Dear Commons Community,
The airwaves in New Jersey have been awash with ads decrying the latest set of standardized tests being promoted by the state education department. A well-organized coalition of administrators, teachers, parents, and students are mounting the campaign to opt out of the new Common Core testing program developed by a number of states and Pearson. Education officials say the new tests, which require more writing and critical thinking, as opposed to filling in bubbles on an answer sheet, are a vast improvement over previous exams. And the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) exam will give detailed, individual feedback to children in New Jersey for the first time. But in virtually every state, the tests will be tougher than the old ones, stoking fears that scores will plummet, as they did when New York began using its new exams last year. The new batch of tests in New Jersey, created by PARCC, is facing increasing opposition in a state where students generally perform well on standardized tests compared to the rest of the country. As reported in the New York Times:
“A new wave of standardized exams, designed to assess whether students are learning in step with the Common Core standards, is sweeping the country, arriving this week in classrooms in several states and entering the cross hairs of various political movements. In New Jersey and elsewhere, the arrival has been marked with well-organized opposition, a spate of television attack ads and a cascade of parental anxiety.
Almost every state has an “opt out” movement. Its true size is hard to gauge, but the protests on Facebook, at school board meetings and in more creative venues — including screenings of anti-testing documentaries — have caught the attention of education officials.
…“There are forces united against it on the left side of the aisle and the right of the aisle,” said James Crisfield, a former superintendent of the school district in Millburn, N.J. “We’re also talking about things that are happening to one’s child. You mix that all up into a caldron and it does create some really high levels of interest, high levels of passion — and, shall we say, enthusiasm.”
New Jersey’s teachers’ union, the New Jersey Education Association, is in the midst of a six-week run of advertisements against the partnership, one of which features an emotional parent describing his overworked first grader, and another talking about the elimination of science classes to make way for test preparation. (Testing begins in third grade, but the union contends that schools begin grooming students for it earlier.)
…Some of the loudest objections to the tests, which are also being used by 10 other states and Washington, D.C., are coming from parents.
Several groups in New Jersey, at least one working closely with the teachers’ union, have organized events where parents can take the exam for themselves or watch movies about the dangers of too much standardized testing. One such event was scheduled for Sunday for parents to gather at a Montclair firehouse to nibble light refreshments while watching “The Other Parcc: Parents Advocating Refusal on High Stakes Testing.”
One of the organizers, Christine McGoey, has two children in the local school system, and both will be sitting out the tests.
“I’m refusing because we’re taking a stand against this deeply flawed policy,” Ms. McGoey said. Parents who object to the tests have been communicating their concerns to local officials, she said, “but they’re just not listening.”
“I feel like the only thing left to do is just say no,” she said.
The Common Core curriculum has a lot to offer but education officials and policymakers at the federal and state levels have undermined its credibility with poorly planned implementations and assessments.
Tony
