Saturday, March 29, 2014

New York City Parents Assert Themselves: Opting Kids out of Standardized Tests

                                         The Carrot Seed by Ruth Krauss, picture by Crockett Johnson. Harper&Row 1945
                                                               

"We didn't know that we had the right." says a mom from Brownsville, Brooklyn, who is opting her third grade son out of the state tests.

Other parents from all NYC boroughs are now realizing and asserting their rights, and keeping the needs of their children front and center, as they opt their children out from these tests that are irrelevant, archaic, and skewed systems of measurement.  Precious classroom energy and resources - (our teachers, their curriculum, and our children) are diverted from learning to weeks of mind-dulling test prep and the disruptive testing schedules. 

In the past, The New York Times seems to have taken an ambivalent posture about the problem of obsessive testing in our schools across the country during this past decade. This obsession has been ratcheted up with the introduction of the Common Core, and the same old rigid ELA tests, (that leave no room or time for thoughtful writing responses) with the same dull micro-fact reading passages -- leftovers from the failed No Child Left Behind.  These are recycled now and being as passed off as "Common Core Assessments". 

At last, the Times is recognizing that parents and schools are demanding that discovery, passion and excitement that accompanies concept learning be the learning experience for children:  Not these tests.

Here's the article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/30/nyregion/standing-up-to-testing.html?_r=0

follow me on twitter: parentsplaybook

No comments:

Post a Comment