What's the End Game for the Test Opt-Out Movement?

_{Muslim Alkurdi, 18, of Albuquerque High School, joins hundreds of classmates in Albuquerque, N.M, Monday, March 2, 2015, as students staged a walkout to protest a new standardized test they say isn't an accurate measurement of their education. The backlash came as millions of U.S. students start taking more rigorous exams aligned with Common Core standards. (AP Photo/Russell Contreras)}

RCEd Commentary

We’ve all done it: I, like every other American child, had unsuccessfully attempted to lead my own educational opt-out movement. Feigning a cough or stomachache, I’d tried to stay home “sick” to skip science and calculus tests.

But each time, my dad, a teacher, saw right through the act, guessed I was unprepared, and pushed me out the door to face the most unpleasant, but necessary, part of school: tests.

Over the past few years, spring testing season has inevitably been accompanied by  media stories of parents’ and students’ refusal to participate. This year, as new assessments aligned to the Common Core State Standards -- the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers and Smarter Balanced -- come into wide use, the movement has grown and the new tests have become a focused, national target. As thousands of kids around the country opt out of standardized tests this month with the support of many parents and teachers, I am puzzled by what the movement hopes to accomplish.

Is the goal to end all standardized testing in America? A quick look at United Opt-Out’s Demands for Public Education suggests that this is their goal. They reject the notion that schools should have any accountability for student learning to grade level standards. Their first “demand” is “an end to all high stakes testing.” While this may sound like a utopian vision to some, it is both unrealistic and would further disadvantage poor students and students of color.

First, end to school accountability for student learning is unrealistic because Education spending makes up the largest share of budgets in each of the 50 states. In exchange for that investment, the public has a right to ask whether kids are learning.  The answer to this question cannot be based on individual assessments created by tens of thousands of different teachers. It must be based on grade-level, standardized assessments that provide data on student knowledge and learning to teachers, students, parents and the public at large.

Second, an end to annual testing would mean an end to our collective ability to see and address the achievement gap. While there are many reasons to dislike the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 and the era of expanded standardized testing that it ushered in, it forced us to confront and ultimately narrow the achievement gap. By requiring annual testing reporting to be disaggregated by race and income status, the law made clear that particular subgroups of students, like African American, Latino and low-income students, were being systematically shortchanged in their education. This led to greater targeted support for challenged communities. Over the past decade, African American reading scores for 9-year-olds have increased at over twice the rate of White students. This is a trend we simply cannot afford to reverse.

For these reasons alone, the goal of ending all standardized testing in America is ultimately a losing cause. Policymakers are not likely to adopt the belief that accountability should be optional. The only people who might walk away from an opt-out thinking accountability is optional are kids.

Is the goal to end just the “toxic” tests? A valid question implicit in the opt-out movement is: how much testing is too much? And, in communities that are over-testing their students, how can the bad tests be eliminated? For most teachers in the network of my organization, Teach Plus, toxic tests are defined as those that are not meaningfully tied to the teaching and learning process. For example, many teachers have commented that their past state tests were not aligned to the curriculum they teach and did not assess the critical thinking skills that teachers believe are necessary for students to become college- and career-ready.

It is ironic that the opt-out movement has focused on the new assessments, designed to be more rigorous and of higher quality than prior tests, and to align with higher standards taught across the nation. Earlier this school year, we invited over 1,000 teachers from across five cities to an intensive day of studying the PARCC assessment. 

A report we published earlier this month on their feedback reveals that overall, the teachers found PARCC to be a better assessment than their prior state tests, with 79 percent of teachers finding it to be a higher-quality assessment. Teachers also found clear alignment between PARCC and the standards they teach. The majority of teachers, 69 percent, believed that PARCC measures the critical thinking skills students need to be college and career ready.

If the end game is to end “toxic” tests in favor of better quality ones, the opt-out folks may have set their sites on the wrong target.