U.S. Air Force/Timothy Taylor
Drama unfolding in New York state could foreshadow a tipping point in the ongoing national parent revolt against high-stakes standardized testing.
Drama unfolding in New York state could foreshadow a tipping point in the ongoing national parent revolt against high-stakes standardized testing. New York has had the largest test refusal movement by far, with approximately one in five students refusing to participate each year since 2015. But recent flare-ups challenging testing length and validity in Texas, Ohio, North Carolina and other states show that tests remain controversial nationwide.
The first round of this year’s grades 3-8 tests began last week in New York, amid fresh criticism of punitive new regulations and an official misinformation campaign designed to intimidate and confuse parents.
New York parents shared district letters they claim reveal threats, bribes, and false information on the part of local schools. The controversy was compounded by a large online system crash almost immediately after testing began April 2. Reports emerged that the state’s computer-based testing platform would not let some students log on or submit tests they had worked on for hours. Headlines from Long Island to Buffalo and everywhere between declared the online testing a “debacle.”
Some 6,600 students were affected, and all online testing was postponed for one day as experts scrambled to troubleshoot the problem. Because a similar crash plagued New York schools last year (along with student data breaches), the New York State Council of School Superintendents, New York State United Teachers (the largest state teachers’ union), and the New York State Parent Teacher Association immediately called for the firing of the testing vendor Questar. The Minnesota-based testing corporation has also presided over disastrous system crashes in Mississippi and Missouri, and in Tennessee where the legislature responded with a multi-year moratorium on online exams.
New York parents shared district letters they claim reveal threats, bribes, and false information on the part of the district.
In the days leading up to test time, State Education Department Commissioner MaryEllen Elia had touted shorter tests, developed by New York teachers. But long testing times remain a major complaint, and claims of teacher involvement have perhaps been overhyped. Multiple teachers who served on the panels that chose the test elements have described to me a highly controlled process in which they could only choose passages and questions provided by the testing company.
Left unclear was whether parents even had a right to refuse testing, so in a significant development, the teachers union stepped up to inform parents. Last year, New York State United Teachers publicized parent’s right to opt-out, but this year, led by Executive Vice President Jolene DiBrango, the union prominently challenged the underlying validity of the tests, noting that the hidden scoring formulas are shockingly misaligned with high school level exams and inaccurately label thousands children across the state as “failing.”
In a campaign called #CorrectTheTests, the union published a blistering fact-check of the education department’s 2019 information, also noting that the highly flawed tests are too long and developmentally inappropriate.
Teachers reported this year’s fourth and sixth grade English Language Arts tests contained the same tenth grade-level passage, and the eighth grade exam had an abstract poem studied at the university level. There were, as usual, ambiguous questions teachers felt had more than one plausible answer.
There are many reasons parents reject the high-stakes tests, but chief among them are the lack of any tangible benefit to students, schools, or taxpayers. Widely considered scientifically invalid, standardized tests are vulnerable to cheating and manipulation, highly subjective, inaccurate and arbitrary. In New York they’ve been weaponized to advance a narrative that has helped expand charter schools and corporate privatization.
There were, as usual, ambiguous questions teachers felt had more than one plausible answer.
The time wasted on testing is insane. Most of my students finished within 70-90 minutes on Day One, but still had to sit silently in the testing room for another two hours. They are allowed to read, but are not allowed to draw or do homework. Day Two tests took longer, and a few students in my school tested from 9:15 a.m. straight through to the end of the school day, stopping only for a “monitored” lunch break. This untimed testing regime, now in its fourth year, was introduced without any supporting research. They said it was to relieve student stress; instead, it has greatly increased testing time. Untimed tests are frowned upon by the American Psychological Association and actually run afoul of a 2014 New York State law that limits to 1 percent the annual instruction time that can be interrupted for testing.
