class and asked daily why he was being punished and whether he could spend more time in the classroom with his friends. It was when my son was in fifth grade and I observed the negative effects that the Common Core standards, curriculum, and tests had on everyone in the school that I realized that children with disabilities not only faced personal obstacles, but also that navigating the education system posed an additional hurdle. I had been advocating for students with disabilities for ten years, and now I expanded my concerns from those with physical and cognitive disabilities to all the children in the school.

The Erosion of Student Privacy As my involvement in the politics of education in my local school district grew, I became aware of other dangers—in particular, inBloom, which would create longitudinal student data on my children that I would not have access to, but other organizations and corporations would, and such data could be compromised. I began to attend local and eventually regional meetings of the school Parent Teacher Association (PTA) to inform parents of the dangers of inBloom and to urge them to resist it. However, while my ranting to parents about inBloom often had little effect, I was learning about policies being put into effect as part of New York State’s “success in winning” funding under Obama’s RTTT.21 RTTT offered funding to states that would adopt and implement national standards and assessments—almost always the Common Core or Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC), increase the number of charter schools, and collaborate with private corporations to build a longitudinal student education data system. I only learned about the last requirement and about inBloom when a school board member confided in me what he knew about the latter. While I became incensed about the dangers inBloom posed for students’ privacy, when I met with teachers and parents at PTA meetings, they did not share my concerns. But I was now committed to combating inBloom and realized that I needed to network beyond my local PTAs. It was then that I began to ally with other individuals and organizations across the state.

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New York State Allies for Public Education Is Born Through my new contact, I was advised to contact Leonie Haimson, executive director of Class Size Matters, where she blogged and posted on social media about the danger parents faced from vendors who collected personally identifiable student data without parents’ consent and the existing and potential damaging effects on students. From Haimson, I learned more about the dangers of inBloom, but also more about the growing movement by parents to opt their children out of the Common Core exams. She suggested that I contact Eric Mihelbergel of Western New Yorkers for Public Education, who informed me of efforts by parents and others to opt students out of the Common Core exams, including a meeting in Syracuse in upstate New York in July 2013. That meeting, as described by Jeanette earlier, was attended by several opt-out leaders from around the state, including Chris Cerrone of Western New Yorkers for Public Education, Danielle Boudet, Lori Griffin, and others. We strategized about creating a statewide group that would serve as a clearinghouse of information for all the grassroots parents and educator groups across the state to resist the testing, and to collect data at the local, regional, and statewide levels. We were committed to undermining the Common Core exams by having a significant percentage of students opt out. We thought 10% would be a huge accomplishment and are more than pleased at having achieved a 20% opt-out rate across the state for the last four years. We immediately created a domain and website (www.nysape.org) and invited every advocacy group across the state to be our ally. Our very first press release on August 23, 2013, reflected a statewide commitment to resisting the state and federal reforms and creating the schools we want for our children. But our goal has never been to just put an end to high-stakes testing and student data collection—given all the research on the negative effects of high-stakes testing, such as the Common Core,22, 23 and massive data collection systems, such as inBloom. More importantly, we are trying to create the space for schools to create new pedagogical approaches that encourage knowledgeable and creative students, parents, educators, and community members. We followed up that first meeting with another one just one week later in New Paltz, just 75 miles north of New York City. There I met

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other leaders, including Bianca Tanis and David Hursh. After each meeting, I drove home energized by the other leaders and knew we were starting something big. I also learned the power of organizing: parents, students, and educators created organizations that were little more than names attached to a group of people and succeeded primarily because of  people’s commitment to work together. Only a few groups had an organizational structure, and most operated on what little financial donations they could get. What these organizations did have were individuals who enthusiastically engaged policymakers in discussions and debates about the Common Core standards and tests, who would gather information and share it with others engaged in the struggle, and who would share strategies and tactics. By the end of the first year, NYSAPE was a coalition of some 50 affiliated groups.

Overview of the Book In this chapter we tell the story of how two parents—Jeanette and Lisa— became two of the most visible and influential leaders of the opt-out movement. Here we want to claim that their stories and the story of the opt-out movement have not merely local and statewide significance. Rather, they contribute to an international struggle to wrest education policymaking away from private, often undemocratic corporate interests and to reinsert students, parents, and teachers as active participants in their own learning.24 In Chapter Two we provide a broader historical context to their transformation by recounting the continuing ratcheting up of high-stakes testing in New York. We also argue that, in general, New York’s education policies and practices intentionally portray public schools and teachers as failing. We show how on many exams, including the Common Core exams, the cut score—the score needed to achieve proficiency—was initially set arbitrarily high in order to yield a high failure rate. For example, on the first iteration of the Common Core exams, Commissioner John King declared that because of where he set the cut score, the passing rate would likely be around 30%, which, indeed, was the result for all the students in the state. Students in urban school districts did much worse. For example, in

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the Rochester City School District, which ranks third-highest in the nation in childhood poverty, only 10% of the students passed the Common Core tests.25 In general, over the last three decades, the passing rate reflects what the commissioner finds politically desirable26—that is, a low passing rate at the beginning of a commissioner’s tenure, slowly rising over time,27, 28 and thereby “demonstrating” the effectiveness of whatever reforms the commissioner instituted. Therefore, we show how, over the last several decades, New York State and the federal government’s education policies have required schools to hold students, teachers, and schools accountable through standardized tests and curriculum. These policies have not only failed to improve student learning, but have also not closed the achievement gap between economically advantaged and disadvantaged students.29 These policies have also deskilled teachers, contributing to the deprofessionalization of teaching.30 We also show how the standardized tests, by portraying schools with high percentages of students of color and/or those living in poverty as failing, contribute to residential and school segregation and, because in the United States schools are primarily funded by local real estate taxes, unequal school funding. Standardized testing, therefore, states Amy Stuart Wells, promotes “Jim Crow education.”31, 32 In Chapter Three, Jeanette and Lisa describe how they achieved a remarkable opt-out rate of 50% in the two eastern counties of Long Island, and 20% statewide, even in the face of efforts by schools and the state education department to undermine the opt-out movement. Jeanette and Lisa describe how they effectively used social media—Facebook and websites— to inform parents and educators of the problems with the Common Core standards and exams and to organize resistance. They showed their political shrewdness by first organizing horizontally and, after building a base, organizing vertically. They began by building a grassroots movement developing allies in many of the schools, seeking to achieve an opt-out rate sufficient to “putting a wrench in the system.” Once they built a grassroots base large enough to affect local and statewide elections, they began campaigning for legislative candidates who supported their criticisms of standardized testing and collecting data on students and families. Since the legislature selects the members of the Board of Regents,

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in time they were able to select a Board of Regents that reflected the opt-out movement’s viewpoint. Then the more progressive Board of Regents was able to select a more progressive chancellor, Betty Rosa. As Chancellor-elect, Rosa spoke in favor of the movement to boycott the state standardized tests, stating at a news conference that “If I were a parent and I was not on the Board of Regents, I would opt out at this time.”33 The Board of Regents, led by Chancellor Rosa, has effected various changes, including filing a successful lawsuit against the previous chancellor, Merryl Tisch, who as a member of the SUNY Charter School Committee proposed that charter schools could certify their own teachers through 30 hours of student teaching and enrolling in classes taught by teachers in the same charter school.34 In addition, the chancellor and commissioner recently announced that they were considering dropping the Regents exam as a requirement for graduating with a Regents diploma.35 In Chapter 4, we discuss the changing role of technology in schools as standards, curriculum, and standardized assessments are made available through computer technology. We want to make clear that we are not against technology, but against the misuse of technology, including how digital technology (1) makes it possible to impose on schools uniform curricula and assessments by shifting control over what is taught and assessed away from teachers, students, and the community; (2) enables the growth of “personalized learning,” in which computers determine what and how students are to learn; and (3) facilitates collecting massive amounts of data regarding students and their families. In the final chapter, we turn to describing and explaining the challenges and successes of the opt-out movement in New York. In particular, members have partially succeeded in shifting the conversation away from test scores and toward what and how students should learn. In addition, they have encouraged parents and teachers to question top-down mandates from the state and federal governments. We also show the similarities between the opt-out movement and other recent efforts to change policies through organized resistance, including teacher strikes and The Women’s March. All of these movements use social media to quickly disseminate information and organize events. At the same time, we and others36 raise the question of whether activists need a more formal and durable structure to effectively transform policy.

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As we have noted in this opening chapter, the opt-out movement has to do more than simply criticize high-stakes standardized testing. It must work toward schools and communities that support the whole child37 and socially just schools and society. Standardized testing, we argue, is used not, as its proponents claim, to close the achievement gap but, as decades of high-stakes testing demonstrates, to create and exacerbate the achievement gap. Instead of high-stakes testing, we need to create, as Dewey38 argued, democratic institutions and communities wherein people work together across income, racial, and ethnic lines. Rather than having students and teachers in schools competing with one another and creating winners and losers, as charter school proponents often do, we need to develop institutions that promote the success of everyone in the school. Such a school would focus on creating spaces and relationships where teachers and students develop real relationships and support each other’s learning. Smyth describes ideal schools “as places of dignity, respect, complexity and diversity with assets and strengths that reside in the school and the community.” The opt-out movement can provide a model for how to work politically to develop more democratic, humane, and equitable educational institutions and society.

Endnotes 1

Koretz, D. (2018). The testing charade: Pretending to make schools better. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press; Ravitch, D. (2013). Reign of error: The hoax of the privatization movement and the danger to America’s public schools. New York: Knopf.

2

Resistance to high-stakes testing is not just a U.S. phenomenon but is occurring elsewhere. For New Zealand, see Thrupp, M. (2018). The search for better educational standards: A cautionary tale, with responses from Bob Lingard, Meg Maguire, and David Hursh. Cham, Switzerland: Springer Press. For Australia, see Lingard, B. (2010). Policy borrowing, policy learning: Testing times in Australian schooling. Critical Studies in Education, 51(2), 129–147.

3

U.S. Department of Education. (2010, December). No Child Left Behind legislation. Retrieved from https://www2.ed.gov/policy/elsec/leg/esea02/index.html

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23

Hursh, D. (2007). Assessing No Child Left Behind and the rise of neoliberal education policies. American Educational Research Journal, 44(3), 493–518.

5

Ravitch, D. (1995). National standards in American education: A citizen’s guide. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.

6

However, in many states funding from RTTT failed to cover the increased expenses. Schools needed to develop a teacher evaluation plan that was often more costly than the amount of funding they received. For example, in Monroe County, where the city of Rochester is located, school districts (not including Rochester) received an average (mean) of $127,000 over 4 years, or just under $22,000 per year. Or, dividing the amount given to districts by the number of children in the state, each district received $33.50 per year (personal communication from J. Siegle, Executive Director of the Monroe County School Boards Association). One rural school district itemized the expense of implementing RTTT. The total funding the school was to receive over 4 years was $20,000. However, a district administrator calculated that in the first year they spent $157,346 on RTTT-mandated activities and technology updates that they wouldn’t have spent otherwise.

7

New York State Education Department. (2016, January). Changes for the 2016 Grades 3–8 English Language Arts and Mathematics tests. Retrieved from http:// www.p12.nysed.gov/assessment/ei/2016/changes2016grades3-8ela-math-tests.pdf

8

New York State Education Department. (2019, April 3). 2019 Computer-based ELA state assessments to resume tomorrow with select grades. Retrieved from http:// www.nysed.gov/news/2019/2019-computer-based-ela-state-assessments-resumetomorrow-select-grades

9

Saltman, K.J., & Means, A.J. (2017). From “data-driven” to “democracy-driven” educational leadership: Navigating market bureaucracy and new technology in a post-Fordist era. In D. Waite & I. Bogotch (Eds.), The Wiley international handbook of educational leadership (pp. 125–138). Malden, MA: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

10

Hursh, D., McGuinnis, S., Chen, Z., & Lingard, B. (2019). Resisting the neo-liberal: Parent activism in New York State against the corporate reform agenda in schooling. In M. Hamilton & L. Tett (Eds.), Resisting the neo-liberal discourse in education: Local, national and transnational perspectives. Bristol, UK: Policy Press. The optout movement in New York State has been the most successful such movement in the United States, with 240,000 children opting out of the Common Core tests in 2015, and 225,000 in 2017, for example. We note that the two counties on Long Island—Nassau and Suffolk—which are typically referred to as Long Island, are generally represented by the Republican Party and are politically conservative.

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11

Strauss, V. (2013, November 16). Arne Duncan: “White suburban moms” upset that Common Core shows their kids aren’t “brilliant.” The Washington Post. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2013/11/16/ arne-duncan-white-surburban-moms-upset-that-common-core-shows-their-kidsarent-brilliant/?utm_term=.0945ab8da214

12

Duncan, A. (2010, May 3). Looking in the mirror: Final remarks of Secretary of Education to the mom congress. U.S. Department of Education. Retrieved from https://www2.ed.gov/news/speeches/2010/05/05032010.html

13

Duncan, A. (2010, May 3). Looking in the mirror.

14

Strauss, V. (2013, November 16). Arne Duncan: “White suburban moms” upset that Common Core shows their kids aren’t “brilliant.” The Washington Post. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2013/11/16/ arne-duncan-white-surburban-moms-upset-that-common-core-shows-their-kidsarent-brilliant/?utm_term=.0945ab8da214

15

Strauss, V. (2013, August 7). What big drop in new standardized test scores really means. The Washington Post. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/ news/answer-sheet/wp/2013/08/07/what-big-drop-in-new-standardized-test-scoresreally-means/?utm_term=.2defd2e7b679

16

EngageNY. (n.d.). Welcome to EngageNY. Retrieved from https://www.engageny.org/

17

Long Island Opt-out Info Public Group. Retrieved from https://www.facebook.com/ groups/Longislandoptout/

18

NYS Allies for Public Education NYS. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.nysape.org/

19

Hursh, D. (2013). Raising the stakes: High-stakes testing and the attack on public education in New York. Journal of Education Policy, 28(5), 574–588.

20

In Rochester, an urban school district, 922 of the 2,474 teachers (37%) received ratings of “developing” or “ineffective,” all of whom would then need a professional development plan.

21

Hursh, D.W. (2016). The end of public schools: The corporate reform agenda to privatize education. New York: Routledge.

22

Koretz, D. (2018). The testing charade: Pretending to make schools better. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

23

Schneider, M.K. (2015). Common core dilemma—Who owns our schools? New York: Teachers College Press.

24

Hursh, D., McGinnis, S., Chen, Z., & Lingard, B. (2019). Resisting the neo-liberal: Parent activism in New York State against the corporate reform agenda in schooling. In M. Hamilton & L. Tett (Eds.), Resisting the neo-liberal discourse in education:

Becoming A ctivists

25

Local, national and transnational perspectives. Bristol, UK: Policy Press. 25

Murphy, J. (2018, June 8). Why are Rochester schools America’s worst? Study Kodak Park School 41. Democrat and Chronicle. Retrieved from https://www.democratandchronicle.com/story/local/communities/time-to-educate/stories/2018/06/06/worstpublic-schools-america-rochester-ny-rcsd-kodak-park-school-41/550929002/

26

Hursh, D. (2016). The end of public schools: The corporate reform agenda to privatize education. New York: Routledge.

27

Ravitch, D. (2010). The death and life of the great American school system: How testing and choice are undermining education. New York: Basic Books.

28

Hursh, D. (2013). Raising the stakes: High-stakes testing and the attack on public education in New York. Journal of Education Policy, 28(5), 574–588.

29

Ravitch, D. (2013). Reign of error: The hoax of the privatization movement and the danger to America’s public schools. New York: Knopf.

30

McRae, P. (2011). The politics of personalization in the 21st century. Alberta Teachers’ Association Magazine, 91(1), 8–11.

31

Wells, A.S. (2019, April 7). An inconvenient truth about the new Jim Crow of education. American Education Research Association Presidential Address, Toronto, CA.

32

Cluckey, K. (2016, March 21). Chancellor-elect Rosa speaks in favor of test opt out. Politico. Retrieved from https://www.politico.com/states/new-york/albany/ story/2016/03/chancellor-elect-rosa-speaks-in-favor-of-test-opt-out-032591

33

Disare, M. (2017, March 28). “We need an opposite narrative”: Chancellor Betty Rosa on her year of trying to reshape New York’s education debate. Chalkbeat. Retrieved from https://www.chalkbeat.org/posts/ny/2017/03/28/we-need-an-opposite-narrative-chancellor-betty-rosa-on-her-year-of-trying-to-reshape-new-yorkseducation-debate/

34

Clukey, K. (2018, February 9). Education Department, Regents file complaint over SUNY charter teacher certification. Politico. Retrieved from https://www.politico. com/states/new-york/albany/story/2016/03/chancellor-elect-rosa-speaks-in-favorof-test-opt-out-032591

35

Cramer, P. (2019, March 16). It’s time to start “hard work of rethinking” Regents exams, New York’s top education policymaker says. Chalkbeat. Retrieved from https://www.chalkbeat.org/posts/ny/2019/05/16/its-time-to-start-hard-work-of-rethinking-regents-exams-new-yorks-top-education-policymaker-says/

36

Cole, D. (2019). The path of greatest resistance. New York Review of Books, 66(2). Retrieved from https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/02/07/social-movements-path-greatest-resistance/

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37

Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. (n.d.). The whole child approach. Retrieved from http://www.ascd.org/whole-child.aspx

38

Dewey, J. (1916). Democracy and education. New York: Macmillan.

39 Smyth, J. (2019). The socially just school: Transforming young lives. In K.J. Saltman & A.J. Means (Eds.), The Wiley handbook of global educational reform (pp. 467–487). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. Retrieved from https://doi. org/10.1002/9781119082316.ch22

CHAPTER TWO

The Rise of High-Stakes Testing and the Opt-Out Movement: A Brief History

I

n order to understand the growth of the opt-out movement, we describe in this chapter the transformation of standardized testing from low- to high-stakes exams and the increasing resistance by parents, students, and teachers to those exams. We also argue that high-stakes tests negatively affect curriculum content and pedagogy by narrowing and simplifying the curriculum, thereby undermining teaching and learning. Further, because many people mistakenly equate a school’s test scores with the quality of the school rather than other factors such as family income, those families that can afford to do so will erroneously choose a school based on the test scores. This process only exacerbates the differences between schools. Consequently, test scores are used to justify school choices, making inequality seem natural. While in New York high-stakes testing provides no benefit for those in school, it causes unnecessary stress for students, teachers, families, and others. So, given these realities, how did high-stakes testing come about?

First the State and Then the Federal Government Institutes High-Stakes Standardized Exams In 1866, New York became the first state to create and administer statewide exams—the Regents exams—that colleges could use to assess student 27

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applicants.1 This testing requirement did not change until 130 years later (in the mid 1990s) when the Board of Regents instituted a new graduation requirement: students would need to pass five Regents exams in four subject areas (English, science, math, and history). This reform was quickly followed by additional federal testing requirements under No Child Left Behind (NCLB), Race to the Top (RTTT) funding, and the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). Every change in testing has raised the stakes. This first testing requirement was created to ensure that high school graduates applying for college had received a quality education. Thus began tracking in high school, with educators preparing one group of students for college to “work with their minds” and the second group to “work with their hands.”2 Those who were college bound were expected not only to pass the course but also the so-called “Regents” exam at the end of the course. Those passing the Regents courses and exams achieved the state-produced and -administered Regents diploma. But because the tests were not required for graduation, they were not yet “high stakes.” David Hursh’s own experience as a high school student in New York in the 1960s illustrates how the Regents track worked. As he describes in The Rise of High-Stakes Testing and the Decline of Teaching and Learning,3 when entering high school, he was unaware that tracking existed and was placed in the vocational non-Regents track. However, during that year, quite by chance, he had the opportunity to test into the Regents track. As a student in the Regents track, he was automatically enrolled in the Regents (not local) version of courses. At the end of each course, he took the corresponding Regents exam. As long as students passed the required minimum number of Regents courses with their respective exams, they received a Regents diploma. So, while important, the Regents were not high-stakes exams. One could fail the exam and still pass the course or fail a few Regents courses and still earn a Regents diploma. If one did not earn a Regents diploma, one could still earn a local non-Regents diploma. However, in 1995, New York Commissioner of Education Richard Mills and the Board of Regents adopted policies requiring students to pass five Regents exams, one each in English, science, and math, and two in history, beginning with English in 1996 and adding one additional subject each year.5 Because failure to pass any one of the exams prevented one from earning a Regents degree, and the alternative non-Regents track was being

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eliminated, students who passed all their classes but failed to pass any one exam would fail to graduate. The exams became high stakes. As we describe in this chapter, this new graduation requirement sparked the beginning of the resistance to high-stakes testing. One group of students that was immediately affected was English language learners, who often did well in their high school classes but had difficulty with the English Regents exams. Bill Cala, superintendent of the Fairport schools in suburban Rochester, New York, reported that several students who had earned high grades in their courses and been admitted to university but did not graduate because they did not pass the English exam.6 A second group of students who would be affected but immediately began a campaign to reverse the new requirement were the students, parents, and teachers who were part of the Performance Standards Consortium Schools, which are innovative secondary public schools that use portfolios instead of standardized exams to assess students. The Performance Standards Consortium Schools had been granted a waiver by Tom Sobol, the previous commissioner, permitting them to award students Regents diplomas without those students taking the Regents exams. The Consortium Schools desired this flexibility because it fostered interdisciplinary, in-depth teaching and learning. Rochester’s School Without Walls is one of the consortium schools. As we will detail more fully in Chapter Four, since the school did not have to prepare students for the Regents exams, students could devote their senior year to an in-depth project. One student, for example, devoted his entire senior year to making a documentary film on the destruction by fire of a rural village near Rochester. Based on his senior project, the student was hired after graduation by legendary documentary filmmaker Ken Burns.7 This first battle over standardized testing included busing hundreds of students, parents, and educators to Albany to lobby legislators and members of the State Board of Regents. After several years of negotiations, the schools and the Regents agreed to one testing requirement: that students pass the English Regents exam. The federal government did not become involved with testing and graduation policies until 2002, with the passage of NCLB as part of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. This significantly expanded the federal government’s reach into public schools beyond anything previously

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known. Indeed, some argue that NCLB and later RTTT were unconstitutional because the U.S. Constitution does not explicitly include education as a responsibility of the federal government and explicitly states that anything not listed in the constitution is reserved for the states. The most well-known aspect of NCLB is the requirement that the state evaluate students, schools, and districts based on students’ scores on the reading and mathematics tests in Grades 3 through 8. The test scores are to be disaggregated along several demographics, including race and ethnicity, to assess whether any group is failing to make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP). It is worth examining AYP for just a bit to reveal how irrational some of the requirements are and how they resulted in illogical policies and the manipulation of test score data. AYP is not based on whether and to what degree the school’s test scores have improved (which the word “progress” implies), but rather on the percentage of students who achieve the passing or “cut score.” In order to demonstrate AYP, the minimum percentage of students required to achieve the passing score, which was set in 2002, NCLB’s first year, as a low number, gradually increased every year thereafter until 2014, when 100% of students were required to pass the exam. Since achieving AYP is based on what percentage of students pass the test each year and not whether their scores improve, NCLB was not measuring progress, and by the year 2014 would require the almost impossible goal of having every student in school pass every test. In addition, NCLB has the perverse effect of harming schools that include large percentages of students living in poverty. Since students’ test scores are closely related to family income, schools with large percentages of such students, which describes the schools in any city in New York, were unlikely to meet the required percentage of students passing the test. Moreover, since the percentage of students required to pass the test increased each year, schools with large percentages of children living in poverty did not achieve AYP when their passing rate failed to rise sufficiently and stay above the ascending cut-score line. On the other hand, wealthy suburban districts that began with a passing rate significantly above the minimum threshold will continue to make AYP, even if their passing rate declines, as long as it remains above the minimum threshold. Therefore, while most people would think of progress as an increase in the passing rate, under NCLB wealthy schools can have declining passing rates and still “make progress” as long as the percentage of students remains

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above a rising threshold. In contrast, schools with high rates of family poverty can have increasing passing rates and still be classified as “not making progress” if they do not remain above the rising threshold.

