Political Agendas for Education: From Make America Great Again to Stronger Together (Sociocultural, Political, and Historical Studies in Education) by Spring Joel

Author:Spring, Joel [Spring, Joel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2017-07-13T16:00:00+00:00

Democrats and the Testing Controversy: Opt Out and FairTest

Unexpectedly there was a strong backlash to the standardized testing required by No Child Left Behind and many state governments. As a result, there was an Opt Out movement by parents to keep students home on standardized testing days. FairTest: The National Center for Fair and Open Testing played an important role in this movement. The organization posted the following:

Testing overuse and misuse is damaging public education by eating up classroom time, narrowing curriculum and driving many students out of school. It is perpetuating a false narrative of failure and putting schools in low-income communities at risk of closure or privatization.

“Opting out,” or refusing to take government-mandated standardized tests, is a powerful way to protest this educational malpractice. Nationally, hundreds of thousands of parents, teachers and students are fighting back against high-stakes testing overkill by exercising their right to opt out, boycott or refuse. It’s one way to educate others about how the harms of excessive testing and an important way to tell policymakers they must change course.

The exploding opt-out movement has already achieved its first victories. It is altering state and local testing policies for the better, reducing the number of tests and lowering their stakes. A larger, stronger out-out movement will win even more substantial assessment reforms. 63

This protest movement resulted in Democrats including the surprising statement in their 2016 platform: “We support enabling parents to opt their children out of standardized tests without penalty for either the student or their school.” 64

In certainly one of the first national platforms to worry too much testing, the Democrats in 2016 devoted a long section to the issue that doomed the argument that standardized testing would be a vehicle for achieving equality of educational opportunity:

We are also deeply committed to ensuring that we strike a better balance on testing so that it informs, but does not drive, instruction. To that end, we encourage states to develop a multiple measures approach to assessment, and we believe that standardized tests must be reliable and valid. We oppose high-stakes standardized tests that falsely and unfairly label students of color, students with disabilities and English Language Learners as failing; the use of standardized test scores as basis for refusing to fund schools or to close schools. 65

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