nothin BOE Members: In With Testing “Opt Out” | New Haven Independent

BOE Members: In With Testing Opt Out”

Christopher Peak Photo

Tamiko Jackson-McArthur (pictured) proposes opt-out plan.

Responding to a local effort by parents who don’t want their kids to participate in high-stakes testing, school board members say they’re interested in creating a formal opt-out” policy.

Tamiko Jackson-McArthur, a Board of Education member who pulled her own kids from the state-mandated exams, proposed that idea at a Governance Committee meeting Tuesday night at the district’s Meadow Street headquarters.

She participated in last week’s panel discussion, organized by parents and teachers with NHPS Advocates, on what New Haven should do about the standardized tests that seem to take up so much of the school year.

Emily Hays Photo

Panelists discuss “breaking up with testing” at NHPS Advocates’ event last week.

Like most states, Connecticut doesn’t actually have a specific legal mechanism for parents to opt out” of standardized tests.

The law says that each student, enrolled in grades three to eight inclusive, and grade ten or eleven, in any public school shall, annually, in March or April, take a mastery examination in reading, writing and mathematics.”

That ambiguity is part of the reason why New Haven’s board members said at Tuesday’s committee meting they’re interested in creating their own opt-out” procedure for the district.

Right now the district has no real stance around the opt-out’ movement that parents are taking,” said Jackson-McArthur, the committee co-chair. We do have a number of parents who have taken the option of opting their children out of high-stakes testing. We need, as a district, to be able to support those children. Because opt-out kids, when we’re reviewing and teaching about the test, they’re not participating in that.”

Where are these kids? I hope they’re not listening to music in the corner. They have been doing work,” Jackson-McArthur added. Their assessments are different: I call them local tests, created by the teacher and team within the school.”

Parents and teachers ponder a “boycott.”

Nationwide, a growing number of parents are saying that they’re done with high-stakes testing, which became far more important after the Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind Act.

Reformers argue that standardized tests are an important way to see how schools measure up, giving parents — especially in poverty-stricken, racially isolated cities — an advocacy tool to demand that their classrooms look more like the ones in wealthier, whiter suburbs.

Lower participation rates could throw off the accuracy of those numbers, especially when looking at disparities by sub-group.

But critics respond that standardized tests take up too much time, without really measuring the things that parents want to know.

Jack Schneider, a professor from the University of Massachusetts at Lowell who wrote a book on standardized testing, said that those assessments often describe less about what teachers are doing in class than about what students are dealing with after dismissal.

We essentially rank-order schools by wealth and pretend we are talking about quality,” Schneider recently said on the Integrated Schools podcast.

As a parent himself, Schneider said, I care about a lot about the degree to which all those kids in the school are engaged in what they’re learning: Are they being challenged? Do their teachers respect them? Do they feel like they have strong relationships?”

None of that usually comes through with bubbled-in answers to literacy and numeracy questions, he said.

Christopher Peak Photo

Sarah Miller: Take the argument to the state.

New Haven’s students have complained that those tests reduce them to a data point, while they also pressure teachers to model their lessons around what’s going to be on the year-end exam. That’s led some high schools, like Metropolitan Business Academy, to try out alternatives for finals, though most still participate in the state-mandated tests.

More than 99 percent of the district’s elementary-school students take the state-wide Smarter Balanced test every year, with only slightly lower rates at Worthington Hooker, Columbus Family Academy, Nathan Hale School, West Rock STREAM Academy and Betsy Ross Arts Magnet.

But only 93 percent of high-school juniors take the SAT, largely because of lower participation at the two comprehensive high schools, James Hillhouse and Wilbur Cross.

At a Teaching & Learning Committee meeting last October, board members reviewed the district’s two-and-a-half page calendar of assessments. It showed that New Haven administers almost three dozen different standardized tests each year, starting with the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS) in kindergarten through the Advanced Placement (AP) exams in high school.

An external curriculum audit said that New Haven does not have a coordinated, district-wide approach to selecting assessment tools, implementing them, and using their results to inform instruction, evaluate programs, and improve effectiveness of services across the system.”

Who actually benefits from this?” Jackson-McArthur said a parent asked at the NHPS Advocates panel. No one could really answer.”

Matt Wilcox: Testing alone didn’t deliver.

Darnell Goldson, an elected board member who said he’d also opted his daughter out of the tests because they put so much pressure” on kids, took the discussion even farther.

What if the board took a position that we wanted to push more education around opt out’? To let parents know we kind of supported the opt-out’ movement?” he said. What would happen?”

Sarah Miller, a Columbus School parent who’s a member of the NHPS Advocates, said that the district could create a new model of assessment.

We can change what the rules are,” she said.

Miller pointed to New Hampshire, whose state education officials obtained a waiver to pilot locally-created, competency-based assessments. Rather than filling out scantrons, students submitted research papers or solved complex, multi-step problems.

New Haven could go to the commissioner and say, We want to pilot performance-based assessment. We want do thing differently here. Give us a five-year window,’” she said. We have to just have the vision and make the argument.”

Lets get the vision and make the argument,” Goldson said.

Matt Wilcox, another board member, said New Haven could also take steps now to deprioritize the annual test results, so a principal doesn’t feel the pressure to move a number on a test.”

We all had standardized tests when we were kids. You showed up, you took it, the results went somewhere and that was it. They didn’t spend a certain amount of time preparing for them,” he said. We have control, collectively, over how much time the district spends: Is this test going to take not only the two hours it takes to administer it or six weeks to prepare for it?”

Wilcox said he agreed that a new district policy could set clearer parameters” for what opting-out means, spelling out what the alternatives will be while a student’s classmates are all taking the tests.

The Every Student Succeeds Act, the Obama administration’s update to federal education law, does allow states to ditch their year-end tests, like Smarter Balanced, for multiple statewide interim assessments” over the course of the year, in what’s closer to a quiz.

Theoretically, that could include a review of portfolios of work, but it would still need to give valid, reliable and transparent information on student achievement or growth,” the federal law says — a requirement that’s stopped all but four states from pursuing alternatives.

A spokesperson for the Connecticut State Department of Education did not respond to emailed questions on Wednesday afternoon.

The state agency has told the federal government that, to comply with the Every Student Succeeds Act, it will downgrade schools that don’t meet the required 95 percent participation rate.

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