A disturbing story emerged this year from a district that had incorrectly informed parents the tests were mandatory. A sixth grader spent four hours testing on Day One and then almost seven hours on Day Two, with only a twenty-minute lunch break and no recess. The child appeared anxious when his test was collected at the end of Day Two and he reportedly collapsed when he got home, ending up in the hospital where he was treated for dehydration. He apparently hadn’t eaten or drank during the day and had to be monitored at the hospital past 2 a.m., missing school the next day.
Across the state, social media buzzed with reports of schools using rewards and punishments such as candy, pizza parties, field trips, and extra recess. One school told students they could not be in the honors program unless they take the tests, another threatened summer school. One upstate middle school principal told students they needed to take the tests because their school loves them, and they love their school, telling students that they should “say YES to the test” because they will be exempt from June English finals, while students who opt-out must take their English finals during state testing time. The principal also promised that if the school reached 100 percent compliance, “...5-6 of your FAVORITE Teachers will do something FUNNY ‘like’ KISS A PIG.”
Once the coercion and resultant nightmare stories came to light, the New York State Education Department would publicly blame local superintendents. At the end of the week, the department finally issued a long-overdue statement clearly affirming a parent’s right to opt out:
“We would like to remind school leaders of the importance of honoring requests received by parents to opt their children out of the exams. While federal law does require all states to administer state assessments in English language arts and mathematics, parents have a right to opt their children out of these exams.”
Up until this point, the department had danced around the question, giving many districts impetus to deceive and exaggerate, telling students the tests were mandatory or inventing hurdles. Parents reported being required to come in person to speak directly to the principal, or to submit opt-out letters by an artificially imposed deadline.
Why this manipulation by some school administrators? Because the stakes were dramatically raised for schools this year.
Why this manipulation by some school administrators? Because the stakes were dramatically raised for schools this year. As a direct result of the education department’s new Every Student Succeeds Act implementation plan, a number of schools with high opt-out rates ended up on the state’s list of schools in need of intervention. Led by Betsy DeVos, the U.S. Department of Education has been forcing testing compliance under threat of withholding Title I funding, which is supposed to fund services for students in poverty.
The Patchogue-Medford School District is a prime example. There, several well-regarded, high-performing elementary schools ended up on the list under a complicated new formula that treats opt-outs students as if they got the lowest score on the test. As much as 80 percent of students opted-out in 2018. The Pat-Med community is outraged over being wrongfully “labeled” and is even concerned about local home values.
Urban schools in impoverished areas were also put on the list, and threatened with eventual closure or phase-out if they do not improve.One alternative school in the South Bronx that exclusively served over-aged, under-credited students will now need to shift resources towards new compliance plans to boost test scores and test participation. A well-loved “progressive” school in Manhattan with opt-out rates topping 80 percent also ended up on the list this year, prompting NYC schools Chancellor Richard Carranza to speak up in their defense.
In bald hypocrisy, the New York State Education Department issued a statement blaming districts for deceiving and coercing parents and students to test: “To be certain, the vast majority of schools honor parents’ requests to have their children not take the tests; however, we have also heard of isolated but troubling reports of parents’ requests being ignored.”
The New York State Council of School Superintendents protested in a heated letter, upset that the department “cast aspersions” on all superintendents instead of dealing directly with the bad apples. The letter also reveals that district superintendents doubted the policy from the beginning, yet felt pressured to carry it out, in fear of the new “corrective action plans.” From the letter:
“Since the inception of high-stakes testing, school leaders have done their best to carry out the directives of the State Education Department… many superintendents are now questioning why they have stood side-by-side with the Department to implement its assessment agenda, even when they disagreed with it.”
In the eyes of many, high-stakes testing in New York does more harm than good. It is incredibly intrusive and skews what’s important in our classrooms. When I was a kid in my New York City public elementary school, I remember a combined math/literacy bubble test held one afternoon, late in the year, that was short, diagnostic and low stakes. My middle school today has over twelve days of high stakes testing and other schools have over twenty days. As the controversy in New York reveals, it’s time to rethink unpopular standardized testing in all states, and to make the tests developmentally appropriate for all learners, putting an end to this harmful, wasteful practice.