How Standardized Testing Contributes to the New Jim Crow in Education NCLB is a prime example of how high-stakes testing contributes to the New Jim Crow in education.8 The tests can portray wealthy school districts as “making progress” even if they are not, and districts with economically challenged families as failing even if their scores are rising. Further, the tests only note whether a student scores at the level of proficiency or not, and therefore a small difference in the percentage of questions answered incorrectly can result in a big difference in the number of students scoring at proficiency. Therefore, the exams inevitably mis-portray the schools as more unequal than they are, incentivizing those with the financial means to live in middle- and upper-class neighborhoods, and leaving those without the financial means further behind. It is no wonder that New York State has the most segregated school districts in the country.9 In addition, no matter how irrational it might seem to have almost all schools failing, it fulfills at least two political goals. First, when George Bush signed NCLB into law in 2002, it was immediately apparent that the rising minimum threshold for AYP would result in an increasing number of schools failing each year, so that by the year 2014 almost all the schools would fail. But since Bush would be out of office by 2008, the blame would fall on whomever succeeded him. As we will describe, Obama implemented RTTT, which allowed states to drop AYP in exchange for instituting the Common Core standards, curriculum, and exams. RTTT also called for evaluating teachers based on students’ test scores. While RTTT did not replace NCLB—the latter was an act of Congress and the former a grant that partially funded standardized testing and curricula in states “winning” RTTT, which included New York—a whole testing regime arose in New York. Obama’s RTTT raised the stakes even higher. Second, the low passing rates, which we will describe in a moment, became a central rationale for privatizing the development of curriculum and assessments such as the Common Core and Partnership for Assessment

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of Readiness for College and Careers (PARRC), and the privatization of schools themselves. Most importantly, for our argument here, standardized testing has had perverse effects on the education system, not least because the scores rise or fall based on whether it is politically expedient to depict the schools as failing or improving.

The Scores Are Manipulated for Political Purposes Corporate reformers have justified their reform proposals as fulfilling a student’s civil right10 to a quality education and holding that charter schools will provide students with a better education, therefore serving as the “great equalizer.” Corporate reformers frequently claim that “poverty is used as an excuse for students failing to learn,” and we should therefore focus on providing a better education and ignore the issue of poverty. In addition, they argue, standardized testing is a civil right because it provides students and families with objective information about the students, their teachers, and schools. However, as we will show, none of these claims are valid. From the beginning, high-stakes testing has been promoted as giving students and parents objective data that teachers were not providing. In No Child Left Behind: A Parent’s Guide, parents are told that standardized tests are a valid and reliable means of assessing students’ learning and are superior to teacher-generated assessments.11 The Guide advises parents that NLCB “will give them objective data” through standardized testing.12 Further, objective data from tests are necessary because “many parents have children who are getting straight A's, but find out too late that their child is not prepared for college. That’s just one reason why NCLB gives parents objective data about how their children are doing.”13 Teachers, NCLB strongly implies, have neither rigorously enforced standards nor accurately assessed students, thereby covering up their own and their students’ failures. Further, test scores are useful to parents because “parents will know how well learning is occurring in their child’s class. They will know information on how their child is progressing compared to other children.”14 Because teachers, NCLB claims, have relied too often on their own assessments, standardized test scores will also benefit them. NCLB “provides teachers with independent information about each child’s strengths and weaknesses. With this

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knowledge, teachers can craft lessons to make sure each student meets or exceeds standards.”15 In the debate in New York over parents opting their children out of the Common Core standardized tests, past chancellor Merryl Tisch argued that opting children out of the test eliminates having an “objective measure” of student learning and “makes it easy to ignore the achievement gap between students of color and white students.” Furthermore, the tests make it possible for a parent to “know whether his or her child is on track for success in the fifth grade or high school graduation or success in college.” Tisch claims that “it’s time to stop making noise to protect the adults and start speaking up for the students.”16 She ignores that the test scores reveal only whether students are scoring a 1, 2, 3 or 4 on the tests, and that the scores are manipulated. Thus, whether they rise or fall, they tell us nothing. In New York, Commissioners of Education have been manipulating test results since standardized testing became high stakes. Sometimes the test scores are manipulated to produce a high failure rate so that the public schools can be portrayed as failing, as in the case of the most recent Common Core exam results, or to portray the commissioner and regents as having high standards. But as Robert Linn, 17 a past president of the American Education Research Association (AERA), revealed almost two decades ago, at some point commissioners and other officials desire to demonstrate that their reforms are working and therefore increase the passing rate by making the scoring easier. The following are some examples. As described above, the first instantiation of high-stakes testing in New York was the requirement, beginning in the mid 1990s, that students pass five Regents exams in four different subjects: science, history, math, and English. In English, math, and science, the students need only pass one of the Regents exams, while in history they are required to pass the Regents exams in Global History and in United States History. In science, the first exam offered is typically biology, also known as the “living environment” exam. Given the commissioners’ desire to be seen as both raising standards and wanting more students to graduate, they lower the “cut score” on exams that students are likely to take as part of the graduation requirement, making it easier for them to graduate. For example, a decade ago the biology or “living environment” exam was criticized as being too easy, as students needed to answer only 39% of the questions correctly to earn a

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passing grade of 55%.18 The practice has not substantially changed over the last decade. One of our recent analyses of the scoring rubrics on the New York State Education Department (NYSED) website revealed that to pass, students needed to answer correctly only 47% of the multiple-choice questions on the living environment exam and 53% on the algebra exam. Conversely, the exams for the advanced, non-required courses, such as physics and chemistry, have sometimes been made more difficult. In 2003, 39% of students failed the physics exam in order—critics charged—to make Regents testing appear more rigorous.19 Then Commissioner Richard Mills apparently assumed that since students did not need to pass the physics exam to graduate, a high failure rate would be of little concern to students and their families. However, he seems to have been unaware that because most of the students who enroll in physics are academically successful middle- and upper-class students applying to university, and low or failing grades on the state physics exam harm their chances for admission, the students and their parents responded by pressuring the State Education Department to change the scoring. At first, Commissioner Mills defended the results as “statistically sound,”20 but the test results were so dubious that the State Council of Superintendents sent letters to universities urging them to disregard them. Finally, revelations on how the scores were manipulated to yield a low passing rate left the commissioner with no choice but to respond to public pressure by resetting the cut score and thereby substantially improving the passing rate.21 High-stakes standardized testing extended beyond the high school Regents courses when NCLB, in 2002, began requiring tests in Grades 3 through 8. While the results of the secondary school exams have fluctuated, the scores on the elementary grade exams have, in general (that is, until recently), steadily risen at rates of questionable validity. In the same way that scores on the Regents exams have been manipulated by raising or lowering the cut scores, the minimum scores necessary to reach increased levels of proficiency on the math and reading tests required under NCLB have consistently declined, with the result that more students achieve proficiency and fewer schools fail to make AYP. How much easier it was for schools to achieve AYP is described by Diane Ravitch in The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education,22 in which she points out how much easier it was for elementary

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students to score in the top three of four levels on the standardized tests. She writes: On the sixth-grade reading test in 2006, students needed to earn 36.2% of the points to attain level 2; by 2009, students in that grade need only 17.9%. In seventh grade math, students needed to earn 36.2% of the points on the test to advance to level 2 in 2006, but by 2009, they needed to earn only 22%. The standards to advance from level 1 to level 2 dropped so low that many students could get enough correct answers to pass level 2 by randomly guessing.23

Michael Winerip (2011) undertook research similar to Ravitch’s and reported that in 2005, “New York City fourth graders made record gains on the state English test, with 59% scoring proficient, compared with 49% the year before.” Similarly, in “...2008 math scores for grades three through eight indicate that 89.7% are proficient, up from 72% in 2007.”24 That these improvements in student learning are deceptive is also revealed when the results of New York State’s tests are compared with New York State students’ scores on the more statistically sound National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) English and math exams. The NAEP exams are administered every other year to statistically representative samples of students in Grades 4, 8, and 12, and the results can be compared from year to year. In 2005, only 19% of the New York City students were scored as proficient on the eighth-grade reading test, compared to 22% two years before, and by 2009 the test results were the lowest in a decade. By November 2011, “New York [was] one of two states in the nation to post statistically significant declines [emphasis added] on the NAEP tests.”25 While the percentage of students passing the New York State exams was rising, a lower percentage of students were passing the NAEP exams, providing evidence that the increasing passing rates were not the result of improved educational practices but instead the result of test score manipulation by the State Education Department. So much for the NCLB and other tests providing “objective data” regarding student success and failure.

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However, as harmful as NCLB might be, the Obama administration, by funding RTTT and promoting more digital technology in schools, significantly upped the ante with its promotion of the Common Core State Standards, (CCSS) curriculum and exams, its linking of test scores to teachers’ evaluations, and its support for a state longitudinal data system.

Obama Raises the Stakes The rise of the CCSS and exams are typically portrayed in the media as a grassroots, voluntary initiative to raise and unify standards across the fifty states. However, the reality is that they would not exist if it were not for the support of Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation. As Layton26 reports, the CCSS were dying for lack of support until Gene Wilhoit, the former Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), and David Coleman, the CCSS “lead architect,” approached Gates in 2008 for support. Gates responded enthusiastically. Hassard (2014) reports that Gates has provided $2.3 billion in support of the Common Core, with more than 1800 grants to organizations running from teachers’ unions to state departments of education to political groups like the National Governors Association [that] have pushed the Common Core into 45 states, with little transparency and next to no public review.27

Explaining Gates’s enthusiasm is not difficult. First, Gates assumes that as one of the world’s wealthiest men, he is also one of the smartest and, therefore, knows better than anyone how to improve not only schools, but also global agriculture and global health.28 Further, even though he is not an expert, he is treated like one. Both he and David Brooks—a journalist who reported in error that the CCSS is a state and not a federal initiative,29, 30 were invited in March 2014 to address 80 U.S. Senators, for whom they extolled the virtues of the Common Core.31 Second, if the goal of every state endorsing national standards, curriculum, and assessments were achieved, this would require that they be de-

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livered digitally on computers and tablets, financially benefiting technology corporations such as Gates’s Microsoft. As we describe in Chapter Four, the Common Core and other reforms are replacing teacher-created with corporate-developed curriculum and assessments. We got a glimpse of the future of education when the Ontario, Canada, provincial government recently proposed that all secondary students would need to take 4 of the 30 required high school credits as online courses. Analysts predict that if these proposals are adopted, 490 secondary teachers will be laid off.32

The Rising Public Resistance to the Common Core/Next Generation Standards In New York, parents such as Jeanette and Lisa realized that the current system of standards and corporate-produced curriculum and assessments was harmful not only to their children but also to students, families, educators, and schools. Students and parents were becoming stressed out over the tests that provide no useful information and cause more harm than good. They were also realizing that teachers were losing control over teaching and assessment, as those responsibilities were being handed over to two corporations, Pearson and Questar, both of which have failed miserably. This and last year’s (2019) language arts exams had to be suspended on two separate days because of a computer server failure.33 Parents also observed the negative effects that the Common Core standards, curriculum, and assessments had on the schools as a whole. Teachers are resigning and retiring early, and fewer people are choosing teaching as a career. Above we recounted the story of how parents objected to the results on the Common Core exams as portraying their children, teachers, and schools as failures, and how Arne Duncan dismissed them as whiners. The focus on standardized testing, corporate-produced curriculum and assessments, and the reduction of people to numbers is deskilling teachers, emphasizing routine over reflection, and leading to more teachers leaving the profession and fewer entering it. Schools are less likely to be places where teachers and students engage in a collaborative process of making sense of the world, and instead are becoming places where teachers and students focus on passing the tests.

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Parents, Students, Educators, and Others Are Pushing Back Against the Common Core Thousands of parents and teachers spoke up when New York’s Commissioner of Education John King embarked on what he initially dubbed a “listening tour” of the state to hear concerns from parents about the Common Core State Standards, the curriculum, and assessments. However, in the first few meetings, King spoke more than he listened, lecturing the parents on their responsibility. The audiences grew hostile in their response, and King initially canceled the hearings, only to reschedule them when it became apparent that he could not ignore the public. The hearings were subsequently held across the state.34 In the Rochester area, a hearing was scheduled for a Wednesday afternoon at a local high school. Approximately 650 teachers, parents, and community members showed up, with those who wanted to provide 3 minutes of testimony assigned a number for when they would speak. During the first 3 hours, dozens of people spoke against the Common Core Standards, curriculum, and tests. Only one person spoke in favor of the Common Core, a superintendent of a local suburban district. Otherwise, everyone who spoke was critical of the standards themselves—the EngageNY online curriculum resources—which the State Education Department developed and strongly suggested that teachers use if they hoped to prepare their students for the standardized exams. The exams and the curriculum were often described as developmentally inappropriate, the EngageNY online curriculum resources as too scripted, and the exams themselves as too time consuming.35 Furthermore, teachers had to sign a “gag order” promising that they would not look at the questions on the exam or share what they read with anyone else. If they did, they could be disciplined, even to the point of losing their jobs.36 Commissioner King and Chancellor Tisch continued to defend the standards, exams, and curriculum. In the end, the only concession that they made was not to use the results from the first 2 years as high-stakes exams for the students—that is, as a criterion for graduation. However, it could and can still be used as a high-stakes test in the evaluation of teachers. Further, the low scores have been used to attack teachers and to push for charter schools. King, Tisch, and Duncan, by dismissing parents’ and educators’ objections to the new Common Core, managed only to fan the flames of

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resistance. Numerous organizations pushed back, and new ones have been created. As Lisa described in Chapter One, in the summer of 2013 the group New York State Allies for Public Education (NYSAPE)37 was formed. It represents 76 local organizations, including Rochester’s Coalition for Public Education, Southern Tier Parents Against the Common Core, Pencils Down Rockland County, Class Size Matters, and Reclaiming Our Public Schools, as well as five statewide organizations, among them Time Out from Testing. In the spring of 2015, the resistance to Common Core exploded as thousands of New Yorkers came together in support of public education by attending rallies and forums across the state. In March, a month before the exams and a month before the legislature was to act on Cuomo’s education reform proposals, NYSAPE’s website listed 40 scheduled forums! The forums attracted large crowds. In the Rochester area, the forum held in suburban Fairport, home to vocal critic Bill Cala, attracted 1,500 people.38 The forum organized by teachers in Spencerport, a conservative suburban community, attracted 650 people. A forum organized by parents in Pittsford, a wealthy suburb, drew 450 people into a room that had a capacity of 300, and many more were turned away. In Brookville, on Long Island, 1,000 people voiced their opposition to the tests at a forum that included Diane Ravitch as a featured speaker.39 Forums scheduled for April struggled to find venues with sufficient capacity. Teachers have been increasingly active in pushing back. On March 30, 2015, New York State United Teachers President Karen Magee called for parents to opt their children out of the Common Core exams.40 Further, 88 teacher associations endorsed strong resolutions against highstakes testing.41 Not only are teachers and parents protesting: the New York Council of School Superintendents and the New York School Boards Association have joined the cause. These organizations issued a joint statement opposing Cuomo’s proposal to change teacher evaluation, pointing out that the proposal just passed in 2015 is the fourth change to the teacher evaluation system in 5 years. Additionally, nearly 100 school district superintendents have signed a petition to save public education in New York.42 However, Chancellor Tisch, Commissioner King, and some members of the Regents continued to assert that the primary reason people objected to the Common Core was that implementing the Common Core was rushed

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(in fact, it probably was, in the hope that it would take effect before resistance could be organized) and that with some minor reforms, a new name (beginning in 2020, the Common Core will be called the Next Generation Standards), and more time devoted to explaining the benefits of the Common Core standards, curriculum and assessments, their implementation would go smoothly. Regent Andrew Brown summarized the changes thusly: I came on after the ball was rolling downhill a thousand miles-anhour. Again, in hindsight, I think things were moving too quickly, but now I think things have stepped back, and I think we’re taking the time to do it right.... We looked at Common Core. We looked at the standards. We reached out to stakeholders. We got substantial input. We made some changes. Now we have Next Generation Standards. We have standards that we think are sensible. (personal communication, February 22, 2018)

Brown’s praise for the revisions can be contrasted to that of NYSAPE’s assessment that the changes are superficial at best and still need to be resisted.43

Opting Out and Throwing a Wrench into the System The opt-out movement grew in response to Tisch, King, and others who mostly ignored the criticisms made by students, parents, and teachers of the Common Core standards, curriculum, and exams. Opting out undermines the usefulness of the exams. Even as few as 10% of the students opting out raises questions as to whether the scores can be used to assess teachers or students. For some in the opt-out movement, the message is clearly: “If you won’t listen to us, then we will not submit our children for testing.” According to a recent (2019) one-page flyer produced by NYSAPE,44 the opt-out movement is accomplishing some of its goals, but has more to do. Its flyer “Know the Facts…Ignore the Noise” points out what has been accomplished and what remains to be done. Families have explicitly gained the right to opt their children out of the exam without fear of punishment, but not all parents have been informed of this right. The NYSED has

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shortened the tests by a few questions and removed the time limit for students to take the tests. However, given that the tests are two days long for each subject, if students use up all the time, they could sit for 24 hours of testing over a 2-week period. We have heard reports of students becoming ill from sitting so long.45 So what seems like an improvement—extending the testing time—may amount to cruel and unusual punishment. Moreover, NYSED promotes the idea that the assessments are written by New York State teachers. However, NYSAPE has seen no evidence of this. What they do know is that Pearson and Questar provide SED teacher working groups with a bank of questions and passages and ask for feedback. There is no evidence that input from teachers is taken into account for the final product. Further, while districts are not required to assess teachers based on the results on the Common Core, by law, 50% of Teacher Evaluations are STILL based on test scores. Although 3–8 assessments are not mandatory to use for this purpose, districts MUST select an SED approved assessment to use in their evaluations, solidifying the overemphasis of high stakes testing in our classrooms.46

As Jeanette and Lisa will describe in the next chapter, organized resistance has resulted in some changes—the most important of which are changes in the legislature, the Board of Regents, and the chancellor—and have broadened the debate over education to include issues such as childhood poverty. But there is much more to be done.

Endnotes 1

Beadie, N. (1999). From student markets to credential markets: The creation of the Regents examination system in New York State, 1864–1890. History of Education Quarterly, 39(1), 1–30.

2

Kliebard, H.M. (1986). The struggle for the American curriculum, 1893–1958. New York: Routledge.

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3

Hursh, D.W. (2008). High-stakes testing and the decline of teaching and learning: The real crisis in education. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

4

In his book High-stakes testing and the decline of teaching and learning: The real crisis in education (2008), Hursh describes how his admission into the Regents track was a lucky consequence of avoiding detention and how such tracking transformed his life.

5

Natriello, G., & Pallas, A.M. (1999). The development and impact of high stakes testing, p. 9. Education Resources Information Center. Retrieved from https://files. eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED443871.pdf

6

Personal communication with Bill Cala in 2016.

7

See an in-depth description of this project in Hursh (2008), High-stakes testing.

8

Wells, A. (2019, April 7). An inconvenient truth about the new Jim Crow of education. The 2019 American Educational Research Association presidential address, Toronto, CA.

9

Hursh, D.W. (2016). The end of public schools: The corporate reform agenda to privatize education. New York: Routledge, p. 31.

10

U.S. Department of Education. (2003, June). No Child Left Behind: A parents guide. Retrieved from https://www2.ed.gov/parents/academic/involve/nclbguide/ parentsguide.pdf

11

USDOE, 2003, No Child Left Behind: A parents guide.

12

USDOE, 2003, No Child Left Behind: A parents guide, p. 12.

13

USDOE, 2003, No Child Left Behind: A parents guide, p. 9.

14

USDOE, 2003, No Child Left Behind: A parents guide, p. 9.

15

Hursh, D.W. (2016). The end of public schools: The corporate reform agenda to privatize education. New York: Routledge, p. 46.

16

Tisch, H.C., & Sigmund, S. (2015, April 23). View tests as a checkup on education. High Achievement New York. Retrieved from http://www.highachievementny.org/ latest_news

17

Linn, R. L. (2003). Accountability: Responsibility and reasonable expectations. Educational Researcher, 32(7), 3–13.

18

Cala, W. (2003, October 22). Testimony before the New York Senate Standing Committee on Education, Roosevelt Hearing Room C, Legislative Office Building, Albany, NY. Retrieved from http://www.timeoutfromtesting.org/testimonies.php

19

Winerip, M. (2003, March 12). Passing grade defies laws of physics. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/12/nyregion/on-educationwhen-a-passing-grade-defies-laws-of-physics.html?src=pm

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43

Winerip, M. (2011, December 18). 10 years of assessing students with scientific exactitude. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/19/ education/new-york-city-student-testing-over-the-past-decade.html

21

Winerip (2003), Passing grade defies laws of physics.

