Parents Should Opt Out – And Teachers Should Help is a post by Dr. John Thompson.
Here’s an excerpt:
I plead guilty to not being militant enough in resisting NCLB-type testing. Had teachers put up a real fight, including “sick-outs” on testing day, they could not have fired us all, and our students would not have had to endure more than a decade of bubble-in malpractice.
The Tulsa World’s Kim Archer, in Parents Opting Kids Out of State Testing Could Put Schools in a Bind, points to a way for teachers to atone for our timidity. The state of Oklahoma has joined Chicago, New York City (under Mike Bloomberg), and others in attempting to intimidate parents into dropping their protests against high-stakes testing. Archer explains the reason, “If test participation dips below 90 percent, the district receives an automatic F, according to the A-F school grade law.”
School systems often make herculean efforts to test 95% of students, which is the required minimum for each test. If only one or two students per class were to boycott bubble-in testing, the entire system would collapse. They can’t give every school an “F,” can they?
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“School systems often make herculean efforts to test 95% of students, which is the required minimum for each test. If only one or two students per class were to boycott bubble-in testing, the entire system would collapse. They can’t give every school an “F,” can they?”
Yes they can. And there are people who want them to who are waiting to profiteer off of them. The ideals contained within opting out may be virtuous but the reality is much more complicated. You wind up feeling great personally but everyone else gets slid one more step toward the hands of awaiting predators.