In the United States, parents, teachers, and other concerned citizens have been protesting testing at least since the 1840s. In his 2013 book Testing Wars in the Public Schools: A Forgotten History, historian William J. Reese tells the story of what happened in 1845 in Boston when reformers led by Horace Mann gave a surprise test to public high school students. At the time, most schools demonstrated their achievements to the public through “examinations” that were more like pageants, full of recitations, plays, performances, and perhaps the answering of a few questions posed by a village elder. The method was far from rigorous. The Mann test, by contrast, was a series of free-response and essay questions covering patriotism, history, geography, natural history, and other subjects. Some items were nearly impossible, whereas others were nonsensical (“On which bank of the Ohio is the Cincinnati River, on the right or left?”)
In Reese’s telling, the reformers used the Mann test as a weapon to enforce top-down control of schools by creating anxiety around failure. Local leaders and parents resisted, arguing, as they do today, that the tests narrowed the curriculum and deprofessionalized teaching. But “once written tests entered the schools, they were never going to leave.” The contrast between performances that emphasize students’ strengths and standardized tests that reveal their weaknesses is a tension still very much in play in the assessment world today.
Still, large numbers of students sitting out state-administered tests is a relatively new phenomenon, a response to the age of universal high-stakes testing. After No Child Left Behind passed in 2001, Scarsdale Public Schools, in the affluent suburbs of New York, and among the best-regarded districts in the country, became the site of the first major test boycott. “A lot of parents got very upset,” said Scarsdale Superintendent Michael McGill. “They saw that good curricula was being thrown out in favor of stuff that was necessary for kids to perform well [on the tests]. Time was spent just prepping kids, and teachers’ time was lost out of class, either getting trained to give the test or correcting the tests.”
“Fundamentally, we feel the tests are not a good measure of what a child learns,” Deborah S. Rapaport, whose daughter was then in the eighth grade at Scarsdale Middle School, told the New York Times during the boycott. “Many students do not perform well on standardized tests. These kinds of tests reduce content, they reduce imagination, they limit complex curriculum, they add stress and cost money.”
The Scarsdale boycotts began with the eighth-grade science tests in May 2001. As the Times reported, two-thirds of the class opted out of the first round of tests. A dozen parents organized a minivan caravan to shuttle them away from school for the two-hour test period, which they spent doing homework at nearby houses.
“It was very weird for the district,” McGill recalled. “As a board and as educational leaders, we completely agreed with the parents’ objections. On the other hand, as public school officials, we were responsible for upholding state laws and regulations.” The district had their wrists slapped in an official report by the state commissioner of education. Then the Scarsdale Board of Education issued a response making clear their position. McGill paraphrased, “We may be required to give the tests, but we want our teachers and schools to provide kids with a deep, rich education and let the test scores take care of themselves. And we understand this may depress the results, but that’s okay with us.”
Of course, an affluent district like Scarsdale doesn’t really need to worry about demonstrating bare-minimum proficiency. Fourteen years later, with annual tests imposed every year from third grade up, McGill sees them as little more than a distraction. “Our approach to state mandates on assessment is largely to drink a lot of radiator fluid,” he said, tongue in cheek. “What we try to do is ignore it as much as we can. . . . The main drawback for us is more and more time spent on activities that don’t really have a lot to do with better teaching or better learning, taking time and energy away from more important activities.”
In the spring of 2014, after forty-one years as superintendent, McGill stepped down. He wrote in Education Week that “for almost a quarter of a century now, Scarsdale educators and parents have tried to help state officials understand that high-stakes testing and related reforms make it harder to provide a quality education. . . . In a more hopeful future, there’s a place for standardized tests, but they’re used judiciously, and they’re not high-stakes.” Like the Florida teacher who quit over YouTube and Manhattan math teacher Carolyn Abbott, high-stakes testing had driven another seasoned educator out of the schools.
The New Option: Opting Out
Starting in 2013 the reforms that began with Race to the Top and continued with the Common Core triggered a new wave of opt-out protests and boycotts initiated by parent groups and teachers’ unions, a wave that Bob Schaeffer of FairTest told me was “unprecedented.” “The closer you get to classrooms, the stronger the opposition is to high-stakes tests,” he says, citing opinion polls of parents and teachers.