22

Ravitch, D. (2010). The death and life of the great American school system: How testing and choice are undermining education. New York: Basic Books.

23

Ravitch (2010), The death and life of the great American school system, p. 79.

24

Winerip (2011), 10 years of assessing students with scientific exactitude.

25

Winerip (2011), 10 years of assessing students with scientific exactitude.

26

Layton, L. (2014, June 7). How Bill Gates pulled off the swift Common Core revolution. The Washington Post. Retrieved from http://www.washingtonpost.com/ politics/how-bill-gates-pulled-off-the-swift-common-core-revolution/2014/06/07/ a830e32e-ec34-11e3-9f5c-9075d5508f0a_story.html

27

Hassard, J. (2014, March 15). Why Bill Gates defends the Common Core. The Art of Teaching Science. Retrieved from http://www.artofteachingscience.org/why-billgates-defends-the-common-core/

28

Hursh, D. (2010). The Gates Foundation’s interventions into education, health, and food policies: Technology, power and the privatization of political problems. In P.E. Kovacs (Ed.), The Gates Foundation and the future of U.S. public schools (pp. 55–68). New York: Routledge.

29

Brooks, D. (2014, April 17). When the circus descends. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/18/opinion/brooks-when-thecircus-descends.html

30

Schneider, M.K. (2014b, November 23). Obama’s USDOE: Appointed to privatize. Period. Retrieved from https://deutsch29.wordpress.com/2014/11/23/obamas-usdoe-appointed-to-privatize-period/

31

Schneider, M.K. (2014a, March 17). Gates dined on March 13, 2014, with 80 Senators. Wordpress. Retrieved from https://deutsch29.wordpress.com/2014/03/17/ gates-dined-on-march-13-2014-with-80-senators/

32

Laucius, J. (2019, March 22). Ontario is poised to require every high school student take four online courses. What does it mean? Ottawa Citizen. Retrieved from https:// ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/ontario-is-poised-to-require-every-high-schoolstudent-take-four-online-courses-what-does-it-mean

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33

New York State Education Department. (2019, April 3). 2019 Computer-based ELA state assessments to resume tomorrow with select grades. Retrieved from http:// www.nysed.gov/news/2019/2019-computer-based-ela-state-assessments-resumetomorrow-select-grades.

34

Hursh (2016), The end of public schools, p. 70.

35

New York City Parents. (2012, December 4). What we talk about when we talk about the Common Core. Retrieved from https://nycpublicschoolparents.blogspot. com/2012/12/what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about.html

36

Sawchuk, S. (2014, October 9). N.Y. union sues over Common-Core testing “gag order.” Education Week. Retrieved from http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/teacherbeat/2014/10/ny_union_sues_over_common-core.html

37

NYS Allies for Public Education. (n.d.). About us. Retrieved from https://www. nysape.org/about-us.html

38

Hursh (2016), The end of public schools, p. 71.

39

Hildebrand, J., & Dowdy, Z.R. (2015, March 10). 1,000 protest Common Core, urge test boycott. Newsday. Retrieved from https://www.newsday.com/long-island/ education/opt-out-organizers-expect-big-rally-turnout-monday-night-1.10037988

40

Karlin, R. (2015, March 30). Going on the offense, NYSUT’s Magee calls for test boycott. Capital Confidential. Retrieved from http://blog.timesunion.com/capitol/ archives/231494/going-on-the-offense-nysuts-magee-calls-for-test-boycott/

41

Ravitch, D. (2015, March 30). Dozens of teacher associations endorse “I refuse” resolutions. Diane Ravitch’s Blog. Retrieved from http://dianeravitch.net/2015/03/30/ dozens-of-ny-teacher-associations-endorse-i-refuse-resolution/

42

Ravitch, D. (2015, March 29). Nearly 100 Superintendents sign petition to save public education in NY. Diane Ravitch’s Blog. Retrieved from http://dianeravitch. net/2015/03/29/nearly-100-superintendents-sign-petition-to-save-public-education-in-ny/

43

Long Island Opt Out. (n.d.). Top three reasons why parents don’t opt out (and our response). Retrieved from https://lioptout.org/opting-out/

44

Long Island Opt Out. (n.d.). Top three reasons why parents don’t opt out (and our response). Retrieved from https://lioptout.org/opting-out/

45

The following are some anonymous posts from the Long Island Opt Out Info Facebook page. Fifth grade students (including English language learners) were denied phys ed today to complete the ELA. Students who didn’t finish in the morning were supposed to return to their testing room in the afternoon. Those who were done got

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to attend phys ed. We started the test at 9:30 and the last student finished at 3:05. Since this is an “untimed test,” the students can literally take all day to finish. These are students who are productively working, trying their hardest. It is very sad to watch. Some complained of stomach aches or put their heads down to rest a bit. These students are 10 years old. A 6th grader spent 4 hours testing on day 1 and then almost 7 hours on day 2. He was given 20 min for lunch. No recess. When he returned, he was noticeably upset but got right back to work. At 2:50 we had to pull the test from his hands (he started at 8:30). You could see the look of defeat and worry across his face. Flash forward to this morning, and a call from his mom that he won’t be in school today because they had to take him to the hospital. Turns out he was too sick and worried to eat or drink anything all day. (Teachers weren’t aware since we just sent him to lunch on his own with the other students who were testing.) He basically collapsed at home. They stayed in the hospital until 2:30 am where they hydrated him and monitored him until he was stable (hence the absence from school today!). From a fourth grade teacher in Nassau County, LI: I have a student who has been really depressed lately. I find out yesterday that the family is homeless. I told the student I hope to see her smiling soon and she said to me: “Sometimes I’m just hungry that’s why I’m sad.” I wanted to cry. And today she has to sit for the test.” This demonstrates that while administrators are encouraging parents to make sure their children eat properly and get a good night’s sleep…so they can do well on a high-stakes test (shouldn’t they be eating properly every day and getting a good night’s sleep every night anyway?)…. Not all kids have food or a place to sleep…yet they still have to face school every day, along with these high-stakes tests. This child is hungry and homeless. She doesn’t need a high-stakes test. She needs food and shelter. Sadly, her situation is far from unique. 46

Long Island Opt Out. (n.d.). Top three reasons why parents don’t opt out (and our response). Retrieved from https://lioptout.org/opting-out/

CHAPTER THREE

Organizing to Resist the Common Core State Tests Today I had to read the entire test to middle school special education students. The words were impossible for even adults to understand. Kids were in tears. One was banging his head on the desk, calling himself “stupid.” —Anonymous teacher Over 11 hours wasted on testing this week. The passages were ridiculous and hard, some words I had difficulties pronouncing and too many difficult vocabulary words that were way above third grade. After 3 ½ hours of testing each day, today my students completely broke down and started crying. My kids were completely overwhelmed each day and they are disheartened and completely defeated. —Anonymous teacher I knew I had to do something when my son, who always loved school, announced: “I hate school.” —Jeanette Deutermann

I

n this chapter, Jeanette and Lisa tell their stories of how they became leaders in the opt-out movement. As related in Chapter One, both came to resist the Common Core in response to the negative impact it had their children. Prior to the incidents with their sons, neither Jeanette nor Lisa imagined that they would create political organizations and become full-time organizers for the last 6 years. 46

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We begin with Jeanette and Lisa recalling how they realized that their sons’ growing hatred of school was not something of their own making but an outcome of the changes in their schools as a result of the Common Core. They began by reaching out to friends and teachers to educate themselves about the Common Core and soon realized that developing trusting relationships with parents and teachers would be key to their success. In this chapter, they describe how they created a grassroots movement to push back against the Common Core with the goal of eliminating it. They describe how they created two grassroots organizations—Long Island Opt Out (LIOO) and the New York State Allies for Public Education (NYSAPE)—that could both provide information on opting out of the Common Core and organize supporters as part of a grassroots movement. They also share how they use social media to inform and recruit people into the movement and communicate with one another. They recount how, after building a strong base in their grassroots organization, they began to effect political changes in the legislature and the Regents. Finally, they describe how the opt-out movement has expanded beyond testing to call for a focus on the whole child and to create socially just schools.

Realizing That the Personal Is Political Both Jeanette and Lisa became involved because their sons were increasingly stressed at school, no longer liked it, and in fact had grown to dread it. At first, they tended to attribute the problems to their children, but in chatting with parents on the playground, they soon realized that the Common Core had transformed their schools and that their sons were part of a larger group that was now stressed about school: it was an epidemic among children, parents, and teachers. From there Jeanette started a social media group on Facebook, which was a way to share information with parents. She prompted: Starting the social media group was just a way to say “Hey, here’s what I’m seeing and here’s the problem. Is anybody else feeling the same way?” I wanted to not only give parents information that I was learning through my research, but I also wanted to connect with other parents to hear what they were going through. It is very upsetting as a parent to watch your kid start to deteriorate and behave this way and have stress symptoms. Once a

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confident student, now he would break pencils, cry, and state that he was “stupid” and would “never be good at math.”

Avoiding Bureaucracy and Embracing Flexibility The key to a lot of our success has been that we have not formalized. We have not become a non-profit corporation that receives donations or funds from other agencies. Nor have we been absorbed into a larger organization. It really has been one of the key pieces of why people trust us; why they go to us; why we are seen as an organization that is the true meaning of grassroots. No one receives any money for their efforts. Some of our volunteers are lawyers performing legal work and consulting for free. They interpret legal documents and help in writing some of our own. Many of us and our volunteers are experts at media and graphics, creating memes, documents, writing op-eds, doing on-air interviews, managing our website, and running social media pages and groups. But an organization that runs on volunteers has its drawbacks, too. How long can individuals sustain non-stop volunteer work? Five years in, can we maintain this energy level? Over the years we’ve had many people interested in raising funds for us or hosting fundraisers. Money tends to complicate the issues, so instead we prefer to just rely on volunteers, the talents of those volunteers, and the time they are willing to give. I began asking for volunteers from each school district, which on Long Island I call my liaisons. Their only criteria for becoming liaisons were that they strongly believed in what we were doing, opted their own kids out, and were willing to lead and instruct other parents in their district to do the same. Some were already leaders in the community: Parent Teacher Association (PTA) leaders, Special Education Parent Teacher Association (SEPTA) leaders, committee chairs, teachers, or athletic coaches. Some never had any leadership roles but were passionate about our movement and what we were trying to accomplish. The success of Long Island Opt Out is owed to them. Over the past 5 years, we’ve had some changes in who our volunteer liaisons are, but many have been there from the very beginning. I have watched these women and men grow as leaders in their own right and become not just opt-out leaders, but empowered leaders in their school, their community, and the state. One liaison ran for a seat in the State Assembly

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and won; countless liaisons have run and won seats on their school boards. Some have become PTA and SEPTA presidents, New York State United Teacher (NYSUT) union building representatives, officers, and Teacher Association leaders. I don’t take credit for their success or their new leadership roles, but I feel my job is to help support them and encourage them to go as far as possible with the leadership skills they have learned from each other and from being a leader in the opt-out movement. These 200+ steering committee members or liaisons operate off of a private Facebook group. We discuss issues in our own districts, ask questions, offer support, and share information about policies and actions in districts across Long Island. It is a crucial network of information keeping all of us connected and informed on how education policies are affecting every corner of the island. The old saying is absolutely true: Knowledge IS power.

Building Trust and Relationships We worked simultaneously on developing relationships with teachers and parents and developing a movement. The first goal was important because it showed that we care about them as people and made their experiences easier to talk about. The second goal was important because we can accomplish more together than we could individually. [In the early days, teachers were valuable informants regarding how the Common Core was affecting teaching and learning in schools. Jeanette added the following thoughts.] I would also ask teachers to tell me what they were experiencing in the classroom. What were the kids experiencing? They would send me the information and I would post it anonymously because, especially at the beginning, teachers would whisper in private, in secret, like don’t tell anybody that I told you this. I just thought the secrecy was absolute insanity. This is something that’s happening to these kids. These teachers see it happening. They don’t like it. They want to stop it. Yet they felt that they couldn’t say anything. Here are people who knew the most about what was going on and how bad this was for kids, and they couldn’t tell anyone. Well, I will tell them for you. That was a major focus in the early days of opt out, and really still is, which is to say: “We’ll be your voice.” We’ll get the teachers’ story of what they’re seeing inside the school to parents. As parents, we don’t know

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what is actually happening during the day in the classroom, but they do. Those stories were so important to get out there, and we did it. We sought to inform parents on why they should opt out and then act on that knowledge. We used a variety of means to inform parents, ranging from memes, to videos, to in-person meetings. Messaging has to be quick, easy to understand, and accessible to a large audience. There’s a bit of a formula for how you do that, how you get that message to them, that they need to hear how you do it in a way that’s easily digestible. Developing relationships with parents and teachers was crucial. Once you foster that relationship, your message will be heard, shared, and, most importantly, acted on. We needed to do more than just individually opt out. We needed to create a movement where parents and teachers are working together. We made sure the action we were asking parents to take was something we were willing to do ourselves and something they were easily capable of doing. For example, we asked them to hand a letter to their principals expressing that their child would not be participating in the assessments. We gave parents a sample letter, complete with detailed instructions. We even had scenarios listed depending on the reaction of the administrators. “If your principal says you cannot opt out, here’s a follow-up letter expressing your legal rights.” That first year we had detailed instructions giving parents information on what to do if an administrator would not comply with a parent’s wishes and demanded the child complete the assessment.

Listening and Speaking At the beginning, we focused on the opt-out parents. But we knew that we can’t just speak as parents; we also need to incorporate the views and insights of superintendents, principals, and teachers. We wanted to engage everyone involved in education so that we knew we understood both the larger context and the specific issues. We specifically sought out comments and analysis from those in other positions. For example, we welcomed challenges from district superintendents so that we would be prepared to respond to that and similar challenges as we promoted the opt-out movement. As activists, we take on several roles. First, we are watchdogs of policy and legislation. We keep an eye out for policies at the federal level that may impact schools directly or that may result in new state legislation or

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Regents or State Education Department regulations and thereby affect us indirectly. Therefore, we have to focus on both federal and New York State policies. Second, we follow the policy debates and translate them into everyday language that is sent to all our members and posted on our websites. We know, for example, that understanding the aims and specifics of legislation is often difficult for people who are not policy experts. Our job is to break down policy and legislation and make them digestible for parents. Third, we are advocates working to repeal educational policies and legislation regarding the Common Core state assessment and related issues, and promote other policies, such as those focusing on the whole child. Fourth, we work to empower our allies and liaisons to effect change. The opt-out movement in New York is a grassroots effort operating with no formal structure or fundraising mechanism. The two organizations represent two different geographical areas: one (LIOO) encompassing two counties and an area of 2,826 square miles, and the other the whole state, an area of 54,556 square miles, more than 19 times larger. For Jeanette, she can travel to almost any place on Long Island within 2 hours and rely on her liaisons to arrange her meetings. For Lisa, travel time can be as long as 15 hours round trip by car, which means relying on the 60 or so allied organizations to plan and hold events with advice and information from NYSAPE. For me [Jeanette], the small geographical span of LIOO allows me to go to many events on Long Island. Everywhere I am asked to speak, I try to go. Geographically, Long Island is the perfect location for a movement. It is about 2 hours from the westernmost border of Nassau County to the easternmost tip of Suffolk County, making the driving distance doable for an evening forum. Liaisons would take the lead on organizing these events. They would book the space, advertise in their local town and district newspapers, put up or hand out fliers, and coordinate with the local teacher unions for support. Having this extensive volunteer network meant that no one person had to do all the work for each event. I would schedule a time and round up the speakers, while the liaisons handled the rest. The forums typically began in mid fall and increased in intensity until the Common Core exams in April and early May. When testing season was in full swing (winter and early spring), I often spoke two or three nights a week, driving from one town to another.

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Again, this is strictly volunteer work, with no funding and no direct resources. These were passionate parents doing what they had to do to fight for their children’s education. Every tearful homework session, every panic attack, every announcement of another canceled extracurricular program, and every meltdown about going to school fueled these parents’ and my resolve. Often people would ask me, “How do you keep doing this?” My response was always, “It’s my kids, what choice do I have?” Forums were videotaped and posted online. I’ve spoken at PTA meetings, retired teacher meetings, teacher association meetings, and community association meetings when invited. I have even presented at local colleges to undergrad and graduate education students. I find this to be invaluable, since these will be the very future educators and administrators that we will need to partner with to keep our education system moving in a better direction.

Motivating Others In growing a movement like this, one relies on understanding what motivates different people. In general, pointing out the negative effects that highstakes testing has on children gains a sympathetic understanding from parents. But, motivation can also be very specific and tailored to different local and political groups and demographic and geographic areas. Some districts were predominantly conservative-leaning, politically. They would be more concerned about inappropriate federal interference in schools through Race to the Top and the Common Core curriculum. When talking with those parents, those concerns had to be addressed. In other, more liberal districts, parents might be more concerned about racial biases and the effects of high-stakes testing on underprivileged and underfunded districts. They might be more focused on privatization, charter schools, and equitable resources. In high-performing, economically advantaged districts, parents would want to discuss the fact that this new “standardized” curriculum was eliminating the unique and highly specialized enriched curriculum they had become accustomed to. In lower-performing districts, the discussion would revolve around testing being used as a weapon against their schools and their children and

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teachers. Once we had a deep understanding of these motivations, forums and local Facebook pages could successfully connect parents from any background and location to the single joint action of opting out, which was a means to the end of remedying all of the various educational concerns. This is where the local district pages were key. Each one has its own vibe and its own focus on what the issues are, but all tie in to the “parent page” of LIOO and the broader NYSAPE organization.

Using the School’s Own Test Instructions and Testing Codes to Our Advantage Standardized assessments, by definition, need to be administered in a standardized manner: same time, same day, same way. We studied the test administration manuals and knew exactly what the testing protocols were for these assessments. We used this to our advantage, knowing that if students were not in the room when testing began, they could not take the test. If students left early but had seen the assessment, they could not finish it. If students were finished early, they could read a book. If a student “refused,” there was a “not tested” code (999) that would be entered, and the test would not be scored. We used these directions to force a district to allow test refusal. The 999 “not tested” code was crucial to the success of opting out in New York. This code was designed and implemented when the practice of tying tests to a teacher’s evaluation began. There had to be a code for kids, especially middle school kids, who simply said, “I’m not taking this test.” Once you use the test scores to evaluate a teacher, you have to have a provision so that kids who literally refuse on their own won’t throw off the system and count against the teacher. That loophole was what we built this movement on. We said, “I’m going to speak for my child. My kid is refusing to take the test. He’s not going to say it himself, but I’m saying it on his behalf.” When challenged on this right, parents would respond, “You have to ask me if he’s going to go on a field trip, you have to ask me if he’s going to participate in this activity or that activity. I’m telling you, as his parent, I will not allow him to participate in this assessment.” After a combative and stressful first year of opting out, the following year saw most districts eliminate the barriers to opting out, reverse these ac-

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tions, and set protocols to make refusals go more smoothly, although many still—even now—do not inform parents that they have the right to opt out. That was the key: we didn’t back down; we called their bluff. I credit parents who stood strong even when challenged, confronted, and threatened. Parents who forced a refusal by taking off from work so that they could pick up their children from school 2 minutes after testing began. Parents who called the police when they attempted to pick up their children from school and the school refused to release their child from the testing room. Parents who resisted the school’s insistence that their child could not engage in after-school sports if he or she opted out of the exams. Our tactics made testing even more disruptive for students taking the assessments and forced districts to rethink whether it was worth challenging us. All the while, we posted on our opt-out social media pages exactly what was happening in each district leading up to and on testing days. Our members were growing, and many educators and administrators were either members of our social media page or were monitoring our comments. When students and parents attempting to opt out were bullied or threatened, detailed reports were posted. Often, the public outrage would cause administrators to reverse the policy or action. Public shaming was quite effective. Mind you, most district administrators were confident and effective leaders and saw what we were doing in the proper context—that we were fighting to protect public schools, educators, and, most importantly, our children. However, a few administrators were forced, kicking and screaming, to accept that we were in control of this situation.

Resisting the Common Core and Becoming Common Sense Often, at the beginning, resisting the dominant view requires courage and confidence. But we have learned that if we place our message within the context of what is best for our children, our families, and our teachers, and because the opt-out message has become ubiquitous, an accepted part of the conversation, that the opting out becomes the default position. Those supporting the Common Core are put on the defensive, needing to justify their views. Opting out becomes the commonsense approach to education. In our efforts to influence policy and become the commonsense position, we have come to realize that we need to focus on expanding our

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grassroots efforts—what we have described elsewhere as organizing horizontally and organizing vertically, aiming to influence those higher up in the hierarchy of decision making: school boards, the Board of Regents, legislators, and governors. As we describe next, we have come to learn two things: first, that policymakers can and often dismiss challenges and proposals made by a small number of people; and second, that building an effective grassroots organization requires both that we increase our numbers at the grassroots level AND that we lobby those in power to support our proposals. Therefore, in the rest of this chapter, we describe how we continued to expand both horizontally and vertically, and then how, because those in power, especially Chancellor Tisch and Commissioner King, were deaf to our pleas, opting our children out of the tests and disrupting the system was our only choice. The first opportunity to organize not only horizontally but also vertically came the first summer, when Dr. Joseph Rella, the superintendent of the Comsewogue School District located in Port Jefferson Station (Suffolk County) wrote his local legislators and argued the following. If state tests scores were how we measure student success, then he, Rella, should be removed from his position, since 70% of the district’s students were deemed non-proficient or “failing.”1 Further, given that 70% of the students in his district and also across New York State were described as not meeting gradelevel standards, then the State Education Department was also failing, and therefore its members should be removed from office.2 The letter went viral, garnering significant attention throughout the state and nation. Dr. Rella’s letter was vital to the opt-out movement on Long Island, not only because he is from Long Island, but also because of the further discussions and actions that were prompted by his letter. Dr. Rella is not alone. Two years before he sent his letter, 1,550 principals across New York State sent an open letter to the chancellor and commissioner regarding New York State’s APPR legislation.3 The letter questioned the NYSED’s proposed teacher evaluation plan, and, more importantly, the letter incisively pointed out that our students are more than the sum of tests scores and that the overemphasis on test scores would only limit, instead of improve, learning. Consequently, administrators were encouraged to speak up. Our movement became mainstream.

