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

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Boys with Heroic Names

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

Deep in the Bronx today
in a school mostly forgotten
except at test time
the third grade exam
was administered
to Tristan, Calvin and Axiom
in the faculty room
with its stained furniture,
odors of discouraging
Tupperware lunches, and
teachers' frustrations over
hazy causes and ancient battles lost-

The whispers 'round school -
High Stakes

Eight year old lives in the balance:
to lose and hang with humiliation?
Or to:
slash the head off this test, only to have
another grow back in its place?

They say a true hero knows he's going down
but goes there anyway -

Legs dangling off the chairs
these three
pencils scratching in circles
yawns - stoical chins
and one runny nose
Eyes on questions
and passages aimed to trick
and crush
like the clashing cliffs
Jason and his Argonauts twisted through -

Then - pencils down -
the tests are ziplocked, sealed.
and carted away in unmarked vans
like so much toxic waste.

Ok now, palms up:
the medals for Valor
are awarded
and they unwrap the foil
from the melting Kisses
that had softened in my pocket
from the heat of the morning.

~ Jane Nixon Willis