That opposition is rising in response to the transition to the Common Core. Many states are administering the old NCLB tests while beginning to teach Common Core–aligned lessons or giving both sets of tests at once. Meanwhile millions of students in the spring of 2014 took the Smarter Balanced and PARCC Common Core–aligned assessments for “field test” purposes, which helps the test creators but not the students. All of the upheaval has made tests a focal point of resistance, within a larger movement by teachers’ unions and parent groups in favor of local control and better resources for schools and against aggressive choice policies, school closures, standards, and cutbacks.
The present-day opt-out movement has supporters on the right, left, and in between. It’s cropped up across the country, from cities to rural areas. Middle-class districts, though, have tended to dominate—affluent Scarsdale notwithstanding. “The higher-income districts are all about their test scores,” said Jeanette Deutermann, who has organized against the tests across Long Island. “And the low-income districts, they’re struggling to survive, trying to keep their schools open. It’s too much for them to think about bucking the system.”
In 2013 an antitesting rally initiated by Deutermann’s group Long Island Opt Out drew sixteen hundred people. About half the families at a Tulsa, Oklahoma, middle school opted out of a ninety-minute “pilot” reading test. In Providence, Rhode Island, forty students staged a sit-in at the office of the state education commissioner. More than 80 percent of the parents at Castle Bridge Elementary in New York City opted out of spring tests. Students staged walkouts in Portland, Oregon, and Denver, Colorado. On December 9 a union-backed organization called United Opt Out National declared a National Day of Action in support of public education, calling for the “Elimination of all high stakes standardized testing.” The organization announced coordinated events in Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Maine, Pennsylvania, Washington, DC, Florida, Illinois, Ohio, Iowa, Kansas, Texas, Minnesota, Idaho, New Mexico, and California.
In the spring of 2014 the action intensified. A reported twenty-one thousand students opted out in dozens of districts across Long Island. Chicago public school parents, the Chicago Teachers Union, and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) staged one of the most politically charged opt-out protests to date. Groups of teachers at two elementary schools, Maria Saucedo Scholastic Academy and Thomas Drummond Montessori, voted to sit out the ISAT state test. And in all, parents at more than seventy Chicago-area schools submitted letters requesting that their children sit out the test. A Chicago teacher described the protests to me as an evolution of the energy from the 2012 teachers’ strike. Colorado and the rest of New York State also saw significant opt-out organizing in the 2014 testing season, and protests made news in Kansas, Oklahoma, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, and Pennsylvania.
Jesse Hagopian is a tall, charismatic, goateed teacher and union leader at Garfield High School in Seattle, making him a national figure in the opt-out movement. I met him when he spoke to a small group of parents and teachers at Earth School, a progressive elementary school in New York City’s East Village, in spring 2013. Manhattan schools were organizing their own opt-out protest with the help of a progressive caucus within the New York City teachers’ union, and Hagopian came to tell his success story and cheer them on.
Hagopian’s career tracks the era of high-stakes testing. He started out at as a Teach for America recruit after just five weeks of training at a 100 percent poor and black elementary school in Washington, DC. “My first year teaching was the beginning of NCLB,” he said. “My school was one of those that was reconstituted with a new principal, and I was one of the fresh-faced new teachers who was going to fix everything.”
He is African American like his students were, but the urban dysfunction they faced was unlike anything he’d grown up with in Seattle. “I had a hole in the ceiling in my classroom, and the first assignment I ever gave the kids, they turned it in on a Friday and when we got back to school on a Monday they were all destroyed because it had rained,” he remembers. “It was the test scores that had labeled this school a failure to be reconstituted. And it was total chaos in that school, from the new principal and the new teachers like me. I saw from the beginning that test scores were being used to punish our schools rather than support them with the resources they needed.”