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In response to his letter, we reached out to Dr. Rella, and over the past 6 years we have become strong allies and friends. Dr. Rella hosted a rally at his school district that summer that drew more than a thousand parents and media, and focused on the theme that “our children are more than a score.” We also began to complicate our argument so that we were no longer only arguing against the exams but also that the exams undermined what and how students might learn. We began focusing less on exams and more on developing rich learning environments that supported all children. By making the switch, we were less likely to be seen as ANTI testing and more PRO education, which made it easier for parents and educators to support us. Every educator and prominent figure who spoke in favor of what we were doing increased support and the numbers of parents willing to take action. Each time an article was written, or an educator spoke out, or a legislator made statements in line with our goals, we reached out. We continued to form alliances and allies everywhere and anywhere we could find them. Statewide, through NYSAPE, we continued to strategize on how to expand across the state. All NYSAPE steering committee members, similar to the liaisons on Long Island, worked in their regions to get out information on what the Common Core assessments were and were not, and why opting out was a means to reach our goals of transforming our public schools into environments where every school is properly funded and whole-child teaching and learning could help our children discover their passions and flourish. Each regional leader managed social media opt-out pages, answering thousands of letters from parents and educators about their rights and the protocols for successfully opting out. However, while the opt-out movement was achieving unimaginable success on Long Island—after all, whoever thought that HALF the students would opt out?—the movement was less successful statewide and in New York City. Many districts responded to our efforts by using scare tactics, threats, and roadblocks to deter parents from opting out. Some districts and schools told parents that their children would not be promoted to the next grade, and some were told that their children would not be accepted into honors programs and other advanced classes. Parents feared opting their children out of the tests because the scores were used as a criterion for

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placing students in special or magnet programs, of which there are many in a city that large. In addition, because children could only opt out of the tests but not out of school, some schools told parents that their children would be excused from the tests but would have to sit at their desks and stare at the walls. This became known as the “sit and stare policy.”4 Some parents were told that if their child was not present for the assessment, he or she would be given a make-up exam, thereby undermining the purpose of opting out. In one of the more egregious cases, one upstate district banned a student from participating in after-school sports events when the student opted out of the exams. One appalling practice occurred mostly in New York City, where some immigrant parents were told that if their children opted out, the school could report them to immigration authorities. The only way to combat these efforts is to provide parents, students, teachers, and administrators with well-documented facts and easily understood explanations as to why some of the information provided by the schools was false, as well as arming parents with facts to give them courage to stand strong. When parents feel that they know what they’re talking about, they are empowered to advocate. Our websites and social media have been key to disseminating this information. Fact sheets linked to Google docs, memes, and articles have all been crucial to empowering parents. .

Becoming Political: Beyond Opting Out to Transforming Politics and Education As described at the end of Chapter Two, even though NYSAPE and LIOO were increasing their numbers, Chancellor Tisch and Commissioner King remained steadfast in their refusal to reconsider Common Core testing, including the amount of time devoted to the tests and how the scores would be used to evaluate students, teachers, and schools. In addition, Governor Andrew Cuomo supported Tisch’s and King’s defense of the Common Core and supported expanding the number of non-religious and religious private schools, and, most significantly, charter schools. Cuomo spoke at rallies supporting charter schools and attacked public schools and public school teachers. Cuomo vowed to break “one of

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the only remaining public monopolies” —public schools—by increasing the number of and funding for charter, parochial, and private schools.5 King, Tisch, and Cuomo, like many supporters of the Common Core whom we interviewed, believed that parents and teachers resisted the Common Core because it was rolled out too quickly, and early misconceptions were not remedied. In an interview, Regent Brown stated that “As a Board of Regents, we have been criticized at times in the past of not listening well. I think part of that was driven by Common Core and assessments and standards all bunched up together and rolled out quickly” (personal communication). King and Tisch were confident that if King could explain the Common Core standards, curriculum, and assessments to the public, the public would support it. Consequently, King and Tisch decided to hold a “listening tour,”6 ostensibly to clarify misconceptions. However, the public had become increasingly aware that while the legislature and Regents make education policy, they are influenced by the wealthy heads of foundations, such as Bill Gates, Eli Broad, and the Walton family; corporations such as Pearson, who profit from the testing regime; and hedge fund managers, who invest in charter schools. Many educators, parents, and others had also realized, correctly, that the tests were being used to negatively portray public schools as failing and as a rationale for privatizing schools.7 The public was skeptical of standardized testing and other corporate reforms and ready to voice its displeasure. At the same time, King had no doubts about the righteousness of his cause. Two immovable forces were about to confront one another. The first of 13 stops on the New York State listening tour began on October 24, 2014, and was scheduled to end on December 11.8 The events were organized so that the audience members would have 3 minutes to speak, and after several spoke, the commissioner would respond. At each hearing, hundreds of students, parents, and teachers registered to speak up to express their concerns about the Common Core standards, curriculum, and tests. However, King spoke more than he listened, interrupting the process and giving lengthy lectures to the parents on their responsibility to support the Common Core, testing, and accountability. The audiences responded with jeers and anger, and after the first four hearings King canceled the remaining nine stops on his “listening tour.” Perhaps King assumed that only those in the audience were meant to listen, and could not adapt to listening to him.

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However, King was encouraged to resume the tour, and the events were rescheduled when it became apparent that he could not ignore the public.9 In the Rochester area, the hearing was scheduled for a Wednesday afternoon at a local high school. Based on our sample count, approximately 650 teachers, parents, and community members showed up. Those who wanted to give up to 3 minutes of testimony were assigned a number for when they could speak. During the first 3 hours, dozens of people spoke against the Common Core Standards, curriculum, and tests. Only one person spoke in favor of the Common Core, a superintendent of a local suburban district. Otherwise, everyone who spoke was critical of the standards themselves and the Pearson-developed EngageNY curriculum, which state education developed and strongly urged that teachers use if they hoped to prepare their students for the standardized exams.10 It was clear that parents and others had developed a sophisticated critique of both the tests and their negative impact on not only what occurred in schools, but also how the Common Core promoted the privatization of education and social inequality. There were, and continue to be, many reasons parents might oppose the Common Core. As already mentioned, those include the pressure on children to do well and the number of days and hours devoted to testing: time that could be devoted to teaching and learning. Contrary to what promoters claim, the tests serve no pedagogical purpose. The State Education Department has revealed only a small sample of past test questions. Moreover, students only receive scores of 1, 2, 3, or 4. Teachers, as part of the Annual Performance Professional Review, are evaluated as “ineffective,” “developing,” “effective,” or “very effective.”11 As described above, efforts to affect policy by speaking up at hearings and meeting with members of the Regents, the commissioner, and the chancellor had been rebuffed since the late 1990s, when protests were mounted against the requirement that students pass five Regents exams in four subject areas. It quickly became apparent that the “listening tour” would be no different. Neither public testimonials nor public pressure could influence King, Tisch, or the Regents. Therefore, the only strategies remaining for critics of the Common Core were these: (1) entering the political arena by aiming to disrupt the system by reducing the percentage of students taking the test so that the scores were useless in evaluating schools and teachers; (2)  working to elect to school

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boards and the legislature representatives who shared the criticism of the tests and were willing to develop, pass, and implement policies focusing on authentic and meaningful assessments and learning. Legislators became a key focus, because it is the legislature that not only passes the laws affecting education, but also appoints people to the Regents. It is the Regents who are responsible for the general supervision of all educational activities within the State, preside over the state universities and the New York State Education Department (NYSED), select a chancellor as their chair, and hire the commissioner to administer the NYSED.

Developing Effective and Low-Cost Messaging Jeanette describes: developing effective messaging strategies has been essential to the opt-out movement. Many organizations make the mistake of having a negative message as their cornerstone. The core message must be positive. Sensational negativism may draw a crowd for a time, but people don’t stick with something unless it makes them feel good. Ours was a message of hope, empowerment, unity, and inspiration. I continually post inspirational messages of what we want for our schools, rather than continued complaints of what we don’t have. Our strength is that we have passion and keep our message simple, which connects us to parents and helps inspire them. When it concerns education, many publications and discussions can be very academic, failing to reach the everyday, non-educator parent. A large part of what I do is constantly translating academic-speak articles and information into easily understood, short, digestible information. Memes on Facebook are great for this reason. It’s a quick message that people can read in a second, along with a visual graphic. Humor helps as well. We had many volunteers making memes that catch the eye and entertain while educating parents on a particular issue. For many of the more complicated concepts, such as the new Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESSA) or new pieces of legislation, most parents just want to know the answer to one simple question; “How should I feel about this?” It is a huge responsibility knowing that many parents often wait for my opinion or the opinions of other leaders in our organizations to determine how to react to something. The NYSAPE steering committee is key to some of these larger issues. Our wide range of expertise in

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that organization ensures that when we weigh in on a major issue, we have confidence that we are steering parents in the right direction. We rarely make statements or weigh in on issues unless we are sure our information is correct. We are considered a solid, trusted resource for parents, teachers, administrators, legislators, and even education policy makers. Finding creative ways to share information, goals of the organization, and action plans is vital. Every year since 2015, 250,000 parents have successfully opted out due to our strong, consistent, and clear messaging. It is not good enough to share the message with followers that are already on board. Every year close to 40,000 opt-out eighth graders enter ninth grade, aging out of the opt-out movement. This means that in order to maintain the numbers we have had, we need to constantly share our message with new third-grade parents and parents who previously had not opted out. Over the years, we have used marketing strategies that can surpass even the most lucrative corporate reformer marketing firm. Free advertising is surprisingly effective. Post-it notes stuck on the walls in bathrooms, grocery stores, and gyms, flyers posted in local libraries and coffee shops, writing on sidewalks with chalk, and soap crayons on car windows can be done by anyone and everyone. Every Halloween, I decorate my sidewalk with optout messages seen by hundreds of trick-or-treating parents. Each year we partner with local bookshops, offering free advertising on our social media pages in exchange for displays of books with signs saying, “Great Books to Read while Opting Out!” With minimal amounts of money being laid out, and volunteers willing to help, lawn signs and bumper stickers are purchased each year and sold at local forums and to local teacher associations (and handed out to members). These lawn signs and bumper stickers urging parents to “Refuse NYS 3–8 Assessments” are placed on front lawns, on the sides of major roads, and on cars throughout Long Island. Again, this is very effective in keeping the message visible. The year our movement exploded, we decided to run a Go Fund Me campaign for billboards. We raised enough money to place a few strategic billboards around the state and to run a radio ad just before the assessments. On Long Island, local teacher unions contributed money to run an opt-out billboard truck that would travel from school to school during the month before testing. This truck has now run for 3 years and has had a “Where’s Waldo” effect, with parents posting snapshots of the truck

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September 17, 2015 “Paint the Road Red for Ed”: A Protest that stretched across 60 miles of road and over two dozen school district communities. Parents and teachers lined the street dressed in red to support Public Education. Photo by Sean Mills

from the highways, in front of schools, and on the side streets with captions exclaiming, “Look what I saw on Sunrise Highway this morning!!” We have had parents and teachers march in local town holiday parades with the opt-out banner, have run informational tables at local fairs and festivals, have held a “Paint the Road Red for Ed” event with parent/teacher rallies up and down a major road that stretched from one end of Long Island to the other, and had volunteers handing out opt-out letters at town sports events and in front of schools just before testing begins (see photo). All of these strategies have ensured that parents feel like they are truly part of something so amazing, inclusive, and so large that it can be seen wherever they go. We have made opting out mainstream and the majority. Long Island has had an opt-out rate that exceeds 50% since 2016. Before testing begins, most schools on Long Island sent out notices asking parents whether or not they are allowing their child to participate.

Using Social Media to Grow the Movement As suggested above, social media has been key to organizing the movement by providing a means to develop networks and increase the numbers in the movement beyond what would have been possible using old technologies. As we will describe later, this is the same strategy that has made it possible

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for teachers in non-union states (Oklahoma, West Virginia, and Arizona) to develop powerful grassroots movements to demand increased funding for public education and salary increases for teachers and staff.12 Here, Jeanette and Lisa agree that developing a large, grassroots movement is crucial to political success. Jeanette states: The only formula that makes advocacy work is numbers. You can’t advocate for more recess time with one person. You need a group of parents and you start posting about it on social media and saying, “Who agrees with me? Who feels the same way?” Now, all of a sudden, I have 30 parents who are all ready to go to the board meeting. They’re all ready to sign a petition. They’re ready to send e-mails. Thirty might not sound like a lot, but it’s not often that 30 people all at once are unified. Usually, you’ll get one, two, three. But if 30 people walk into a Board of Education meeting, all of a sudden the board realizes,” Who are these people? What do they want?” It’s a numbers game, and numbers speak to power. We couldn’t have gotten the numbers without Facebook. We asked ourselves, “How do we get this message out to people? Where do people get their information?” Most parents I know don’t read newspapers anymore, but they certainly read their Facebook page. So I decided to start a Facebook page, Long Island Opt Out, and began by recruiting all my friends. I went to my friends first because, I said, if they don’t buy it, then who will? At first, they were skeptical: “Opt out of the test? Are you out of your mind? You’re crazy!” I responded by taking them to the coffee shop, sitting with them for an hour, talking, reading, and showing them articles. By the end of that, they were all committed. They all turned in their letters to opt out. When I started the Facebook page there was little media coverage of opting out, but I was doing all sorts of research, talking about it, posting it on Facebook. People were joining. Facebook works like a virus, so if you join and you invite your friends to join, it just grows exponentially. I remember when we had 500 followers, and I was thrilled. “Oh, my god! Five hundred people!” And then all of a sudden it was 1,000 people, and I was freaking out. “Oh, my god, there’s a thousand people following this page!” And then it just kept growing from there. Every day we take emails, phone calls, and private messages and comments on Facebook. Every day I spend the majority of my time talking to

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parents whom I’ve never met but who need information. There are always emails from parents asking, “How do I do this?” Or, “Can you give me some guidance?” This is what we do all day every day all year. We answer questions from parents. Because we’ve been so steeped in this, we know the information, so we’re able to give the information even more than their schools can. They’ll call us and say, my school said the following, and generally, it’s bogus information. It’s not even correct, so we have to correct that. Then, sometimes I’ll get in touch with the school or the union president and I’ll say: This is the information that’s going out from your school. Can you help correct this?” One of the most unbelievable things about the movement that we’ve created in New York is that we have a huge network. In the early days, when we created NYSAPE, we realized that we’re all working siloed and

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we need to work together and share what we learned with others across the state. Then we’ll bring things to our regions. If we work together, we will be much more effective. Certainly, many parents following on Facebook made the decision to opt out simply through the information we provided and shared as well as these new followers-turned-leaders. However, I could see the difference from when I would speak to parents in person as opposed to a digital conversation with no human emotion attached. I knew we needed a way to speak directly to parents and a way to make us more public. Since funding did not exist for us, we needed to figure out a way to hold meetings without any fees attached. As our membership on the page and on the steering committee grew, so did ideas and resources. Our first meetings were held in living rooms around the island with parents offering to host them in their homes. Very quickly the requests were coming in for larger forums in each district. We began booking libraries and meeting spaces for forums. Some parents had connections to meeting spaces such as the aquarium, hotels, town halls, and conference centers. When we began we were holding forums in living rooms with 10 parents. Now we packed auditoriums with hundreds of people. We also realized that we needed to develop a network in which individuals were less reliant on us and became local leaders themselves. We would answer their questions and then send them to other advocacy groups locally, even as close as their own school district. They might not even know that there’s an advocacy Facebook group. The opt-out movement became part of something larger.

Local Advocacy We began our political efforts of advocating for changes at the local level by developing district liaisons who worked with us to promote the opt-out movement, determine which candidate to support, and assist in political campaigns. Initially, we focused on influencing elections for local school boards but later broadened our attention to include legislative and gubernatorial elections. As we became more well known and developed a reputation for putting children before corporate and partisan interests, and for having a clear analysis of educational issues, parents began to come to us for advice.

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Parents who agreed with our philosophy and wanted to advocate for changes in their districts began asking, “Who should I vote for, for my Board of Ed?” Because my steering committee knows their districts better than I do, I turned to these parent leaders, who know the board, know who’s running, and who can interview the Board of Ed candidates. They are in a position to decide who is going to help them the most with their advocacy efforts. This informal endorsement process has now become more formal, with candidates all over the island filling out our survey, being interviewed by parent leaders, and adding our endorsement to their campaign messaging. A number of my steering committee members have been candidates themselves for their local boards of education. We endorse them, help with their campaigns, give them exposure on social media, and even provide free training on how to run a successful campaign. Over the last 4 years, we’ve helped elect over 100 candidates to their local boards of education. The list of candidates seeking our endorsement continues to grow each year. In the same way that we help elect people to boards, we support people in their efforts to influence their local boards of education. For example, parents at one particular school were lobbying for smaller class sizes. We worked with them on contacting other parents to join the effort, focusing their message, providing them with research on class sizes, developing an email that they all sent to the board, and, finally, presenting to the board. They won in large part because they were a unified group of 30 with a developed and clear message. This is the power in teaching parents not just what to advocate for, but how to successfully advocate.

Resisting and Rolling Back High-Stakes Testing We [Jeanette and Lisa] realized that Merryl Tisch, the Chancellor of the Board of Regents in 2013, when the first wave of widespread opting out began, was a lightning rod of controversy for the opt-out movement. It was clear from the beginning that Tisch was entrenched in the reform movement and was highly invested in high-stakes testing and the Common Core. It was also clear that she would not turn away from the reforms we were fighting against. At that time, we had a number of allies on the Board of Regents who were equally concerned about the effects that Common Core and highstakes testing had on the New York State education system. We could see

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that no matter how many Regents members supported what we were trying to do, Tisch would always be an obstacle to what we were working to accomplish. Tisch had also hired the Commissioner of Education, John King, who was equally despised by the parents in New York opposed to Common Core testing. We focused a tremendous amount of energy on a campaign against both of these education leaders, calling for both of their resignations. The outcry grew as opt-out numbers increased, and the pressure finally resulted in the resignation of Commissioner King in 2014.13 That still left Merryl Tisch. While it was a huge win to push Commissioner King out the door, he was widely considered a supporter of Chancellor Tisch. A year later, in 2016, after another year of intense pressure from parents, Merryl Tisch resigned as well, but not before hiring yet another Commissioner of Education, Maryellen Elia, who, at least initially, supported the Common Core and other corporate reforms. Tisch, who was up for reappointment as chancellor that March of 2016, saw that she would not be reappointed and resigned.14 Once we knew of the upcoming vacancy, a strategy was put in place to try to push the Regents to vote with the will of the people, electing a Regent to the chancellor position who was considered an ally of parents, teachers, and students. In March 2016, Regent Betty Rosa was elected Chancellor of the New York Board of Regents, giving parents hope that positive changes were coming. In a second example, a parent involved in our advocacy efforts on Long Island contacted me about a legislative breakfast being held in her community. These legislative breakfasts are a way for community members to directly ask local legislators questions about issues concerning them and to request that these legislators advocate for them. This parent asked for help in developing talking points and questions to ask. I posed the question to my steering committee, and within an hour these brilliant parent leaders had developed a list of talking points on education issues. As a volunteer leader, having a team of dedicated steering committee members to call on at a moment’s notice makes all the difference in effective advocacy. This parent used these talking points and felt confident expressing these thoughts to legislators and asking the tough questions. Such organization makes these legislators say, “These parents really know what they’re talking about. We had better be on our game.” It’s a constant flow of information and knowledge, teaching people how and what to

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advocate for. There is an army of advocates ready to help when they are needed—advocates who are teachers, lawyers, researchers, web designers, legislators, special education experts, board members, administrators, and parents. Our team has made all the difference in our effectiveness and our success.

