Great Barrington — In 2015, nearly 650,000 elementary and secondary school students across the United States opted out of taking high-stakes standardized tests. New York State led the pack in last year’s incipient movement, with more than 200,000 refusals, representing 20 percent of the eligible third through eighth grade student population, followed by just over 100,000 students in New Jersey. In 2015 Massachusetts’ numbers did not make last year’s list. There are indications that this year they might.
The fifteen attendees at a lively, wide-ranging community meeting on Saturday afternoon at Berkshire South Regional Community Center came together to learn about the opt-out movement gaining steam in the state, just as MCAS season approaches later this month. At the meeting were local mothers, teachers, school committee members, as well as a couple of out of town guests who have built up an opt-out campaign at their own school. The meeting was convened by Kristin Homeyer Canzone of New Marlborough, and its guest star was Barbara Madeloni, who was elected president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association in May, 2014 and who runs the University of Massachusetts high school teacher training program.
Sanzone was one of Madeloni’s 67 student teachers who made national news in the spring of 2012 for refusing to participate in a new teacher licensing assessment being piloted by Stanford University and its corporate partner, the nation’s largest testing services provider, Pearson. Madeloni’s students had been asked as part of the assessment to send to Pearson a 40-page take-home test and two ten-minute videos of themselves teaching. Sanzone felt those things, “should be kept in the classroom, among my peers, teachers and mentors, and not sent off to a corporation.” That successful boycott — the Pearson teacher licensing assessment has not been adopted by Massachusetts schools to date — was Sanzone’s first experience with civil disobedience. After realizing her own eight-year-old daughter’s fear of the third grade was related to taking the MCAS test, she geared up for another go at it.
This year, public school districts this year in Massachusetts have the choice of administering Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS), the same test they have been using since 2001 to assess progress in English and Math for students in third through eighth grades, or switching to the Partnership for the Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, or PARCC, test, which is aligned with the Common Core standards set out by President Obama’s Department of Education. States individually contract with Pearson Education in the development and scoring of the PARCC tests, at a cost of about $25 per student. In the 2014-15 school year, eleven states and the District of Columbia participated in PARCC.
Locally, Berkshire Hills Regional School District (BHRSD) has opted to stick with MCAS for the high school, and for science in the middle school science, and PARCC for grades 3 through 8. South Berkshire Regional School District (SBRSD) has opted to pilot the more rigorous PARCC test, but uses MCAS for 10th grade. Districts in the PARCC pilot cohort will be “held harmless” this year and next, meaning that there will be no threat of negative consequences for PARCC-implementing schools whose students perform poorly on the test or don’t take the test at all, and their teachers’ effectiveness will not be assessed based on test scores.
It is not legally required for public school students to take standardized tests, the only exception being the 10th grade MCAS tests, without which a student’s ability to graduate from high school may be jeopardized. But while it is not illegal to opt out, for many of the parents in the room at Berkshire South, it is a daunting prospect.
Sanzone, even with her firsthand evidence of victorious rebellion, was afraid of making her daughter an outlier. “I didn’t know anyone else opting out except a family in Eastern Massachusetts, who was keeping quiet about it.” When she decided to reach out to other parents and organize a more collective refusal, she contacted her old professor, who’d lost her job at UMass only to win the top spot at the teachers’ union. She agreed to come out to answer questions from parents wary of going out on an untried limb.
As an introduction to the opt-out movement, Madeloni showed a YouTube video titled “When you refuse.” It was a speech by Jeannette Deutermann, the Long Island mother and activist who launched last year’s opt-out campaign in New York. Her speech encouraged parents to take a broad view, to look beyond their own children’s interests. Deutermann, according to Madeloni, “told herself she could quietly go about her business and opt her own children out of test-taking, but decided to act on behalf of other people’s kids.” To watch the video, click links below:
According to the New York Times, the opt-out movement in that state was strongest among wealthier districts. Only 2 percent of New York City students opted out, and those who did were concentrated in more affluent neighborhoods like Park Slope in Brooklyn. Keeping the most disadvantaged students on everyone’s radar is one key argument that test proponents make in favor of rigorous testing. As the chancellor of New York’s Board of Regents, Merryl Tisch, put it last year, “Without an annual testing program, the progress of our neediest students may be ignored or forgotten, leaving these students to fall further behind.” In the end the state decided to give the opt out parents “a wide berth” and to date there has not been news of any New York state schools suffering adverse consequences as a result of their reduced testing result numbers.
It remains to be seen how broad and diverse the Massachusetts opt out effort will be, and it remains to be seen if there will be any adverse consequences for schools that have high opt-out rates. Swift River Elementary School in New Salem, with 161 Pre K to Grade 6 students, has been getting attention from the MTA and other districts around the state for its unified front in support of families to choose opt out of the PARCC test this spring. Kelley Sullivan, principal of Swift River, attended the Saturday meeting, along with one of her teachers, Danika Tyminski.
Since last year, when grumblings started among Swift River staff about not having enough bodies to both administer the test and carry on with regular business, momentum has been building from the school committee on down to provide information to parents about opting out of PARCC. Sullivan credits her school committee chairwoman, Johanna Bartlett, with creating a safe space for others to unify around the issue. Bartlett is firmly opposed to the PARCC test.