As a high school history teacher back in Seattle, Hagopian didn’t like the effects of testing, especially graduation exams, on his fellow teachers or his students. “I had students who don’t pass the end-of-course exams in high school and aren’t allowed to graduate. And I find that problematic on several levels. It completely disrespects the profession of teaching, saying that the educators can’t decide whether this person has met the requirements for graduation. We know where the kid started from and where he ended up. We know the effort and the commitment that student has put in. And we can assess and make our own judgment based on that intimate knowledge,” he said. “Whereas someone a few thousand miles away who has developed this test and administered it on a certain day—they don’t know if the kid’s parents have split up, or they’re sleeping on the street that night.” Garfield High is 62 percent racial minority and 38 percent poor. Students from urban public schools like these who don’t make the cut on graduation tests are likely to continue the cycle of poverty and face a greater risk of going to prison. Teachers felt that the mandated MAP test did not align with state standards, that it singled out and demoralized English-language learners and those with disabilities, and that it led to lost instructional time.
Among other subjects, Hagopian teaches the nation’s history of direct action in support of civil rights and other causes. His conversations with colleagues about the detriments of testing came to a head in January 2013, when the school’s union voted unanimously not to administer the MAP tests in math and reading. The PTA voted its support of the boycott. Hundreds of students brought official opt-out letters to school. Many who didn’t have notes from their parents sat out the tests by hitting “A” repeatedly until their results were invalidated. After the media picked up the story, Hagopian’s group received messages of solidarity from Florida, Australia, British Columbia, Japan, and the UK.
“Really, this has been the most incredible year of my life,” Hagopian said. “My son was born just a few days after we launched the boycott. And this boycott has turned into not just a citywide struggle but a national and international inspiration for people who are struggling for authentic assessment.” A total of nine schools in Seattle eventually joined the boycott. Although the superintendent initially threatened the Garfield teachers with insubordination and ten days’ suspension, ultimately the school district fully backed down, announcing that the MAP test is now optional for high schools and no longer a graduation requirement.
The Student
Alex Kacsh was a senior at Jefferson County Open School, a progressive public school in the suburbs of Denver, Colorado, when he organized a test walkout in the spring of 2013. His school, which is lauded across the city, has projects and portfolios instead of grades and promotes student leadership. The entire freshman class goes on an annual camping trip with teachers. Once a week students leave campus to pursue a personal passion, like cooking at a restaurant or writing and performing plays. But under a law Colorado passed in 2006, the school, like every other, had to be evaluated solely on standardized test results.
“We didn’t take the tests seriously because they had no relationship to our curriculum,” said Kacsh. “So our school was labeled a turnaround school, in the bottom 5 percent. There was a three-year plan to shut us down.” The state’s threat took a toll on the school’s progressive philosophy. Classes reverted to the textbook. Students spent time taking practice tests. “We were hearing the phrase ‘this will be on the state test’ a lot.” Kacsh’s walkouts led to networking with fellow student organizers in Portland, Oregon, New York City, Philadelphia, Newark, Providence, Chicago, and Florida.
The Parent
Until the fall of 2012 Jeanette Deutermann led a “calm, normal” existence in the close-knit community of Bellmore, Nassau County, New York. Her husband commuted to a job in finance in Manhattan, arriving home around nine o’clock each night. After she quit teaching to stay at home with her two sports-obsessed boys, she sometimes helped out with her mother’s decorating business. She saw or spoke with her parents and two sisters almost daily. Her kids spent summers camping with their cousins on Cape Cod.
That all changed when her older son, then in third grade, started crying and begging not to go to school. He developed a nightly stomachache. The doctor said it was probably stress-related.
Deutermann, a charismatic, athletic blonde, was mystified. She was plugged into the school community, knew all the parents and most of the teachers, so she could rule out bullying or similar problems. “All the usual suspects of why your child might not like school weren’t there,” she said. “In kindergarten, first, second grade, he wasn’t a kid who was like, please let me go to school, but he didn’t have issues.”
The one change she could pinpoint was the advent of high-stakes standardized testing, particularly in combination with the new Common Core–aligned curriculum. Her son’s homework became a four-hour nightly ordeal as he struggled under the Common Core’s increased emphasis on writing, which turned even math into a series of word problems.
Teachers constantly told him that this or that would be on the test. Deutermann saw the curriculum narrowing. “I started asking the teachers, why aren’t they doing science? We haven’t studied for even one social studies test. And teachers are saying, we don’t have a lot of time for it. The testing’s coming up, we can’t afford to spend a lot of time doing the other subjects. It shifts the entire focus of the classroom.”