The Opt-Out Movement Enters State Politics The media have been fascinated by this parent movement since its early beginnings. In the first 6 months, I would often have to contact papers and news outlets, urging them to cover what we were doing. Six years later, because of continual contact with the same reporters, we have a close working relationship with them, often helping to research and provide information and subjects for interviews and stories. The importance of this cannot be overstated. The stories that reporters write are often a conduit to the public. Media favorable to the movement and organization can be crucial in recruiting new members and swaying policymakers. As described earlier, we knew that we had to influence policymakers by having a voting bloc that could act in concert on one single issue, taking one quantifiable action. At rallies, reporters focus on the numbers. A petition is successful depending on how high the number of signatories climbs. The opt-out movement demonstrates success based on how many parents refuse to allow their children to participate in the NYS assessments. The success and power of our movement is based on the fact that it can be enumerated. After the second year, when numbers began to climb, local legislators were taking notice. Individual politicians began to identify themselves as a “friend of the opt-out movement” and “against the Common Core.” The 2014 New York State gubernatorial election even saw the creation of a “Stop Common Core” ballot line by the Republican candidate. Up until this point, our movement had been largely non-partisan. Instead of diving completely into party politics, we educated parents on the “dark [secret] money”15 donors that might indicate a candidate’s true motivation. In addition, politicians often have differing incentives to be anti-Common Core. I [Jeanette] often use the phrase, “just because a candidate is anti-Common Core doesn’t mean they are pro-public education.” However,

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some Republicans in the opt-out movement were furious that we weren’t taking the candidate at face value for his or her anti-Common Core sentiment. At that point, many right-leaning members branched off to other more Republican-centered opt-out groups. This was a difficult and stressful time in the movement, increasing personal attacks and even threats from some unstable members to myself and other opt-out leaders. The most difficult but important task was remaining calm, moderating the social media pages carefully, and not being afraid to purge toxic members. Now, it became clear to most of the members of LIOO that I was a liberal Democrat, a label that I was careful not to make obvious—not because I wanted to hide it from followers, but because it had been divisive in those early years. Over the years I have met with most Long Island legislators from both parties in the Senate and the Assembly. Each wanted to benefit from the voting bloc, but only those who “walked the walk” were supported. Even Governor Cuomo reached out to me via phone in 2015 several times in an attempt to establish a connection with our movement. We have tried to teach each of these politicians that they can claim support, but if they vote against our issues or support privatizers or take dark money from the charter industry, they will not only lose our support, but we will actively work to defeat them. In New York, politics is an especially dirty business. Even the closest allies may often vote where the money is. They need money to run elections, and it is our job to remind them that on Election Day they also need our votes. We have successfully helped many legislators to win their seats, or to come closer than many had predicted. In contrast, Governor Cuomo has been targeted by us since we began. We have strongly supported and campaigned with his primary challengers in the past two Democratic primaries: Zephyr Teachout (2014) and Cynthia Nixon (2018), who were aiming to replace Cuomo as the Democratic nominee for governor. These candidates came closer to winning than expected and developed a very close relationship with our organization, adopting our education policy goals. However, the war chest the governor has amassed,16 as well as his alliances with misguided union leaders (typically without support from their local members), and the governor’s reputation for seeking retribution have proven difficult to overcome. In Chapter Five, we will focus on some of the opt-out movement’s successes and challenges. We will close the present chapter with a brief

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description of the impacts that the opt-out movement has had on New York’s education policies. As described earlier, LIOO and NYSAPE, by working to elect legislators who are critical of the Common Core, helped to replace the previous chancellor, Merryl Tisch, with Betty Rosa. While Tisch supported charter schools and standardized testing, Betty Rosa, a long-time educator, has been against the misuse of standardized testing and privatization. While Tisch did not seek reappointment as chancellor, she still influences education policy, particularly as a member of the SUNY Charter Schools Committee. The State Senate appointed Tisch to the SUNY Board of Trustees in June 2017.17 One of the reforms that she proposed addressed the problem of charter schools experiencing rapid turnover in their teaching staff. One-half leave by the end of their first year. The Charter School Committee proposed that charter schools would not need to hire teachers certified in university teacher education programs but, instead, could certify their own novice teachers.18 Instead of enrolling in university teacher education programs that take a minimum of three to four semesters of coursework, novice teachers would take “courses” from teachers in the school in which they taught. And, instead of taking the two or three semesters of practicum and student teaching, certification could be granted after only 40 hours (!!!) of student teaching. However, the certificates would qualify teachers to teach only in New York’s charter schools, not traditional public schools. Chancellor Rosa, along with Commissioner Elia and the Board of Regents, took the unusual step of filing a lawsuit against the SUNY Charter Schools Committee. They argued that such “reforms” would lower standards. They also argued that they could not “allow inexperienced and unqualified individuals to teach those children most in need—students of color, those who are economically disadvantaged, and students with disabilities—in SUNY-authorized charter schools.”19

Resisting and Rolling Back Corporate Reforms The ability to elect progressive legislators who would appoint progressive representatives to the Board of Regents, who in turn would appoint progressives like Betty Rosa as chancellor, is one of the successes of the opt-out

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movement. The opt-out parents, along with teachers’ unions and other organizations, have effectively pushed back against using students’ scores on the Common Core exams to evaluate teachers.20 In December 2015, the Regents declared that there would be a 3-year moratorium on using students’ scores to evaluate teachers.21 In the spring of 2018 the moratorium was extended for another year, with the chancellor stating that she was seeking input on how best to evaluate teachers.22 Such an outcome, in which the chancellor, commissioner, and Regents file a lawsuit against the SUNY Charter School Committee, reflects the influence that the opt-out movement has had on education politics.

Beyond Opting Out [Jeanette and Lisa]: On the local level, we began supporting board of education candidates across Long Island. This movement isn’t just about changing testing policies in New York State. It is also about transforming our schools into child-centered, whole-child teaching and learning environments. Unless we have school board members who support this concept, we will never have the classrooms we want for our children. In spite of the State Education Department’s damaging testing and evaluation policies, our schools can still create amazing opportunities for their students if they have the proper leadership. This starts with the local board of education and the superintendent hired by that board. For example, in the Patchogue-Medford school district in Suffolk County, the superintendent, Dr. Michael Hynes, with the support of his school board, has put in place a comprehensive action plan to bring whole-child policies into his schools. His mantra is “PEAS”—Physical, Emotional, Academic, and Social Learning. Recess was expanded to 40 minutes, yoga takes place every morning throughout the district, and he is piloting numerous strategies to enhance learning through play in the younger grades. Other districts can certainly follow his lead, but this must start with the right community members occupying seats on their boards of education. We, all the coauthors, agree that politics is a necessary evil of this movement. Unfortunately, we have allowed non-educator legislators and State Education Department leaders to dominate the process of setting education

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policy through laws and legislation. This is not where it belongs, yet this is the world we now live in. The strength of this movement is crucial to continuing to move the massive gears of change in our direction. We have successfully slowed the seemingly unstoppable progress of the corporate reformers in New York State; however, reversing the damage already done is a slow and difficult uphill battle. Parents will not be deterred. This isn’t a disconnected outside issue requiring occasional reminders to stay involved. These are our children. We have no choice but to fight, and we are reminded every single day what we are fighting for. Fight we will.

Endnotes 1

Those who design standardized tests often conflate proficiency with passing. Ravitch describes how, when she was a member of the committee that created the National Assessment of Educational Progress, they equated proficiency not with passing but a grade of at least B+.

2

Walsh, S. (2013, August 15). Superintendent’s letter goes viral, gets own ‘Rella’s got this’ meme. Patch. Retrieved from https://patch.com/new-york/portjefferson/ comsewogue-sups-letter-on-state-testing-goes-viral-rallies-support

3

New York State Principals. (2011, December 20). An open letter of concern regarding New York State’s APPR legislation for the evaluation of teachers and principals. Retrieved from https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=sites&srcid=ZGVmYX VsdGRvbWFpbnxuZXd5b3JrcHJpbmNpcGFsc3xneDo2MDRlNGU2MDdm MjgyNzNi

4

Strauss, V. (2014, March 14). “Sit and stare”—What some kids who opt out of tests are forced to do. Washington Post. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost. com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2014/03/14/why-schools-are-forcing-some-kids-to-sitand-stare-for-hours/?utm_term=.083f4c81876a

5

Hursh, D.W. (2016). The end of public schools: The corporate reform agenda to privatize education. New York: Routledge, p. 17.

6

Strauss, V. (2013, October 13). How New York’s education commissioner blew it big time—principal. The Washington Post. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost. com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2013/10/13/how-new-yorks-education-commissioner-blew-it-principal/?utm_term=.04a3702d0582

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Ravitch, D. (2010). The death and life of the great American school system: How testing and choice are undermining education. New York: Basic Books.

8

New York State Education Department. (2014, February 7). Community forum schedule. Retrieved from http://usny.nysed.gov/community-forum-schedule.html

9

Strauss, V. (2013), How New York’s education commissioner blew it big time—principal.

10

Hursh (2016), The end of public schools, p. 40.

11

Hursh (2016), The end of public schools, p. 17.

12

Blanc, E. (2019). Red state revolt: The teachers’ strike wave and working-class politics. Brooklyn, NY: Verso.

13

Taylor, K. (2014, December, 10). Education commissioner to leave for federal post. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/11/nyregion/ john-king-new-york-state-education-commissioner-is-leaving-for-federal-post.html

14

Harris, A.E. (2015, October 26). Merryl Tisch, Board of Regents Chancellor, is stepping down. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes. com/2015/10/27/nyregion/merryl-tisch-board-of-regents-chancellor-says-she-willstep-down.html

15

See Hursh (2016), The end of public schools, pp. 70–71, for a detailed description of who secretly funded Cuomo’s gubernatorial campaign.

16

Goldmacher, S. (2018, January 17). Cuomo amasses $30 million war chest. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/17/nyregion/ cuomo-fundraising-election.html

17

Clukey, K. (2017, October 10). Merryl Tisch is back, will have say in how charter schools certify teachers. Politico. Retrieved from https://www.politico.com/states/ new-york/albany/story/2017/10/10/merryl-tisch-is-back-will-have-say-in-how-charter-schools-certify-teachers-114954

18

Clukey, K. (2018, February 9). Education Department, Regents file complaint over SUNY charter teacher certification. Politico. Retrieved from https://www.politico. com/states/new-york/albany/story/2016/03/chancellor-elect-rosa-speaks-in-favorof-test-opt-out-032591

19

Prothero, A. (2017, October 12). Charter schools in New York can now certify their own teachers. Education Next. Retrieved from https://blogs.edweek.org/ edweek/charterschoice/2017/10/charter_schools_in_new_york_can_now_certify_their_own_teachers.html

20

Shapiro, E. (2019, February 1). New York joins movement to abandon use of student tests in teacher evaluation. The New York Times. Retrieved from https:// www.nytimes.com/2019/02/01/nyregion/standardized-testing-teachers-students.html

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21

Taylor, K. (2015, December 14). New York Regents vote to exclude state tests in teacher evaluations. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes. com/2015/12/15/nyregion/new-york-regents-vote-to-exclude-state-tests-in-teacherevaluations.html

22

Shapiro, E. (2019), New York joins movement to abandon use of student tests in teacher evaluation.

CHAPTER FOUR

Technology: Promise or Peril?

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he Common Core standards, curriculum, and assessments contradict everything that we know about how students learn. We know from research and experience that students learn best when they form “a deep, personal understanding developed in dialogue with teachers and their curriculum.”1 We also know that schools need to be places where children ask and answer questions in an effort to make sense of the world. Instead, the Common Core, by developing standards, curriculum, and standardized tests in language arts and math, narrows what and how teachers teach and students learn. In this chapter, we begin by arguing that advances in technology make it easier for non- and for-profit corporations to take over developing standards, curricula, and assessments, thus marginalizing teachers, students, and families in the process. We fear that education is becoming privatized not only by private corporations taking over schools, as in the case of charter schools, but also by corporations taking over what occurs in schools. Further, the Common Core standards, curriculum, and aligned standardized tests undermine our efforts to foster critical, creative, and engaged learners and close the achievement gap. The Common Core exams, by the nature of standardized tests, necessarily incorporate the knowledge of the majority: the white middle class.2, 3 We then turn to describing so-called personalized learning, in which students learn on computers programmed to deliver curriculum individualized for each student. Personalized learning claims to respond to the commonsense desire to accommodate the varied, idiosyncratic skills and interests of all students by providing an exclusive educational experience. However, as we describe, personalized learning is 75

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incapable of responding to students’ and teachers’ interests and skills as long as it focuses on standardized curricula and tests. Further, because corporations and organizations such as the Common Core, Pearson, and Questar necessarily focus on improving students’ scores on the standardized test, students are not engaging in personal learning, in which they work with caring teachers to engage in intellectual adventures that reflect their needs and interests,4 but rather individual learning, where they learn at different rates. Moreover, because the lessons and assessments for personalized learning are stored on computers that can be accessed only by those who have permission, personalized learning enables corporations to retain control over curriculum, pedagogy, and assessments. Moreover, digital learning enables corporations to collect personalized data on students without instituting a program such as inBloom. As we will describe, in New York, inBloom became a target for those opposed to the corporate collection of student and family data in schools. However, personalized learning provides a less overt and more covert means of collecting data as it is incorporated into digital instruction and assessments. For example, Jeanette describes how a computer program gathered and evaluated data on her son that, if she did not insist in having a say, would have placed him in a program that she felt was inappropriate. Her description of her and her son’s experience shows how personalized learning makes teachers and students subservient to the interests of private corporations.

The Potential Promise of Technology Amy Wells, in her 2019 American Educational Research Association (AERA) presidential address “An Inconvenient Truth About the New Jim Crow in Education,” describes how high-stakes testing—such as the Common Core exams—perpetuates and justifies inequality in resources and educational outcomes.5 In opposing high-stakes testing, she cites the National Academies report “How People Learn” (2018),6 which emphasizes that “educators should support learners’ motivation by attending to their engagement, persistence, and performance by • helping them set desired learning goals, as well as goals for performance that are appropriately challenging; 76

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• creating learning experiences that learners value; and • supporting learners’ sense of control and autonomy.”7 Research and the results of a century of progressive pedagogy tell us that successful teachers engage students, other teachers, and the community in asking, debating, and answering the question: “What constitutes important knowledge?” In addition, effective teachers incorporate into their teaching students’ culture and experience—as promoted, for example, in culturally relevant teaching8 and ethnic studies programs.9 We show how we are not against using technology; we have integrated technology into our own teaching and describe how we and others have done so. Technology should be central to students and teachers producing new and important knowledge. Our three examples focus on learning about toxins in the environment (specifically, pet waste) and how to reduce our health risks, creating a historical documentary about a village destroyed by fire, and learning about regional planning so as to reduce people’s negative effects on the environment. However, in contrast to the benefits technology can have for teaching and learning, we fear that technology is being used primarily in ways that harm education, students, and others. In this chapter, we argue that digital technologies are negatively transforming education by: 1. privatizing the development of standards, curricula, and assessments by (a) narrowing the curriculum to focus on the core subjects—typically math and language arts—and what can be assessed and quantified on a digitalized exam, and (b) making what will be assessed in the “black box” of the computer accessible only to those approved by the corporation. 2. developing “personalized learning,” which takes the Common Core to its logical (or illogical) conclusion, in that what students are to know and in what order is determined by unknown others employed by corporations who develop algorithms that dictate the educational process. Subsequently, personalized learning marginalizes and deprofessionalizes teachers. 3. collecting students’ personal data and sharing it with third parties without the student’s or family’s knowledge. The data collected include personal information for each child from birth or preschool onward, “including medical information, survey data, and data from many state agencies such as the criminal justice system, child

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services, and health departments.”10 We describe the increasing support from foundations and the federal government in statewide and multistate student education data collection and sharing. In New York and seven other states, parents and others began what would be a successful attempt to push back inBloom, which is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and is portrayed “as a data warehouse solution designed to help public schools embrace the promise of personalized learning.”11 Their success in rolling back inBloom gives them confidence in resisting the Common Core. Bulger, McCormick, and Pitcan,12 in their analysis of the demise of inBloom after one year, show how a data breach at inBloom, in an era of multiple data breaches and misuses of data, such as at the National Security Agency, contributed to rising concerns on the part of the public about inBloom and the risk to privacy. These concerns, along with increasingly organized resistance to state policies by organizations, such as the those described in this book, and by Leonie Haimson, the founder of Class Size Matters and Parent Coalition for Student Privacy,13 led to the end of inBloom. The demise of inBloom ignited a heated national discussion on educational data privacy and collection that “resulted in the introduction of over 400 pieces of state-level legislation.”14 Although inBloom may have withered away, the ways in which personal data can be collected have expanded exponentially through personalized learning, where sharing personal data simply becomes part of the process. Whereas inBloom was an overt process with the primary aim of collecting data, with personalized learning, data could be collected surreptitiously as they are entered in order to personalize the curriculum.

How Technology Privatizes the Educational Process and Narrows Curriculum In this chapter, we argue that digital technology is central to the rise of the Common Core standards, curriculum, and assessments and that the Common Core epitomizes the current effort to transform teaching and learning from a process that should be dynamic and creative to one focusing on passing the standardized tests. Focusing on a standardized test as a single

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measuring tool narrows the curriculum and excludes teachers and students from the process of deciding what and how students will learn. Wells (2019) argues that high-stakes tests, like the Common Core, reward simply teaching to the test, thus privileging what is on those tests and nothing else. These kinds of pressures result in curricula that include very little science, virtually no social studies or history, and very little in the way of performing arts or cultural expression.15

In New York, the Common Core assessments were developed first by Pearson Inc., a giant international edu-business and publishing company providing professional development and assessment service that was replaced by Questar in July 2016.16 Additional curricular resources (EngageNY) on the NYSED website have been produced by several corporations, including Common Core, Inc. (now Great Minds), the Core Knowledge Foundation, the Expeditionary Learning Group, and the Public Consulting Group.17 The issue is not that schools should not incorporate the expertise of others but whether teachers are involved in an open and equal process. As we described in Chapter Two, we know from teachers that they were initially provided with only a few sample questions from the tests. Therefore, since no one knew what might be tested, Commissioner King strongly urged teachers to prepare students for the test by adopting the EngageNY curriculum, thus further marginalizing teachers and students.18 Consequently, teaching and learning focus less on developing a shared understanding of a subject and more on recalling the information digitally transmitted to them in discrete bytes that can be easily assessed on computers. This subverts teaching and learning as a process requiring that teachers and students develop a relationship in which they communicate to one another what they know and want to know. In fact, there is almost no relationship, as teachers implement curriculum that has been imposed on them from above by an anonymous corporation. Therefore, opting out of the Common Core exams is about more than resisting a specific exam. It is about resisting the degeneration of education from a process in which students and teachers engage with one another in what and how to learn, to a process in which what is worth knowing is

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determined by algorithms and anonymous others and transmitted to students in disconnected bytes. The Common Core shifts control away from teachers and students towards unknown corporate employees. Indeed, businesses that create the curriculum and assessments, such as Pearson, boast that they are in the best position to provide professional development to teachers because they created the materials that teachers will use when they teach. They claim that if you want to raise students’ test scores, hire us. And, if such a process leaves any autonomy to educators, as we will describe in this chapter, “personalized learning” can remove any autonomy that remains. Therefore, we argue that the opt-out movement is not merely about students annually refusing to participate in the Common Core exams, but is a central battle over the aims, organization, and methods of education. The Common Core enables for-profit corporations such as Pearson and Questar to take over the process of creating the curriculum and assessments, thereby marginalizing parents, teachers, and students. It is a battle over who controls education and whether education is to become corporatized.

Personalized Learning Boninger, Molnar, and Saldaña describe how computer technology is also central not only to the Common Core but also to the rise of “personalized learning.” The promise of personal learning as it began about a century ago, under Frederick Winslow Taylor in 1915, was “to provide children with immediate feedback and interesting, personally relevant materials… and to promote these goals, often by allowing students to progress independently through rationalized materials and assessment.”19 Both Boninger (2019) and Saltman and Means (2017)20 show how personalized learning built on the rise of the “scientific method” promoted by Frederick Winslow Taylor21 a century ago, wherein student learning would be sped up by making schools more efficient by modeling them after factories. In the intervening decades, “personalized learning” shifted its focus to individual student learning. In the 1950s, developers of personalized learning began to design personal learning machines that would both test and teach students, with B.F. Skinner’s teaching machines, designed on behaviorist principles, as the most well-known approach.22

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Most recently, because computers seem to make it possible to collect and analyze a near-infinite amount of data, education technology companies are developing and selling products that they claim will personalize learning—that is, assess every child’s strengths and weaknesses and provide “a series of comprehensive digital curricula that promise to help teachers ‘tailor support for every learner.’”23 Given that the Common Core would not exist without support from the Gates Foundation,24 it is not surprising that “the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has been the prime mover in the push for widespread adoption of personalized learning.”25 In 2014, the Gates Foundation funded a group of organizations to develop a working definition of personalized learning, which is the following: Personalized learning seeks to accelerate student learning by tailoring the instructional environment to—what, when, how, and where, students learn—to address the individual needs, skills, and interests of each student. Students can take ownership of their own learning, while also developing deep, personal connections with each other, their teachers and other adults.26

Boninger and colleagues critique personalized learning for sounding progressive—“child centered and inclusive of students with varying needs and interests.” “However,” they write, the visions embodied in the definition—of children as individuals on separate, parallel, predefined paths toward their individual goals— assumes that learning is best understood as a series of self-contained individual behaviors rather than a collaborative process engaged in by members of a learning community.27

They conclude: Our analysis suggests that, rhetoric notwithstanding, the personalized learning agenda is now for the most part dominated by a

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restricted, data-centric, hyper-rational approach to curriculum and pedagogy that limits students’ agency, narrows what they can learn in school, and limits the ability of schools to respond effectively to a diverse array of students. Further, for-profit entities are promoting a multitude of personalized learning offerings that tend to privatize consequential educational decision-making, compromise children’s and teachers’ privacy, and distort pedagogy in ways that stifle students’ learning and their ability to grow as people and as participants in a democratic system.28

Replacing Teachers with Programmed Computers In the same way that Gates was hoping to make the Common Core curriculum digitally available to every student, he may be aiming to do the same with personalized learning. Gates has long envisioned replacing teachers, who make mistakes and have to be fed, with computers. It would be more efficient.

Jeanette’s Story: Computers Before People Jeanette describes how personalized learning has affected what occurs in her school and its effects on students and teachers. She reports how schools are buying into the latest computer technology—The Northwestern Education Association (NWEA) and Measure of Academic Progress (MAP), AIMSweb, iReady, and Achieve3000—to make educational decisions for the children. For example, instead of teachers making decisions about whether to provide a student with enrichment needs and remedial intervention based on their own interactions, observations, and professional diagnosis and judgment, teachers are now instructed to determine these needs based on algorithmic results from computerized assessments. She describes how iReady designs lesson plans based on assessment results. She reports that many schools that use the iReady program incorporate computerized lessons daily during “centers.”29 The computer program constantly assesses students based on how they interact with the program and complete activities that are algorithmically designed for them, devoid of the subjective professional opinion or evaluation of the teacher in the room.

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NWEA, mentioned above, perfectly captures the essence of personalized learning, stating that it is “a research-based, not-for-profit organization that supports students and educators worldwide by creating assessment solutions that precisely measure growth and proficiency—and provide insights to help tailor instruction…to help advance all students along their optimal learning paths” [italics added].30 They describe personalized learning thusly: “If your child answers a question correctly, the test follows up with a more challenging question. If your child answers incorrectly, the test follows up with an easier question.”31 Personalized learning is presented as capable of doing what people cannot—that is, perfectly measuring the past and creating the optimal path forward. Jeanette has experienced these programs in her son’s elementary school. She writes: The process begins when the computer flags which students are to receive AIS (academic intervention service), sometimes with no input from teachers. This can result in students who had been performing well in class being recommended for remedial services. Another example is the Achieve 3000 program that is used to determine reading levels. What was once done by teachers using one-on-one diagnostic tools and assessments is now done through a computer program which then uses the assessment algorithm to design personal lessons, rewriting reading passages for each student’s reading level. While this may sound ideal, it assumes that the computer can accurately diagnose how well a student reads and comprehends text based on an assessment the students takes on a given day, without taking into account the student’s effort, mindset, and willingness to participate. The example above, in which it is assumed that the computer can precisely measure growth and proficiency and determine the optimal path, is an example of what James Bridle32 describes as our misplaced faith in technology and how “computation replaces rational thought.” This computational thinking assumes that perfect information about the past can and should be collected and synthesized to inform decisions about the future. Computational thinking forms the rationale for standardized testing and data-driven instruction. Bridle further warns that “computation, at every scale, is a cognitive hack, offloading both the decision process and the responsibility onto the machine.”