Both Sullivan and Tyminski agreed that the PARCC test their students took last year was developmentally inappropriate for their students. Third graders, she said, were being asked to complete reading passages that were at a 7th grade level.
Louise Law, Director of Elementary Education for Union #38/Frontier Regional School District, recently wrote in a widely circulated blog post that originally appeared on the website “leadinggreatlearning.com,” that one PARCC test “required fourth grade students to respond to questions based on reading passages from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum. According to the widely used Lexile measures of text difficulty, Baum’s famous book has a readability score of 1030, which means that these passages are suitable for an average eighth grader.”
Sullivan said that some of the students in her school opened the test booklet and laughed out loud at the impossibility of the task set before them, which was more heartening a sight than that of the “four or five students who sob uncontrollably” every time they have to take a standardized test. Sullivan said about the test developers, “They should have been paying students to take PARCC because it was such a huge strain on them.”
The local parents who came out for the meeting did not have anything against testing per se. As Maria Rundle of Monterey, whose children attend the New Marlborough School, pointed out, “This isn’t about being anti-assessment. We agree. Assessment is good and healthy.” Attendees, too, for the most part, had never taken issue before with the MCAS test, and were brand new to the idea of opting out. Many felt moved to take action for the emotional well-being of one of more of their children. Echoing the feelings of many moms in attendance, Robin Curletti of Housatonic said, “I have one child who will be fine with taking the test, and another who will not. I’m here to protect her.” A few parents were not clear who made the decisions about who got tested, how often, or why, and didn’t know who received their child’s test scores apart from the parents and school.
Joyce Schneider said that her father, a retired high school principal, and his wife, a retired elementary school principal, both advocate for opting out of standardized tests. “They think it is the only way to affect change,” Schneider said. She was already convinced that opting her son out of the PARCC test was the right thing to do, but came to the meeting to educate herself with arguments for those who would question her decision, or who might be convinced to join her.
Schneider also wanted to know, “Are there going to be funding repercussions? How will this come back to the district?” Madeloni responded to these concerns, which were shared by all the parents present, by referring to the MTA fact sheet she’d brought along. The fact sheet claims that, “Although parents have been told that schools could lose money, no school anywhere has lost a dime.” No New York school lost federal or state money as a result of last year’s massive opt-out campaign, and neither did other states with big opt-out numbers.
The less clear cut issue is how schools could be hurt in other, less direct ways. To answer that question, Madeloni first discussed the origin of high stakes testing in the No Child Left Behind Act, which President George W. Bush signed into law three days into his presidency.
“Prior to 2001, you could graduate from high school without the 10th grade MCAS.” (In 2001, some students at Monument Mountain Regional High School organized their own small boycott of the new test, Rundle mentioned. Opting out is not a new idea.) As the required benchmarks set by No Child Left Behind morphed into the opt-in, sticks and carrots system offered by President Obama and former Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s Race To The Top initiative, participating schools in participating states, including Massachusetts, came to be categorized as Level 1 through Level 5, with 1 being the best, and 5 the worst. (Last spring, Holyoke was forced to relinquish local control of their schools when the district was classified Level 5.
Schools are scored according to how well they meet goals for raising the achievement levels of students, especially “high needs” students. (According to the Massachusetts Department of Education, high needs students are either low income [according to eligibility for a free or reduced lunch], economically disadvantaged [according to their eligibility for a range of public assistance programs], and/or an English Language Learner, former English Language Learners, and/or have a disability.)
Swift River Elementary is a Level 1 school, which status, Sullivan said, gives it considerable leverage in the opt-out campaign. Muddy Brook Regional Elementary School (MBRES) has also earned a Level 1 status. MBRES, along with Swift River, is also a Title 1 school, a federal designation for schools serving large numbers of high needs students. The percentage of high needs students at MBRES for the 2015-16 school year is 49.6 percent. SBRSD’s Undermountain School is designated Level 2 and Title 1, with 41.6 percent of its students labeled high needs, and its New Marlborough School is at Level 2, non-Title 1.
Hanging over the heads of school administrators is the “state hammer,” as Madeloni put it; the requirement that 95 percent of students in a particular school take the test. Theoretically, with a participation level under that threshold, Level 1 school can be dropped to a Level 2, or a Level 2 dropped to a Level 3, with possible reductions in Title 1 funds. However, the MTA argues in their talking points, “It would be bad policy and a waste of valuable resources for the state to intervene in a well-functioning school simply because a lot of parents refused to let their children take a test they believe does more harm than good.”
As for the real world repercussions of the longstanding in-school testing culture, Rundle says, “There are lots of hidden costs. The cost of Math tutors eliminates a Spanish position. We are driving good teachers away. We’re paying already.” Sanzone recalled her time teaching 8th grade. “I wish I had a nickel for every time a student asked me, ‘Why do we have to keep coming to school? We took the MCAS.’”
The teachers, former teachers, principals, school committee members and parents in attendance all wished the conversation were different. As Sullivan put it, she and all of her staff wanted those moments of “joy and opportunity for students,” the moments that teachers live for, to be the focus of attention. One parent from Richmond said her child’s school calendar lists out all dates of the tests, but not those of student concerts. Madeloni lamented, “There is such a difference between what we want to do and what the world is talking about.”