For Deutermann the last straw came in February 2013, when her son brought home a notice that he’d been “selected” for something called “Sunrise Academy.” Based on their scores on a different benchmark test, the NWEA, a portion of the fourth grade—gifted as well as struggling kids—were asked to come in at 7:30 two mornings a week for state test prep.
“For me it was a total red flag,” Jeannette said. “I didn’t do this kind of work for the SATs. How is it my fourth grader is going to do this? Then I start asking, what happens if he doesn’t do well? Will he be put on a lower track? What is the consequence? And they say, well, it has none for him but it’s for the teacher and school.” As Deutermann gets madder, her Long Island accent gets thicker. “I said, wait a minute, he’s going to get up an hour early on Tuesdays and Thursdays and do all this work only so that it can be an improvement for the teacher and the principal? Are we kidding here? I was literally twitching.”
Deutermann founded the Facebook group Long Island Opt Out in February 2013. By the end of the 2013 testing season it had about four thousand members; by the next year it had over fifteen thousand. Deutermann spent the summer and fall movement building. She built a network of volunteer liaisons representing 80 of Long Island’s 122 districts. She connected with teacher and other parent groups across the state. They organized protests at the capital in Albany and cofounded a statewide group, the New York State Allies for Public Education. With the help of this ward-captain model, the spring 2014 Long Island test boycott stretched across dozens of schools and twenty-one thousand students.
Like many parent activists, Deutermann has faced down the irony that the cause she adopted on her kids’ behalf is also taking her away from her kids. She drives up and down the Long Island Expressway attending public forums two or three nights a week while her kids are with her relatives or babysitters. Her husband has to pick them up when he gets back from his long commute. “It’s a gigantic sacrifice,” she said. “I’m not home making dinner.” At the same time, she said, the boys respect what she’s doing. Her older son’s school anxiety has gone away because he knows he won’t have to take the tests anymore. The other day her boys were watching 42, the Jackie Robinson biopic, and it led to a conversation about civil rights and standing up for what you believe in. “That’s like you, Mommy!” said her younger son.
Should You Opt Out?
If you believe that standardized tests are the wrong way to hold our students and schools accountable, the most direct means to register that opinion is to stay home.
If you have a high-anxiety child whose fear of testing is warping his experience of school, a break from that testing may be, literally, just what the doctor ordered.
Under NCLB, in order to demonstrate adequate yearly progress, 95 percent of a school’s enrollment in each subgroup is supposed to participate in annual statewide tests. So the magic threshold for organizing a protest that will force action at an NCLB school thus becomes 5 percent of any group, such as English-language learners, special education students, African Americans, or Hispanics.
As a majority of states now have NCLB waivers and the transition to the Common Core–aligned assessments is producing its own upheaval, the accountability system is currently in flux. Local politics will vary. But schools or districts in danger of missing their progress goals are likely to take a harder line against students and parents who opt out.
Sitting out a benchmark, diagnostic, or practice test is less risky than skipping spring statewide tests. The potential consequences for students are greatest for those tests that are used to determine promotion, competitive admission to middle school (fourth-grade tests) and high school (seventh-grade tests), and for high school graduation.
Surprisingly, it’s even possible to opt out of college admissions tests. Eight hundred of the country’s three thousand colleges make the SATs and ACTs optional for admission. That number has grown by nearly one hundred in the last decade and includes institutions of all kinds. For-profit colleges and community colleges are common on the list, but there are high-quality, selective, and prestigious schools that don’t require the tests: Arizona State University, Bard, Bowdoin, Pitzer, Mount Holyoke, Smith, Wake Forest, Worcester Polytechnic, American, and George Mason, among others.
A 2014 study of over 123,000 students and alumni from score-optional schools showed “few significant differences” in college GPAs and graduation rates for students at the same schools who submitted test scores versus those who did not. This was true even though the students who did not submit test scores for admission were more demographically diverse, more likely to be racial minorities, and more often the first in their families to go to college.