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In the same way that education is not neutral—what we learn always reflects the knowledge interests of one group over another, neither are algorithms. Safiya Umoja Noble,33 in her book Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism, shows how negative biases against women of color are embedded in search engine results and algorithms. In this chapter, we have argued that the Common Core exams are central to the process of transforming classroom practices. Computers have increasingly replaced people in schools and play a key role in determining what and how students will learn. Anderson and Cohen (2018)34 describe and critique this rise in the centrality of computer-directed learning as “data-driven decision making,” which they contrast with “community-based decision making” and “democracy-driven” decision making as promoted by Dewey35 and other progressive educators over the last century.36 The essential opposing characteristics of the approaches of “data- and “democracy-based” decision making form the basis for much of the conflicting views of education throughout the last century. Similar principles permeate today’s educational practices. The assumption that educational goals and methods can be objectively determined and implemented forms the basis of the current push for data-driven decision-making.37 Computer technology may deliver different curricula to every student, but it undermines the relationship between student and teacher by marginalizing experience and knowledge that does not fit within the parameters of the programmed algorithms. We argue that, in the end, data-driven instruction is likely to result in humans who are subservient to the computer and alienated in their other relationships. As we have seen with the Common Core standards and exams, as well as other assessments over the last two decades, data-driven approaches “enforce rigid new systems of privatization and accountability, performance evaluations, auditing tools, examinations, scripted curriculum,” and “credentializing mechanisms.”38 This approach presumes “that the only knowledge worth teaching is quantifiable, that teaching practices must be ever more controlled to be replicable and improved, and that standardized tests are the only meaningful arbiter of educational quality.”39 Saltman and Means critique the Common Core and similar approaches for assuming that determining the aims and organization of schools, what is to be taught and how it is to be taught, can be an objective process. In con-

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trast, progressive educators from Dewey40 to the present (too numerous to name but including John Dewey,41 Henry Giroux, Peter McLaren,42 Antonina Darder,43 and Gloria Ladson-Billings44) describe education as a political process in which conflicting visions are contested—a process that is often controlled by the rich and powerful (such as Bill Gates and the Walton family). In contrast, Saltman and Means call for a democratically deliberative approach that is rooted in the work of John Dewey, one that, rather than focusing on individual accountability, aims for “accountability in common” that supports collective, dialogical forms of education “that involve deliberation and contestation over knowledge-production, values, and pedagogical practices.”45

Protecting Data Privacy Though inBloom is gone, data collection continues unabated. First, as we will trace out, the federal government has consistently removed restrictions on what data can be collected. As we will describe, states continue to increase the amount and kind of data they can and will collect, at the same time receiving increased funding from the Gates Foundation. Second, inBloom was defeated in New York, but data is collected more covertly and surreptitiously. Gates and others have realized that personalized learning machines, because they are programmed to respond uniquely to individual students by collecting data on them, make data collection appear to be a natural part of the process. Further, personalized learning machines claim that they will provide unique programs for every student, because teachers do not have the time or ability to decipher the interactions between students and their technology. Because the information is collected on computers, it is easily assembled and shared. We also note that the dominant actor throughout the period from the rise of the Common Core to the present is Bill Gates. Many would argue that Common Core would not exist if it were not for the $3.2 billion he gave to 180 organizations to support it. Since funding the Common Core initiative, he has also funded personalized learning and data collection through various sources. In the remainder of this chapter, we will both identify a central danger from the rise of technology and remind readers of the potential for technology

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to positively transform education. In this section, we will first describe what student data has been collected and then show how student data protections have continually eroded. First, some definitions. Student-level education data refers to any information a student generates from preschool through graduate school that can be gathered either through students’ online usage or information provided by parents and teachers. Such information includes identifiably personal demographic, academic, disciplinary data, as well as other data, including the utilization of health services, a student’s transportation data, which can be tracked on transportation apps, and Individualized Education Plans.46 Student-level education data are collected by schools, uploaded to school districts’ online databases, and then sent to the State Education Department and saved in the statewide longitudinal data system (SLDS).47 In the above scenario, it seems that no third parties are involved in the data collection process. However, the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy, a national grassroots advocacy group, instructs parents on how they can protect their child’s education data. They describe how their child’s personal information may be disclosed to companies that provide services to the school and district. For example, a child’s information may be shared with bus or catering companies, ed-tech companies that provide online lessons or administer state standardized tests, or with military recruiters.48

The Diminishing Privacy of Student Data The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act was signed by President Gerald Ford in 1974 to protect the confidentiality of student education records accumulated from early childhood through university. It explicitly stated that educational agencies and institutions may not “have a policy or practice of permitting the release of or providing access to education records without a parent’s prior written consent.”49 However, a 2008 amendment added new exceptions that permitted the disclosure of education records without consent from parents and students. Changes included: (1) allowing disclosures to contractors and other outside parties connected to the outsourcing of institutional services and functions; and (2) permitting educational agencies and other parties to release personally identifiable information that has been de-identified, without consent

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from parents.50 Further, in 2011, substantial changes were made to FERPA. Educational agencies and institutions were allowed to disclose students’ personally identifiable information to authorized third parties in order to evaluate the effectiveness of federal- or state-supported education programs, which increased data sharing.51 However, some parents argued that any organizations or individuals could be defined as “authorized third parties” and granted access to students’ personally identified information. Regulations have since been further weakened by the U.S. Department of Education.

The Rise of Data Collection and Sharing The rise of student data collection is largely attributed to efforts made by the U.S. Department of Education. Parent-leaders in many states, such as Leonie Haimson in New York, worked hard to defeat the inBloom project. However, they realized that “inBloom was only the tip of the iceberg.” The federal government has pushed for the adoption and implementation of numerous data collection and sharing programs over the years. Such programs are too numerous to mention; we document only a few major student data-collection and -sharing projects here. As early as 2005, the federal government had granted 41 states and the District of Columbia $265 million to build a Statewide Longitudinal Data System.52 Federal support for student data collection has intensified under the $4.35 billion Race to the Top (RTTT) grant that required states receiving the RTTT grant to advance reforms around four specific areas. According to the RTTT fact sheet, one reform priority is to “build data systems that measure student growth and success, and inform teachers and principals about how they can improve instruction.”53 States are also encouraged to expand statewide longitudinal data systems to include or integrate data from special education programs, English language learner programs, early childhood programs, at-risk and dropout prevention programs, and school climate and culture programs, as well as information on student mobility, human resources (i.e., information on teachers, principals, and other staff), school finance, student health, postsecondary education, and other relevant areas, with the purpose of connecting and coordinating all parts of the system to

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allow important questions related to policy, practice, or overall effectiveness to be asked, answered, and incorporated into effective continuous improvement practices.54

So far, 47 states and the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands have received at least one federal grant to develop a Statewide Longitudinal Data System (SLDS) or P20 database from 2005 to 2012.55 Besides SLDS, the federal government expanded support for data collection, linking, and sharing across states with financial support from a third party. The Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE) is one example of a federally funded and Gates Foundation funded multistate data exchange program. WICHE aims to track how students develop human capital throughout their educational and work experiences, from P12 to postsecondary education and as they travel within and between 16 states. WICHE exists to provide policymakers with information about how well educational investment is aligned with employment outcomes.56

The Promise of Technology In the final part of this chapter, we present some examples of educational practices wherein the teachers and students collaboratively decided what and how to learn. In these examples, different technologies were used to conduct research and to present what was learned to other children and adults in the school and the wider community. The students had to struggle with what questions were worth asking, how they were going to learn what they needed to know, and how they were going to present what they learned to others. In all of the examples, the students presented new understandings of the world around them that were important not only to themselves, but to others in the school, the community, and potentially across the globe. In 1975, at the dawn of the video age, David Hursh57 described how he worked with his elementary students (ages 5–13) to research, write, and record a 30-minute film for public television titled “MAPA Who?” on urban renewal and suburban sprawl in the Omaha, Nebraska, metropolitan area. The students interviewed the staff regarding the goals and procedures of MAPA (the Metropolitan Area Planning Association), wrote short skits

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portraying some of MAPA’s planning goals, such as limiting suburban sprawl, promoting urban renewal, and making people aware of the dangers of siting mobile home parks in flood plains. They first rehearsed the skits at school and then performed and recorded them in a public television studio. None of what was presented was written or developed by an adult. Several weeks later, after the credits were added and some other inclusions were made, the students returned to the station, where they viewed the film’s “world premiere.” The video was subsequently used by MAPA to explain MAPA’s goals and activities to the public. The students demonstrated that they could research a complicated topic and present what they learned in an accurate, amusing, and entertaining way. In the 1990s, Hursh began collaborating with teachers at Rochester’s School Without Walls (SWW), at that time one of 26 Performance Consortium Schools in New York. When the schools began in the early 1980s, the Commissioner, Thomas Sobol, granted them waivers from requiring students take and pass the Regents exams to earn a Regents rather than a local diploma. Instead of devoting their senior year to test prep, students were required to create and ultimately defend an interdisciplinary project. As we briefly described earlier, one student, David Weingarten, made a 90-minute documentary film on the history of the small rural town of Hilton, not far from Rochester. The first 15 minutes provided the town’s early history, which centered around apple orchards and the making and shipping of applesauce. However, most of the film documented the singular event in the town’s history, a massive fire in the 1970s that destroyed Main Street, and how the town rebuilt after the fire without considering, unfortunately, its historical heritage. Because the School Without Walls encourages students to learn beyond the boundaries of the school, David, as a high school student, enrolled in community college courses on documentary filmmaking and used those skills to interview townspeople about their memories of the fire. He combined these oral histories with their photos and “Super 8 film” to tell the story of a community from its founding to the present. The finished film was entirely his work: he edited it and wrote and recorded the narration and the music.58 Weingarten’s film was so professional that after high school he was hired by documentary filmmaker Ken Burns. It was only after he began working with Burns that Burns learned that the School Without Walls was

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not a post-secondary institution but a high school. David’s experience exemplifies what students can accomplish if they are supported in the pursuit of their own interests. By the time David graduated from high school, he had a sophisticated understanding of the aims and methods of oral histories. In fact, his understanding of historical research was so sophisticated that while he was still a high school student, Hursh invited him to make a presentation to his graduate-level class on teaching secondary social studies. However, as we described earlier and will do so again below, the requirement that students pass five Regents exams to graduate has made it difficult for schools to be places where students construct meaning. Instead, schools have become places that transmit bits of information that will be evaluated not based on a complex, interdisciplinary performance such as a television show or a documentary film, but on disconnected bits. One last example of how testing and technology has undermined the possibility of students constructing meaning for themselves occurred when David Hursh and Camille Martina, a former high school English teacher and now professor in public health, were teaching environmental health to fifth-grade students. As part of a unit funded by a grant from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), they asked a class of fifth graders what environmental health danger they would like to investigate, suggesting air and water pollution, among other common dangers. To Hursh and Martina’s surprise, the students chose a health danger not among those suggested: pet waste, more commonly known by fifth graders as “poop.” The students researched a variety of websites, including NIEHS and the Environmental Protection Agency, to understand the connections between pet waste and illnesses, and how to reduce the health risks to people (i.e., how to properly dispose of pet waste), including policies that might encourage people to do so. They then used what they learned to develop a website, a video, and pamphlets that they presented to students and teachers in the school. By the end of our week-long unit, the students not only understood the science of pet waste but also how to present what they learned through various media to children and adults.59 Unfortunately, when Hursh and Martina returned to the school the following year, they were informed by the principal that the district’s administrators had decided that they needed to devote all of the school’s efforts over the school year to preparing for the standardized tests, which at that time

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included tests in language arts, math, science, and social studies. While Martina and Hursh argued that having students research environmental health and write text for videos, websites, and pamphlets would teach the desired skills in the subjects to be tested, the school district was convinced that explicit test prep was the only way to achieve the desired test results. Thus in this chapter we have not argued against the incorporation of digital technology into the classroom. Rather, we have argued against the misuse of technology in the classroom. As presently used, technology, instead of enriching learning, reduces it to what can be assessed on a standardized test. Technology replaces students’ relationships with teachers and other students with computer programs and algorithms that have been created for fictional generic classrooms, not students and teachers learning and teaching in a particular place and time. Consequently, students are unlikely to produce research on harmful toxins in their neighborhood, create a documentary film on the fire that destroyed a rural village, or document the effects of suburban sprawl and urban renewal in a Midwestern city.

Endnotes 1

Boninger, F., Molnar, A., & Saldaña, C.M. (2019). Personalized learning and the digital privatization of curriculum and teaching. Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center, p. 4. Retrieved from http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/personalized-learning

2

Koretz, D. (2018). The testing charade: Pretending to make schools better. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.

3

Wells, A.S. (2019, April 7). An inconvenient truth about the new Jim Crow of education. The 2019 American Education Research Association Presidential Address, Toronto, CA.

4

Kohn, A. (2015). Four reasons to worry about “personalized learning.” Alfie Kohn’s Blog. Retrieved from https://www.alfiekohn.org/blogs/personalized/

5

Wells (2019), An inconvenient truth about the new Jim Crow of education.

6

National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. (2018). How people learn II: Learners, contexts, and cultures. Washington, DC: National Academies Press.

7

Wells (2019), An inconvenient truth about the new Jim Crow of education, p. 17.

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8

Ladson-Billings, G. (1995). Toward a theory of culturally relevant pedagogy. American Educational Research Journal, 32(3), 465–491.

9

Cuauhtin, R.T., Zavala, M., Sleeter, C., & Au, W. (Eds.). (2019). Rethinking ethnic studies. Milwaukee, WI: Rethinking Schools.

10

Strauss, V. (2015, November 12). The astonishing amount of data being collected about your children. The Washington Post. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2015/11/12/the-astonishing-amount-of-databeing-collected-about-your-children/

11

Horn, M. (2014). InBloom’s collapse offers lessons for innovation in education. Forbes. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelhorn/2014/12/04/ inblooms-collapse-offers-lessons-for-innovation-in-education/#692f19b6525f

12

Bulger, M., McCormick. P., & Pitcan, M. (2017). The legacy of inBloom. New York: Data & Society. Retrieved from https://datasociety.net/pubs/ecl/InBloom_feb_2017. pdf

13

Class Size Matters website: https://www.classsizematters.org/ and Parent Coalition for Student Privacy website https://www.studentprivacymatters.org/

14

Bulger et al. (2017), The legacy of inBloom, p. 5.

15

Wells (2019), An inconvenient truth about the new Jim Crow of education, p. 18.

16

New York State Education Department. (2016, January). Changes for the 2016 grades 3–8 English language arts and mathematics tests. Retrieved from http:// www.p12.nysed.gov/assessment/ei/2016/changes2016grades3-8ela-math-tests.pdf

17

Haydel, E., & Carmichael, S.B. (2015). Uncommonly engaging? A review of the EngageNY English language arts Common Core curriculum. Washington, DC: Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

18

Hursh, D.W. (2016). The end of public schools: The corporate reform agenda to privatize education. New York: Routledge, p. 40.

19

Boninger et al. (2019), Personalized learning and the digital privatization of curriculum and teaching, p. 4.

20

Saltman, K.J., & Means, A.J. (2017). From “data-driven” to “democracy-driven” educational leadership: Navigating market bureaucracy and new technology in a post-Fordist era. In D. Waite & I. Bogotch (Eds.), The Wiley international handbook of educational leadership. Malden, MA: John Wiley & Sons. (pp. 125–138).

21

Taylor, W.F. (1915). The principles of scientific management. New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers.

22

Skinner, B.F. (1958). Teaching machines. Science, 128(3330), 969–977. http://dx.doi. org/10.1126/science.128.3330.969

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Moinar, M., & Herold, B. (2018, November 6). Are companies overselling personalized learning? Education Week. Retrieved from https://www.edweek.org/ew/ articles/2018/11/07/are-companies-overselling-personalized-learning.html

24

Hursh (2016), The end of public schools, p. 9. Hursh writes in his book that “as of March, 2014, the Gates Foundation has provided $2.3 billion to support creating and implementing the Common Core State Standard (Hassard, 2014), with more than 1,800 grants to organizations ranging from teachers’ unions to state departments of education to political groups that have pushed the Common Core into 45 states.”

25

Boninger et al. (2019), Personalized learning and the digital privatization of curriculum and teaching, p. 10.

26

Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, Silicon Schools. (2014). A working definition of personalized learning. Retrieved from https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/1311874/personalized-learning-working-definition-fall2014.pdf

27

Boninger et al. (2019), Personalized learning and the digital privatization of curriculum and teaching, p. 13.

28

Boninger et al. (2019), Personalized learning and the digital privatization of curriculum and teaching, p. 25.

29

“Center” here refers to group work in which children rotate from one activity to another in groups organized by skill levels.

30

NWEA. (n.d.). About NWEA. Retrieved from https://www.nwea.org/about/

31

NWEA. (n.d.). Parent toolkit: Resources for parents. Retrieved from https://www. nwea.org/parent-toolkit/

32

Bridle, J. (2018). New dark age: Technology and the end of the future. New York: Verso, p. 89.

33

Noble, S.U. (2018). Algorithms of oppression: How search engines reinforce racism. New York: New York University Press.

34

Anderson, G.L., & Cohen, M.I. (2018). The new democratic professional in education: Confronting markets, metrics, and managerialism. New York: Teachers College Press.

35

Dewey, J. (1923). Democracy and education: An introduction to the philosophy of education. New York: Macmillan.

36

Saltman & Means (2017), From “data-driven” to “democracy-driven” educational leadership.

37

Anderson & Cohen (2018), The new democratic professional in education.

38

Saltman & Means (2017), From “data-driven” to “democracy-driven” educational leadership, pp. 125–126.

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39

Saltman & Means (2017), From “data-driven” to “democracy-driven” educational leadership, p. 126.

40

Dewey, J. (1997). Experience and education. New York: Touchstone.

41

Dewey (1997), Experience and education.

42

Giroux, H.A., & McLaren, P. (2014). Between borders: Pedagogy and the politics of cultural studies. New York: Routledge.

43

Darder, A. (2014). Freire and education. New York: Routledge.

44

Ladson-Billings, G., & Tate, W.F. (1995). Toward a critical race theory of education. Teachers College Record, 97(1), 47–68.

45

Saltman & Means (2017), From “data-driven” to “democracy-driven” educational leadership, p. 125.

46

The Glossary of Education Reform. (2015). Student-level data. Retrieved from https://www.edglossary.org/student-level-data/

47

Parent Coalition for Student Privacy. (n.d.). Parent toolkit for student privacy: What is student data? Retrieved from https://www.studentprivacymatters.org/wp-content/ uploads/2017/05/Parent-Toolkit-for-Student-Privacy-Section-I_PCSP-CCFC.pdf

48

Parent Coalition for Student Privacy. (n.d.). What is student data? Retrieved from https://www.studentprivacymatters.org/what-is-student-data-graphic/

49

U.S. Department of Education. (n.d.a). Laws & guidance: Legislative history of major FERPA provisions. Retrieved from https://www2.ed.gov/policy/gen/guid/ fpco/ferpa/leg-history.html

50

U.S. Department of Education. (n.d.b). Laws & guidance: Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). Retrieved from https://www2.ed.gov/policy/gen/ guid/fpco/ferpa/index.html

51

Feder, J. (2013). The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA): A legal overview. Congressional Research Service. Retrieved from https://www.higheredcompliance.org/resources/publications/CRS_FERPAOverview_2013%2011_19.pdf

52

U.S. Department of Education. (2009, July). Statewide longitudinal data system. Retrieved from https://www2.ed.gov/programs/slds/factsheet.html

53

U.S. Department of Education. (2009, December). Race to the Top. Retrieved from https://www2.ed.gov/programs/racetothetop/factsheet.html

54

U.S. Department of Education. (2009, November). Race to the Top program executive summary, p. 4. Retrieved from https://www2.ed.gov/programs/racetothetop/ executive-summary.pdf

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Strauss, V. (2015, November 12). The astonishing amount of data being collected about your children. The Washington Post. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2015/11/12/the-astonishing-amount-of-databeing-collected-about-your-children/

56

Prescott, B.T. (2014). Beyond borders: Understanding the development and mobility of human capital in an age of data-driven accountability. A report on WICHE’s multistate longitudinal data exchange pilot project. Boulder, CO: Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education.

57

Hursh, D.W. (2008). High-stakes testing and the decline of teaching and learning: The real crisis in education. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

58

Hursh (2008), High-stakes testing and the decline of teaching and learning, p. 75.

59

Hursh, D.W., & Martina, C.A. (2011). Teaching environmental health to children: An interdisciplinary approach. Dordrecht, Germany: Springer.

CHAPTER FIVE

Beyond the Opt-Out Movement: Current Challenges and the Future

A

t its core, the opt-out movement has been about more than just tests. It has always been about who decides what is taught and assessed; whether it is students, educators, or corporate employees; and whether education is to be privatized or to remain a public good. In this final chapter, we want to assess what the opt-out movement has accomplished, the challenges it faces, and what comes next. We begin by reminding readers how impossible it seemed that the opt-out movement could persuade 20% of parents statewide and 50% on Long Island to hold their children out of the Common Core tests, especially given that there is no obvious or easy way to organize parents and teachers, and that parents and teachers are understandably reluctant to challenge their school’s administration. Further, some organizations that might be logical places for teachers and parents to examine and reflect together on issues, such as the national Parent Teacher Association (PTA), received funding from Bill Gates to support the Common Core1 and were thus not places where critical conversations could occur. Therefore, participants in the opt-out movement, as members of a true grassroots movement, have met on grassy school playgrounds, through social media, and in community forums. We begin by describing some of the accomplishments of the opt-out movement, beginning with changes in local school boards, the New York

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State legislature, and the Board of Regents, that led to the selection of Betty Rosa as chancellor. Next, we examine several specific challenges that the opt-out movement has faced, including attacks by the state and federal departments of education and misrepresentations by the media. Then we turn to some of the tensions embodied in the nature of grassroots movements: the lack of a formal structure and consistent and reliable sources of funding. While lack of funding limits what such movements can do, it also allows them to respond quickly to issues without fear of losing donations. Finally, we look to the recent teacher strikes in Arizona, West Virginia, Oklahoma, and Los Angeles to see what the strikes and the opt-out movement can learn from one another.2 In particular, we note that the strikes were successful because they focused on more than teachers’ salaries and benefits. The teachers also demanded more funding for other employees in the district: teachers’ aides, bus drivers, school nurses, and school suppliers. In addition, the teachers and their supporters broadened the issues beyond teacher salaries to include criticizing neoliberal economic policies that cut taxes for the wealthy while cutting social services for the working class and poor. They also opposed privatization in education such as promoting charter schools. They further negotiated for smaller class size and more spending for public schools. By using this strategy, the teachers gained solidarity with others in their community.

From the Grassroots to the Capitol As described in previous chapters, the opt-out movement has quite purposefully worked to increase its membership and thereby impact policy from the grassroots to the federal level. As Jeannette stated, there is power in numbers. The movement has held forums and exchanged information on Facebook and its websites, but, more importantly, it has been visible. Opponents of the Common Core have lined highways for miles, holding signs and wearing red “red for ed” shirts that demonstrated the extensive support for the opt-out movement. This tactic was initiated in West Virginia and soon spread to Nevada, Oklahoma, Los Angeles, and other places across the country.3 In New York, the month before the Common Core exam, NYSAPE and LIOO held dozens of forums across the state, with many venues filled beyond capacity.

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In New York, NYSAPE and LIOO used their grassroots power to elect legislators who agreed with their views and to defeat those who did not. Legislators and the governor saw that the opt-out movement could affect their electability and began to seek their support. Consequently, the opt-out movement gained enough support in the legislature to replace Merryl Tisch as chancellor with Betty Rosa, a New York City career educator who has held almost every position from teacher’s aide to district superintendent.4 Between the time when Rosa was designated chancellor and when she actually began working in the position, she stated that if she had a child in New York, she would opt him or her out of the Common Core exams.5 In addition, she has been critical of charter schools and sees them as an effort to privatize public schools, and she has resisted demands to replace local control with state control by having state education take over the running of “failed” public schools, as is being currently debated regarding the Rochester city schools.6 Further, the opt-out movement has resisted and rolled back the use of student test scores on the Common Core to evaluate teachers. As described in Chapter Two, the Common Core exams are flawed on several counts, including that the tests only evaluate students in Grades 3–8, and that the results aren’t provided until the fall after the student has been promoted to the next grade and a different teacher. The teachers don’t know what is being tested, and students are only informed that they scored a 1, 2, 3, or 4. Because schools and school districts were threatened with the loss of funding if they did not have 95% of the required students taking the test, administrators have directly and indirectly pressured students through their teachers, families, and others to take the tests. As we have described, in some districts students have faced various kinds of punishment, including having to “sit and stare” for hours over several days while students who took the tests would be rewarded (i.e., bribed) for doing so. That some legislators are becoming aware of the various ways in which students were being “encouraged” is evident in a bill introduced in the New York State legislature. In May 2019, the senate and assembly introduced similar bills to prohibit such actions. New York State Senate Bill 5394 would require that parents of students in Grades 3–8 be notified of their “right to opt out of high-stakes testing.” The bill, if passed and signed into

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law, would guarantee parents’ right to opt their children out of the state tests. The bill would further provide that: • No punitive measures may be taken against students who refuse to participate in such testing, nor shall students who do participate in such testing receive any incentive or reward for doing so. • Students who do not participate in any state testing or any other high-stakes testing shall be scored as a refusal, rather than as absent. • It shall further be unlawful for any school district to take punitive measures against students who refuse to participate in such testing, or provide any form of incentive or reward for students who do participate. • Punitive measures include, but are not limited to, threats of repeating a school grade, mandating after school attendance, mandating summer school attendance or any negative academic impact as a result of a student’s refusal to participate in any state testing or any other high-stakes testing. • School districts shall provide students whose parents refuse to permit their testing participation with an alternate educational activity during scheduled state testing times. • State aid for schools shall not be contingent on or in any way affected by the student participation rate for any state testing or any other high-stakes testing. • Notwithstanding any other law, rule or regulation to the contrary, score results on any state testing or any other high-stakes testing shall not constitute grounds or be considered as a factor for determining whether a school is a chronically low-performing, underperforming or failing school. • Nor shall a school district give any consideration to classroom participation rates in such testing when evaluating teacher performance or making personnel decisions. • It shall likewise be unlawful for a school district to re-allocate funding among or between schools within such district based on student participation rates for such testing. (The New York State Senate7)

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This bill, were it to become law, would rectify many of the current abuses on the part of those in power, directed at parents and the children who opt out.

The Attacks on the Opt-Out Movement by Local and State Administrators and Policymakers In this chapter we argue that the opt-out movement has achieved considerable success, even though it has faced ongoing attacks from the U.S. Department of Education and the New York State Education Department, including threats to eliminate Title I funding, implement punitive regulations, and lower the ratings of schools with high opt-out rates. At the federal level, the U.S. Department of Education sent a letter to all school administrators in December 2015 to warn them that failure to meet the required participation rate in state tests under ESSA would result in losing federal funding and lower school ratings.8 This was the year that 13 states failed to meet the 95% participation requirement, and New York State reached a peak 20% statewide opt-out rate. At the state level, for example, the New York State Education Department removed 99 schools from the “Reward School” list and withheld $75,000 each from 16 schools in New York City in 2016.9 In spite of the tremendous pressure from the USDOE and NYSED, Jeanette and other opt-out parents describe how they tactfully responded to the challenges that the federal and state governments posed for them. Jeanette adds: Before opting out went mainstream, while some administrators put the welfare of children first and honored parental rights to make this decision of participation, other administrators attempted to put the children in their care in the middle of a controversy in order to deter parents. The worst of these was a superintendent on Long Island who told parents that if they opted their children out, the children would have to sit without any reading materials until all test takers were finished. Even the special education students were told they would have to sit quietly without reading material for the entire extended testing window (up to 3–4 hours). Parents fought back against this “sit and stare” policy, called “cruel and unusual punishment” by others. Parents used our advice and pushed back by picking students up

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just after tests were handed out and bringing them back after the testing window was closed. However, according to some opt-out parents, upon returning to school, the superintendent placed the returning students in a room to “make up” hours of sit and stare time. The first year of opting out, many other administrators from across the state used similar tactics. NYSAPE and LIOO, as well as other opt-out social media groups, put out detailed instructions on how parents could navigate successfully around punitive opt-out policies. One district even refused to release opt-out children to their parents when the parents arrived at school to pick them up just after testing began. Parents had to call the police in order to force the release of their children. Some administrators would call each and every opt-out parent, pressuring them to change their minds. Others told parents that students themselves had to refuse. Some districts did not accept parents speaking on behalf of their children and required students to verbally refuse themselves. While verbally refusing was easy for middle school students, this was challenging and anxiety producing for those ages 8–10. We then urged parents to place lanyards around their children’s necks with cards that said “I refuse.” Opt-out children were told just to show the card to the teacher rather than having to verbally oppose the instruction. We also directed parents to discuss their desire that their child refuse by speaking directly to the teacher with their children present. This would reduce the anxiety for the student when he or she witnessed Mommy telling the teacher it is HER wish that little Annie not take the assessment. The weeks of testing were a non-stop frenzy of answering countless messages and questions from panicked parents navigating administrative policies set up to deter this action. The media were crucial in changing abusive policies. I [Jeanette] was in close contact with the local media, sending cameras to interview parents at districts with uncooperative administrators to shine a light on what was happening. In this case, the community became tired of the bad press and punitive opt-out policies. They voted in a new school board and removed the superintendent. After the first year of widespread opting out, most administrators across the state realized that opposing the refusal action was much more disruptive and challenging than finding an alternate location for opt-out students to simply read while the tests were administered. Six years later, many districts

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have found an alternate, smaller location in which to administer the tests, as their numbers are now in the minority. Very few districts continue to actively deter students and parents from refusing. The majority of these can be found in the big five districts of New York City, Rochester, Buffalo, Syracuse, and Albany. Districts with large minority populations and poor test performance are often the schools and districts that use the most threats and scare tactics: telling students and parents that students will not be promoted to the next grade, that students will not get into specialized middle and high schools, that their schools will be closed and privatized, or even that the schools will call immigration authorities on parents. Without local control of a school board and a teacher union (UFT) that is not supportive of opt out, parents have no recourse when these threats are used. We have always posed the following problem to policymakers such as the legislature, governor, Board of Regents, and the State Education Department. How do you attack or criticize a group of parents who are advocating for children? Each and every time they have attacked, we have become stronger. Arne Duncan’s “white suburban moms” comment is a perfect example. There was a huge increase in interest and activity in the opt-out movement after that comment. People do not like to be bullied or dismissed. We will always be viewed as the underdog. When we are attacked, the majority of the public will choose our side. Elected officials are at times our best ally, and at other times our biggest enemy and roadblock. Both political parties tend to play games with legislation, often proposing bills they know they cannot pass just for the purpose of highlighting the other party’s reluctance to sign on. A split state legislature means that few bills pass. Every bill is a political ploy, and our kids are the collateral damage. Although we make an honest attempt to work with local legislators, the fact that we do not need or wish to play political games along with them can cause us to be at odds.

The Media Portrayal of the Opt-Out Movement as a White Suburban Mom Movement The opt-out movement has been portrayed as a white parent movement since its inception. As stated above, former U.S. Secretary of Education Arne

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Duncan dismissed parents who were against the Common Core assessments as “White suburban moms” who were panicked when their children were challenged by high standards. A 2016 national online survey about who opts out and why conducted by Oren Pizmony-Levy and Nancy Green Saraisky10 also found that about 92% of 1,641 respondents from 47 states were White, and the median household income in the online survey was $125,000. However, their sample size was fairly small, and the weakness of using online surveys through social media of opt-out groups significantly undermines the reliability and generalizability of their survey. Along with media’s misleading headings like “The whitewashing of the opt-out movement,”11 “Promoting White privilege: A look at the opt-out movement,”12 “Why some Black leaders aren’t down with opting out of standardized testing,”13 and so on, a heated discussion on whether parents should opt their kids out of state standardized tests was spurred on by testing proponents on Twitter with the hashtag #OptOutSoWhite in April 2016. However, we argue that pro-testing groups and policymakers overemphasize the involvement and contribution of white parents and intentionally create political and racial divisions. The misrepresentation of the opt-out movement as a white suburban mom’s movement renders invisible the efforts of parents of color. The opt-out movement is complicated in terms of participants’ race, gender, class, and political beliefs. While Arne Duncan and some of the mainstream media portray the opt-out movement as a white suburban moms’ movement, our interviews with urban parents of color revealed that there are multiple explanations for the difference in opt-out rates between urban and suburban schools. Though urban families may be equally concerned with the use of standardized tests, they can be even more concerned with issues regarding how low-income persons and/or students of color are treated in school, inequalities in school funding, and their own family’s issues regarding income, housing, and transportation. Rochester, for example, has the highest rate of child poverty for a mid-sized city in a state that has the most segregated schools. We can’t deny the fact that White suburban parents are more likely to opt their children out of the state tests. In fact, Pizmony-Levy and Green’s14 data show that middle-class white parents are overrepresented among the parents who opt their children out. However, to conclude that the two

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groups have significantly different views on education is misleading and perhaps racist. In interviews with women of color who do not opt their children out, they detailed their more immediate concerns. They expressed that they trust the public education system and believe the testing system at least gives them some information about how their children are doing in school as compared to their peers. They also expressed concerns about funding for their schools. As they rely more on state and federal funding, they are more worried about whether their already-underresourced schools will lose federal and state funding if they opt their children out of the state tests. We also learned that saying that these women weren’t as concerned as the White suburban moms is an oversimplification. Instead, they may have other concerns that take precedence over parent-teacher meetings or debating the strengths and weaknesses of the Common Core standards, curriculum, and assessments. Many parents have to overcome multiple barriers and challenges to become involved in the opt-out movement and their children’s education. Some urban parents work multiple jobs, have more fundamental needs such as shelter and food, lack knowledge and access to current education policies, and have had interactions with teachers and administrators that were less than welcoming. For immigrant parents, language is a barrier to involvement in their children’s education. These multiple barriers, as our Latina parent informant summarized, make every case very individual. We have not, in this book, discussed the opt-out movement in New York City, the largest city in the state, and a quick review of why it has a low opt-out rate reveals that the rate may have little to do with race and a lot to do with how large urban school districts work. Jeannette and Lisa describe some of the structural reasons why parents may not opt their children out in cities. Probably the biggest factor is that they have specialized and admissions-based schools that can make up their own admissions criteria. Also, the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), the union for New York City teachers, has been against opting out, and therefore teachers fear that their union would not back them up if they advocated for opting out or were caught telling parents the truth about the assessments. The lack of local control is yet another major obstacle. New York City, unlike almost all school boards in the country that are elected, has a board that is appointed by the mayor and is more likely to heed the views of the mayor than the parents. Teachers

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and parents have not experienced support for the opt-out movement. The fact that many New York City schools are under threat for low performance is yet another reason that testing is used as a weapon against them, and parents and teachers are always operating in fear that joining the opt-out movement will make their school an even bigger target. In addition, there are cultural and language barriers such that immigrant parents may not understand how New York’s schools work and are likely to be unfamiliar with the concept of opting out. Finally, there is a misleading narrative that high-stakes testing such as the Common Core levels the playing field for Black and Brown students, because now we know which groups of students are doing poorly.15 However, we knew that before we gave the tests by looking at NEAP scores. It is equitable resources and economic and racial integration that close the achievement gap. NCLB and the Common Core supporters believe that these tests will lead to school reforms that will improve the learning outcomes for minority children.16 Of course, we know that the exact opposite has and continues to occur. Equitable resources lead to improved outcomes. The opt-out movement, as Seattle NAACP president Gerald Hankerson notes, “is a vital component of the Black Lives Matter movement and other struggles for social justice in our region. Using standardized tests to label Black people and immigrants ‘lesser,’ while systematically under-funding their schools, has a long and ugly history in this country.”17 In addition, there is the danger of focusing too much on the test scores. Diane Ravitch describes the attention paid to standardized tests and the scores as a “purposeful distraction” presented by critics of public schools to divert our attention from the larger issues of the aims of education, what students should learn, school funding, and social and economic inequality.18 The opt-out movement has achieved a consistently high opt-out rate that makes the tests even less worthy and more harmful than they were. The tests provide almost no useful information to educators, students, and their families. In fact, as Wells19 and Koretz20 have argued, they cause more harm than good because they divert our attention from the important issues. Here we have documented the efforts of parent leaders of two organizations to disrupt the system of high-stakes testing with the goal of replacing the current system with one that focuses on the whole child and creating socially just schools.

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There are very few authentic opponents of the opt-out movement. Most organizations that oppose us are either paid lobbyists, for-profit organizations tied to testing companies, or non-profits tied to privatization and the corporate charter industry. When the print, television, and radio media are doing a story on high-stakes testing in New York, they often struggle to find dissenting voices to our cause. One such instance was a highly advertised live “debate” between myself [Jeanette] and a superintendent on Long Island on a local news outlet. As the debate began, the superintendent (one of the only known public school educators to fully support both Common Core and high-stakes testing) agreed with practically every statement I had made about the detrimental impact of the Common Core and high-stakes testing on our schools. I was later told by reporters that this was a bit embarrassing for the news station, as they had touted this as a controversial debate. Over the years, as fewer and fewer educators defend the system and oppose the movement, it has become a struggle to cover our story, particularly on Long Island. As one reporter expressed to me, “it has become hard to cover since it’s the same story every year without any opposition.” 

Media Misrepresentation of the Marginal Decline of the Opt-Out Movement Further, most of the media tend to focus on the opt-out rate rather than the goals of the opt-out movement. That is, the media tend to report the optout rate but not the larger issues of the negative consequences of high-stakes standardized testing and alternatives. Instead, they focus on the numbers and report small declines in the opt-out rate as “an existential crisis” and that the movement is “losing steam,” ignoring the fact that because each year approximately 65,000 eighth graders “age out,” and, therefore, the same number of additional students need to be recruited.21, 22 The media seem to think that numbers—such as the percentage of students “passing the Common Core” or the change in the percentage of test takers—tell us all we need to know. Every year the questions I am asked most often from reporters is: “Are the numbers going to go up? Down? What does that mean?” I often respond that it is truly no longer about the specific number from year to year. For the first few years, the numbers were crucial. We were an army beating

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against the gates, and numbers truly mattered. But over time, we earned seats at the table, shifting the importance of increasing numbers to political strategizing and influencing policies from within the system. There is certainly still importance on opt-out numbers remaining strong, as this not only demonstrates public sentiment and places power behind our efforts, but also reflects the numbers of students protected from the worst of the impacts of high-stakes testing. Each year, the voices screaming “See, it’s getting smaller!” also lose impact, since they only come from singular sources, such as the New Jersey-based “High Achievement New York” executive director and lobbying groups profiting off of high-stakes testing. Yet it is all they can point to as a result of their marketing campaigns of “say yes to the test.”  The opt-out movement in New York has developed deep roots. The media’s current reluctance to dive deep into the story beyond the surface numbers has done little to impact the continued quarter-million parents that opt out each year. Parents don’t need a newspaper article to know what the impact of high-stakes testing is on their children and their classrooms. Their children are the reporters, and they come home each day with stories of test prep and assignments that come straight off of past state assessments. The curriculum and reaction of students to it drives parents to seek us out. Although media attention over the years has certainly helped with our messaging and our exposure, it is thankfully far from being the source of our impact. 

Blaming the Victim Opt-out parents are sometimes labeled as overprotective helicopter parents who make irrational decisions. In Pizmony-Levy and Cosman’s national online survey about why people oppose the opt-out movement, respondents criticized opt-out parents thusly: “Helicopter parenting at its very worst. I think it is a terrible precedent to set with kids that they are so special they can just opt out of things.” “While I sometimes agree there are too many of these tests, I think these parents are being overprotective.” “Annoying. I can’t stand these parents. Special snowflakes that are

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so demanding. Grow the fuck up, someday your special child is going to be at a job and they will be required to follow the company’s rules and regulations, so they should get used to it now.” “Parents should go along with what the schools think is important and standardized tests are important to make sure students are not sliding by without learning anything.” “Parents are not experts on school curriculum.”23 We have described why opting out is not irrational but is instead the only choice parents have if they want to affect policy. For some parents, opting out is an effort to reclaim their right over their child’s public education. Before, when they expressed their concerns at public hearings, they consistently felt they were not heard. Therefore they turned to opting out as a means of communicating to policymakers that they should and will have a say about their children’s education. The national survey by Pizmony-Levy and Nancy Green Saraisky24 also shows that opt-out parents have specific reasons for opting their kids out of the state standardized tests that go beyond just refusing to take the tests. Their research reveals that 60% of parents opt their children out of the tests because they believe the standardized tests force teachers to teach to the tests. Approximately 73% of parents opt their children out of the state tests because of their concern over the growing role of corporations in public schools. Other parents object to the misuse of standardized tests and their negative impacts on teaching and learning and prefer that alternative methods of assessment be used.

Learning from LIOO and NYSAPE: Turning Liabilities into Strengths Both LIOO and NYSAPE are unincorporated grassroots organizations that have neither consistent sources of funding nor formal decision-making structures. This lack of a formal structure and consistent sources of funding, Jeanette and Lisa report, sometimes limits their efforts to expand the movement. Because they pay their own travel expenses, they are usually unable to attend and to present at conferences or reach out to all the school districts where lobbying in person would make a difference. In addition, because LIOO relies exclusively on volunteers, it sometimes has trouble reaching out

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to school districts that have few or no local volunteer liaisons, which limits the breadth of the movement and explains why some districts have high opt-out rates while others have modest or low opt-out rates. As described in Chapter Three, NYSAPE and LIOO face different challenges because of their different geographies. LIOO covers only two counties, making it feasible to travel in one day by car to any school district. NYSAPE is composed of 76 allied organizations throughout the state that operate independently of each other, which requires them to intentionally communicate with one another. The lack of a formal structure may make it difficult to know how to connect with the organization. Regarding NYSAPE, both Lisa and Jeanette are part of an 18-person steering committee, so replacing either one of them should be no harder than adding an additional member, which occurs regularly. However, if Jeanette were to resign, it is not clear how her responsibilities would be assumed. While lacking adequate and consistent funding sometimes makes it difficult to travel to schools and participate in conferences, it can also be a strength. As Jeanette responded regarding our questions about funding and organizing: Our lack of funding has been a blessing and a curse. In the early days of the movement, we were operating on blind passion, which drove us to do whatever it took to get the message out, no matter what personal time or expense it cost us. Time off from work, our careers, and being away from our families was the biggest expense, as social media, our primary tool, is free. Our large pool of volunteers meant that everyone shared in the monetary expenses. On Long Island, when we would hold a forum, the local optout leaders, teacher associations, and/or liaisons between the districts and LIOO would chip in and pay for photocopies or fees for meeting venues. Since each forum was “hosted” by a different district or town, volunteers only had to cover one event per year, and only if they chose to do so. When you are doing something to help your child, you don’t care about the expense. Parents operate selflessly when it comes to their kids, and our efforts were a perfect example of this. Volunteers around the state would often fully engage for a time, and then eventually slow down or fade to the background, while others would step up and take their place. The core leaders have generally remained the same, with four or five of us that began this movement still actively engaged.