The Right to Opt Out
The parental right to opt children out of testing is still in question but may itself be tested soon in the courts. State law generally requires schools to administer accountability tests to all students who have been in the country for at least a year, with accommodations for those with learning disabilities. According to the advocacy group United Opt Out National, only three states—California, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—have statutes protecting parents’ rights to keep students out of state assessments. In addition, the Kansas State Department of Education explicitly permitted opt-outs in a 2013 letter. However, successful opt-out protests have taken place in several states where no such protection exists—New York, Washington, Colorado, and Illinois, to name a few.
Though there are no documented reports of this, in theory parents who deliberately kept children home from school in violation of state law could be prosecuted under truancy laws or for contributing to the delinquency of a minor. There also haven’t been any cases yet that I’ve seen of students being kept back a grade or suffering other consequences for opting out of state tests, as opposed to students whose academic careers were derailed by administrators rigging test results, as Lorenzo Garcia did in El Paso.
Still, students and families who threaten to opt out are often pressured to conform. Actions have included repeated—sometimes automated—calls home, suspensions, and detention. In some schools parents are asked to pick students up or keep them home for the duration of the tests. In others students have been required to “sit and stare,” without books or other diversions, for hour upon hour while their peers take the test.
There have also been reports of petty intimidation: eight-year-olds being forced to verbally refuse in Long Island, asked to call home and ask their parents for permission to take the tests in Colorado, or a nine-year-old girl in Chicago being forced to watch the test takers rewarded with ice cream and candy.
The Constitutional Right to Parent
Regardless of the current statute, parents who choose to keep their children out of state tests have a strong legal argument in their favor. The Supreme Court has repeatedly recognized the constitutional right of parents to “direct the upbringing and education of their children.” In one 1923 case, Meyer v. Nebraska, a teacher taught German to a student in violation of a state law prohibiting the teaching of foreign languages before the eighth grade. This law had been passed to enforce the assimilation and English learning of first-generation students. The court found that in arresting the teacher, the state was violating the parents’ liberty under the Fourteenth Amendment, which guarantees equal protection under the law.
In another oft-cited precedent, Pierce v. the Society of Sisters (1925), two private schools, one parochial and one military, challenged an Oregon state law requiring all students to attend public school. The court found in favor of the schools, agreeing with Meyer v. Nebraska that the Fourteenth Amendment protects parents’ right to decide how best to educate their children. The decision begins with words that serve well for the purposes of would-be opt-outers: “The fundamental theory of liberty upon which all governments of this Union rest excludes any general power of the State to standardize its children.”
More recently some states have passed “opt-out” statutes that affirm parents’ rights under the First Amendment’s freedom of religion or freedom of speech clauses to keep their students out of sex ed or evolution classes. The First Amendment, then, is another potential defense if parents want to make a case that the use of high-stakes standardized tests violates their personal beliefs about, say, human potential, equal opportunity, or self-determination. With regard to standardized testing, parents in both Chicago and Colorado have submitted complaints to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) that school leaders’ responses to opt-out protests violate parents’ Fourteenth Amendment right to guide their children’s education.
The organization United Opt Out National publishes state-by-state opt-out guides on their website.
How to Opt Out: Step by Step
1. Write a letter or e-mail to your principal, and if you wish, copy the district superintendent, explaining the reasons for your decision. Templates may be found on United Opt Out National’s or FairTest’s website.
2. If the test has personal consequences for your child, you’ll need to make plans for an alternative evaluation. Most states and districts have existing provisions for placement of students without state test scores, for example, homeschooled students, students coming from out of state or from private schools, or those with disabilities. They are little known and not much talked about, but in New York City, for instance, students have the right to request a portfolio evaluation, including classroom work and special projects, or the results of a different test for admission into middle or high school.
3. Make a plan for your child during test days and confirm with school leaders whether your child should stay home, will be allowed to work in the library, or should stay in the test administration room with a book.
4. Make sure your child is on board with opting out and able to state the reasons in her own words. She might be asked to verbally refuse the test or pressured to change her mind.
5. Consider joining forces with other families and teachers via the PTA or a Facebook group. Depending on the size of your school, even a few families can make a big impact. Solidarity makes a big difference in how positive or negative the experience will be for your child. You don’t have to picket the school or hold a rally; opting out is an action that speaks for itself.
Opting out is a rejection of the status quo. To find out how we can build a better future for students, read on.