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However, the year we raised additional funding through a “Go Fund Me” campaign, our numbers exploded. The corporate reformers had begun to infuse millions of dollars into an “opt IN” campaign, hiring marketing firms to push their agenda.25 In response, we raised enough money to pay for a billboard upstate, a radio ad, and a billboard truck to drive around Long Island. Individual parents, educators, and local teacher associations contributed to this fundraising campaign, with the money going directly back into our own amateur marketing campaign. There is no way to know if this was the primary factor in the opt-out numbers jumping to more than a quarter of a million students that year, but it definitely had a big impact. While funding dramatically increases our visibility, it can also change the perception of who we are and what our organization is. Our lack of funding has been our strength. We have been David fighting Goliath. The underdogs fighting against bullies of the worst kind. Corporate greed fighting against moms and dads. The media has been fascinated by this mismatch in funding and political power, and therefore covered (and covered favorably) our stories, creating a groundswell of excitement when we were clearly winning the public opinion war in such a mismatched fight. Our lack of funding has also insulated us from some attacks and threats. We have nothing to lose. We have no corporate connections that need to be protected, so we don’t need to play nice with the web of funding sources in which so many nonprofits are caught. We don’t owe anyone anything, we ask for nothing, and we have no one to fear. We say what we want, criticize those we need to, and are able to do what’s right without fear. That is the power of an organization built on volunteers. While we may not be able to match their heavily financed marketing schemes, we use our talents, passion, and time to put up a fight no one ever expected. However, grassroots organizations face a dilemma when it comes to expanding beyond their basic goals—specifically, some may agree with the additional goals, and some may not. For example, Jeanette recalled that when she started to speak up for gun control, she received tons of backlash, with people screaming, “Why are we talking about this? This is an opt-out page. Why are you discussing something like this?” She continued: Every time something like that comes up, you have to make the decision, is this issue important enough to sacrifice a handful—or maybe even ten percent—of the opt-out population? I have to make a decision on sacrificing

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some opt-out support for other things that I personally feel significantly affect our schools. It’s just too important, and I can’t always put opt-out numbers and opt-out support before some of these other really crucial issues. We had the same thing with charter schools. Some parents don’t want to discuss charter schools because they’re Republican and say their legislator supports charters, and they want to support it, too, because that’s politically where they are. It’s a constant decision: how far out of the realm of just opt out do we go? Not all of us agree. In the concluding pages of this book we assert that the opt-out movement, if it is to make a lasting difference, needs to explicitly take on broader issues such as neoliberal funding cuts in social services and the privatization of education through charter schools and corporate development of curriculum and tests. We realize that expanding the aims to include other issues such as social service spending may not be of interest to some, but we think such a broadening of goals is crucial.

From the Opt-Out Tests to Whole-Child and Social Justice Schools Not all exams are high stakes, but because the Common Core exams are intended as a major part of the evaluation of teachers and students, they are high stakes. In addition, we are critical of the Common Core exams because, contrary to what proponents claim, they cannot serve as a diagnostic tool for either teaching or learning, and, as with most standardized exams, student test scores largely reflect their family income. The tests consume a lot of time and tell us little beyond what we already know. Moreover, they mislead us and contribute to economic and racial segregation. Because proponents mis-portray the exams as objective assessments of what students know rather than how well they know a limited White and middle-class range of information, the public generally assumes that the scores indicate the quality of the teachers and students. Further, they conclude that low test scores indicate that the teachers aren’t very good, rather than that the families are financially challenged. Consequently, families with some financial means may choose to live in the most expensive neighborhoods they can afford, hoping to have “better schools” for their children but contributing to economic and racial segregation. Therefore, as Wells26 describes, the Common Core (along with other similar exams) exacerbates the

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economic and racial differences between schools. In sum, not only does the Common Core not contribute to closing the achievement gap, it increases it.

Beyond the Opt-Out Movement In this last section we argue that the opt-out movement needs to broaden its goals and the means of achieving them. Throughout this book we have critiqued the Common Core curriculum and exams and personalized learning for the ways in which they narrow the curriculum and marginalize students, teachers, parents, and the community. In this last chapter we acknowledge that it is not enough to critique what exists. We also need to radically change it. Therefore, we extend our argument that we need to develop social justice schools that promote the whole child. Our view is that the opt-out movement is the first player in what will be an ongoing battle over who will control what takes place in schools: educators who have studied curriculum content and how students learn in creating curriculum appropriate for children in their schools, or corporations that enter algorithms into computers for students to follow a path developed by someone unknown to the teacher, student, or family. Developing institutions that support the whole child will require schools in which the curriculum is designed by teachers and other educators working together. For example, in Chapter Four, Hursh described teaching elementary and secondary students about environmental health, which included lessons on pet waste, lead poisoning, water pollution in the local environment, and local history. This curriculum was collaboratively designed by fifth grade classroom teachers, scientists in public health, high school biology teachers, and professors in elementary education. We need schools in which teachers and students actively raise questions and seek answers to the essential issues of our time: climate change, social and educational inequality, health, and on and on.27, 28 Similarly, Shane Wiegand, a fourth grade teacher in suburban Rochester, New York, designs his own units for fourth-grade New York history. His first unit focused on redlining, the process by which northern cities became segregated as parts of each city was marked off—redlined— limiting where southern Blacks moving north can live. Such actions resulted in racial, economic, and housing segregation and limited the ability of Blacks

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to create home equity. Wiegand has developed many other units on related subjects, such as post-World War II prejudice in Rochester against people of color. His place-based curriculum taught students about the political and economic construction of where they live, something for-profit edu-businesses are unlikely to do because it raises questions about the corporation’s goals and political interests. We also advocate that the opt-out movement needs to form alliances with other progressive grassroots organizations in order to push back against neoliberal economic, social, and educational reforms. Here we note that at the same time as resistance to the Common Core exams has been rising, so has the teacher revolt against neoliberal policies that cut funding for public education while increasing the number of and funding for charter schools. We also suggest that many of the problems we face as a society—such as increasing economic and racial inequality, climate change, and toxins in our environment—are a result of our neoliberal policies, and, therefore, an adequate response requires that we rethink not only our education policies but also our political and economic ones. We will need to create new ways to connect environmental, economic, and political policies. Therefore, even if high-stakes testing such as the Common Core were to end tomorrow, thinking through these different issues and developing the path forward is going to require ongoing analysis and action. We argue that the opt-out movement has not reached its potential but needs to become stronger by taking on more issues and calling for radical change. We suggest that education requires humans to teach and learn from one another. The opt-out movement suggests that parents, teachers, students, and community members can work together to achieve democratic schools and society.

Endnotes 1

Hassard, J. (2014, March 15). Why Bill Gates defends the Common Core. The Art of Teaching Science. Retrieved from http://www.artofteachingscience.org/why-billgates-defends-the-common-core/

2

Blanc, E. (2019). Red state revolt: The teachers’ strikes and working-class politics. Brooklyn, NY: Verso.

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3

Blanc (2019), Red state revolt.

4

New York State Education Department. (n.d.). Betty A. Rosa biography. Retrieved from https://www.regents.nysed.gov/members/rosa-betty

5

Cluckey, K. (2016, March 21). Chancellor-elect Rosa speaks in favor of test opt out. Politico. Retrieved from https://www.politico.com/states/new-york/albany/story/2016/03/chancellor-elect-rosa-speaks-in-favor-of-test-opt-out-032591

6

Sharp, B., & Murphy, J. (2019, May 23). Emails outline state plan to oust RCSD school board. Democrat & Chronicle. Retrieved from https://www.democratandchronicle. com/story/news/education/2019/05/23/rcsd-school-board-takeover-board-of-regentsplan-lovely-warren-rochester-ny/1205654001/

7

The New York State Senate. (2019, April 29). Senate Bill S5394, 2019–2020 legislative session: Enacts the right to opt out of high-stakes testing act. Retrieved from https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2019/s5394

8

Strauss, V. (2016, January 28). U.S. Education Department threatens to sanction states over test opt-outs. The Washington Post. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost. com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2016/01/28/u-s-education-department-threatens-to-sanction-states-over-test-opt-outs/

9

Lockport Union-Sun & Journal. (2016, June 9). Schools miss out due to state testing opt-outs. Retrieved from http://www.lockportjournal.com/news/local_news/schoolsmiss-out-due-to-state-testing-opt-outs/article_1b855eba-ad97-5ade-97e5-c9deeaeba298.html

10 Pizmony-Levy, O., & Green Saraisky, N. (2016). Who opts out and why? Results from a national survey on opting out of standardized tests. New York: Teachers College Press. 11 Quinlan, C. (2016, April 11). The whitewashing of the opt-out movement. Think Progress. Retrieved from https://thinkprogress.org/the-whitewashing-of-the-opt-outmovement-73e3e1c689b/ 12 Hairston, S. (2017, October 9). Promoting white privilege: A look at the opt-out movement. Forum of the American Journal of Education. Retrieved from http:// www.ajeforum.com/promoting-white-privilege-a-look-at-the-opt-out-movementby-sarah-l-hairston/ 13 Williams, J. (2016, April 6). Why some black leaders aren’t down with opting out of standardized testing. Takepart. Retrieved from http://www.takepart.com/article/2016/04/06/black-leaders-not-down-with-opt-out-standardized-testing 14 Pizmony-Levy & Green Saraisky (2016), Who opts out and why?

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15 Hursh, D. (2013). Raising the stakes: High-stakes testing and the attack on public education in New York. Journal of Education Policy, 28(5), 574–588. 16 Hursh, D. (2007). Assessing No Child Left Behind and the rise of neoliberal education policies. American Educational Research Journal, 44(3), 493–518. 17 NYC Opt Out. (n.d.). Race, class, and opt out. Retrieved from https://www.optoutnyc. com/race-class-opt-out 18 Ravitch, D. (2014, September 10). The crisis in our schools: Is there a future for public education? East High School, Rochester, New York. 19 Wells, A.S. (2019, April 7). An inconvenient truth about the new Jim Crow of education. 2019 American Education Research Association Presidential Address, Toronto, CA. 20 Koretz, D. (2018). The testing charade: Pretending to make schools better. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. 21 Bakeman, J. (2018, January 10). The rise and fade of education’s “opt out” movement. Medium. Retrieved from https://medium.com/s/new-school/the-rise-and-fade-of-educations-opt-out-movement-13250787e7f4 22 Harper, A. (2018, July 25). Opt-out movement losing momentum. Education Dive. Retrieved from https://www.educationdive.com/news/opt-out-movement-losing-momentum/528576/ 23 Pizmony-Levy, O., & Cosman, B. (2017). How Americans view the Opt Out movement. New York: Teachers College Press, p. 27. 24 Pizmony-Levy & Green Saraisky (2016), Who opts out and why? 25 South Bronx School. (2015, April 22). The truth about high achievement New York. Retrieved from http://southbronxschool.blogspot.com/2015/04/the-truth-about-highachievement-new.html 26 Wells (2019), An inconvenient truth about the new Jim Crow of education. 27 Hursh, D., Henderson, J., & Greenwood, D. (2015). Environmental education in a neoliberal climate. Environmental Education Research, 21(3), 299–318. 28 Hursh, D.W., Martina, C.A., Trush, M.A., & Davis, H.B. (2011). Teaching environmental health to children: An interdisciplinary approach. New York: Springer.

RESOURCES

Resources on High-Stakes Testing and the Opt-Out Movement Websites: Class Size Matters - www.classsizematters.org/ Diane Ravitch's blog - https://dianeravitch.net/ Fair Test: The national center for fair & open testing - www.fairtest.org/ Long Island Opt Out Info facebook page - www.facebook.com/groups/Longislandoptout/ Long Island Opt Out website - https://lioptout.org/ Network for Public Education - http://networkforpubliceducation.org/ NYS Allies for Public Education - www.nysape.org/ NYC public school parents: Independent voices of New York City public school parents nycpublicschoolparents.blogspot.com/ Parents Across America - http://parentsacrossamerica.org/ Parent Coalition for Student Privacy - https://www.studentprivacymatters.org/ Rethinking Schools - www.rethinkingschools.org United Opt Out National - http://www.unitedoptoutnational.org/

Books: Common Core Dilemma: Who Owns Our Schools?. by Mercedes K. Schneider (2015). New York: Teachers College Press. More than a score: The new uprising against high-stakes testing by Jesse Hagopian (2014). Chicago: Haymarket Books.

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Testing and the Decline of Teaching and Learning: The Real Crisis in Education By David W. Hursh, D. (2008). High-Stakes Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. The End of Public Schools: The Corporate Reform Agenda to Privatize Education by David W. Hursh (2017). New York: Routledge. The Testing Charade: Pretending to Make Schools Better by Daniel M. Koretz (2017). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Videos: Jeanette Deutermann, Teachers Make a Difference https://youtu.be/UNYPDGEUYCw Network for Public Education Video Series: 8 powerful voices for public education https://networkforpubliceducation.org/9931-2/ \ A Call to Action - Standing Together to Save Public Education https://youtu.be/kmbkm0Jm-zI AERA 2019: Presidential address: Amy Stuart Wells. (2019, May). An inconvenient truth about the new Jim Crow of education. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=6kkLDhULMsI&t=2308s High-stakes testing and the demise of teaching (2014, May). University of Rochester’s Mel Talks at Meliora Weekend October 12, 2013, in the Louis Alexander Palestra, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIQu2Hh_YkI New Zealand Education Institute Taking stock, moving forward. (January 2013). The annual meeting of the New Zealand teachers’ union. Presentations by David Berliner, Barbar Comer, David Hursh, Bob Lingard, Martin Thrupp, https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=hW4vZGsLiL4 Opting Out: the story of the parents’ grassroots movement to achieve whole child public schools. (2018, March). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkRyMd491y0&t=2s The takeover of public education. (2016, May). University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand, https://www.waikato.ac.nz/wmier/news-events/prof-david-hursh-onthe-takeover-of-public-education

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

David Hursh is a professor in education at the Warner School, the University of Rochester. He has researched, written, and taught about numerous aspects of education, including neoliberalism and environmental health. Over the last several years he has focused on the politics of high-stakes testing and written two books: High-Stakes Testing and the Decline of Teaching and Learning: The Real Crisis in Education (2008) and The End of Public Schools: The Corporate Reform Agenda to Privatize Education (2016). He is an associate editor of the Journal of Education Policy. Jeanette Deutermann is the volunteer director and administrator of Long Island Opt Out and the co-founder of NYS Allies for Public Education (NYSAPE). She holds a BS degree from SUNY Brockport and lives in Bellmore, Long Island, with her husband and two children. Lisa Rudley is a founding member and volunteer executive director of NYS Allies for Public Education (NYSAPE). She currently lives in Briarcliff Manor, New York, with her family. She serves on the Ossining School District board and oversees investment operations at 5C Capital Management, LLC. Lisa holds an MBA from Fordham University. Zhe Chen is an international student from China pursuing doctoral studies in teaching & Ccurriculum at the University of Rochester. She holds two master’s degrees, one in International Education from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the other in education policy from the University of Rochester. Her research interests focus on educational policy in China, the United States, and elsewhere. Sarah McGinnis is originally from Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. She received her undergraduate degree from Houghton College, New York, and her master’s from the University of Rochester, where she discovered the world of educational research. She is currently a doctoral student at the University of Ottawa. 119

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Amy Stuart Wells is a Professor and the Director of the Sociology and Education Program at Teachers College, Columbia University. She also directs several research projects, including The Public Good, a Public School Support Organization (PSSO) that applies educational research to help sustain equitable and socially just integrated K-12 schools. Wells was the 2018-19 President of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), one of the largest research associations in the world. Wells’ research examines the intersection of racial inequality and educational policies. Her most recent publication is Wells, A.S.; Cordova-Cobo, D.; Keener, A. and Cabral, L. (in press, December 2019). “The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same: The Resegregation of Public Schools via Charter School Reform.” The Peabody Journal of Education.

INDEX

999 code, 11, 53 95% participation requirement on state tests, 98, 100 #OptOutSoWhite, 103 A Academic Intervention Service (AIS), 83 accountability, 1, 58, 84, 85 achieve 3000, 82, 83 achievement gap, 1, 20, 22, 33, 75, 105, 112 Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), 2, 30, 31, 34 AIMSweb, 82 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), 2 Annual Performance Professional Review (APPR), 55, 59 a score of 1 to 4, 6, 33, 59, 98 B Black Lives Matter movement, 105 Board of Regents, 3, 20, 21, 28, 29, 41, 51, 55, 58, 66, 67, 70, 97, 102 Broad, Eli, 58, 86 Brooks, David, 36 Brookville, NY, 39 Brown, Andrew, Regent, 40, 58, 105 Burns, Ken, documentary filmmaker, 29, 89 Burris, Carol, 13 Bush, George W., 31 C Cala, Bill, 29, 39 Cerrone, Chris, 10, 18 charter schools, 2, 17, 21, 22, 32, 38, 52, 57, 58, 70, 71, 75, 97, 98, 111, 113, 120 charter school teaching certificates, 70 Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), 36 Coleman, David, 36 Common Core Inc., 79 computational thinking, 83 Core Knowledge Foundation, 79 Cuomo, Andrew, 3, 39, 57, 58, 69 cut scores, 19, 30, 33, 34

D data-driven instruction, 83 decision making, in contrast to community-based or democracydriven decision making, 84 deprofessionalization, 20, 77 Dewey, John, 22, 84, 85 diploma, Regents, 2, 21, 28, 29 local, 2, 89 non-Regents, 2, 28 Duncan, Arne, 4, 5, 37, 38, 102, 103 E Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESSA), 29, 60 Elia, Maryellen, 67 EngageNY, 38, 59, 79 Environmental Protection Agency, 90 Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), 28, 100 Expeditionary Learning Group, 79 F Facebook, 12-15, 20, 47, 49, 53, 60, 63, 65, 97 Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), 86, 87 Ford, Gerald, 86 G “gag order”, 38 Gates, Bill, 36, 37, 58, 78, 81, 82, 85, 88, 96, 107 “Go Fund Me” campaign, 61, 110 grassroots advocacy, 86, 87 movement, 20, 47, 63, 96, 97, 115 H Haimson, Leonie, 13, 18, 78, 86, 87 Hassard, Jack, 36 helicopter parenting, 107 High Achievement New York, 107

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high-stakes tests, 22, 29,33, 106, 107 justify school choices, 27 narrowing and simplifying the curriculum, 27 undermining teaching and learning, 27 Hilton, New York, 89 “How People Learn”, 76 Hursh, David, 19, 28, 88, 89, 90, 91, 112 Hynes, Michael, 71 I inBloom, 17, 18, 76, 78, 85, 87 inclusion class, 16, 17 individual learning, 76 individualized education plans (IEP), 86 iReady, 82 J Jim Crow, 20, 76 in education, 31 K King, John, 5, 8, 19, 38, 39, 40, 55, 57, 58, 59, 67, 79 Koretz, Daniel, 105 L liaisons, 14, 48, 49, 51, 56, 65, 109 Linn, Robert, 33 “listening tour,” 38, 58, 59 local school boards, 39, 49, 55, 60, 65, 66, 96, 104 Long Island, 13, 15, 20, 55, 62, 67, 106, 109, 110 Nassau County, 48, 51 Suffolk County, 51, 55, 77 Long Island Opt Out (LIOO), 1, 13, 14, 47, 48, 51, 53, 57, 63, 69, 70, 97, 98, 101, 108, 109 longitudinal student education data system, 17, 36, 86-88 M Magee, Karen, 39 Martina, Camille, 90, 91 Max, 15, 16, 17 Measures of Academic Progress (MAP), 9, 82 “Metropolitan Area Planning Association (MAPA) Who?”, 88, 89 Microsoft, 37 Mihelbergel, Eric, 18

Opting Out

Mills, Richard, 28, 34 “More Than a Score” forum, 13, 14, 56 N National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), 35 National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), 90 New Paltz, NY, 18 New York State Allies for Public Education (NYSAPE), 1, 15, 18, 19, 39, 40, 47, 51, 53, 56, 57, 60, 64, 70, 97, 98, 101, 108, 109 New York State Education Department (NYSED), 2, 8, 34, 40, 41, 51, 55, 60, 79, 100, 102 New York State legislature, 98 New York State Senate Bill 5394, 98-100 New York State United Teacher (NYSUT), 39, 49 Next Generation Standards, 37, 40 Nixon, Cynthia, 69 No Child Left Behind (NCLB), 2, 3, 28-32, 34-36, 105 Noble, Safiya, Umoja, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism, 84 non-union states, 63 Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA), 9, 82, 83 O Obama administration, 2, 17, 31, 36 organizing horizontally, 20, 55 organizing vertically, 20, 55 Ontario, Canada, 37 opt-out rates, 1, 4, 18, 20, 62, 100, 103-106, 109 “opt IN” campaign, 110 P “paint the road red for ed,” 62 Parent Teacher Association (PTA), 11, 17, 48, 49, 52, 96 Partnership for the Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC), 3, 17 Pearson, 3, 37, 41, 58, 59, 76, 79, 80 Performance Standards Consortium Schools, 29, 89 personal learning, 76

IN D E X

personalized learning, 2, 4, 21, 75, 76, 77, 78, 80, 81, 82, 83, 85 Physical, Emotional, Academic, and Social learning (PEAS), 71 Pittsford, NY, 39 private corporations taking over schools, 75 taking over what occurs in schools, 75 privatization, 32, 52, 59, 70, 84, 97, 106, 111 professional development, teachers, 16, 79, 80 Public Consulting Group, 79 Q Questar, 3, 37, 41, 76, 79, 80 R Race to the Top (RTTT), 1, 6, 17, 28, 30, 31, 36, 52, 87 Ravitch, Diane test scores as “purposeful distraction”, 105, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education, 34 “red for ed”, 62, 97 Regents exam, the first of in New York State, 27 graduation requirement, 28 physics, 34 Rella, Joseph, 55, 56 resource room, 16 Rochester City School District, childhood poverty, 20 Rosa, Betty, 21, 67, 70, 97, 98 S School Without Walls, Rochester, NY, 29, 89 scientific method, 80 Seattle NAACP, 105 sit and stare policy, 57, 98,100, 101 Skinner, B.F., 80 Smyth, John, 22 Sobol, Thomas, 29 social media, 10, 18, 20, 21, 47, 48, 54, 56, 57, 61, 62, 63, 66, 69, 96, 101, 103, 109 socially-just schools, 22, 47, 105 Special Education Parent Teacher Association, 48-49

123

Spencerport, NY, 39 standardized testing is a civil right, 32 provides parents objective data, 32, 35 State Council of Superintendents, 34 student-level education data, 86 Sunrise Learning Academy, 9 SUNY Charter School Committee, 21, 70, 71 T Taylor, Frederick Winslow, 80 teacher, evaluation based on test scores, 7, 31, 36, 53, 59, 98 teacher strikes, 21, 97 Teachout, Zephyr, 69 Tisch, Merryl, 5, 21, 33, 38-40, 55, 57-59, 66, 67, 98 tracking, 28 Tyler, 6-9, 11, 47 U United Federation of Teachers, 102, 104 U.S. Department of Education, 14, 87, 100 V vaccines, 15, 16 volunteers, 14, 48, 51, 61, 62, 108, 109, 110 W Walton family, 58, 85 Weingarten, David, 89 Wells, Amy, 20, 79, 105, 111 2019 American Educational Research Association (AERA) presidential address, 76 Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE), 88 whole child, 4, 22, 47, 51, 56, 71, 105, 111, 112 Wiegand, Shane, 112 Winerip, Michael, 35 Women’s March, 21