Where does the "Opt Out of testing" movement come from? You'd be surprised.

The “opt out” movement is a supposedly-grass-roots movement against K-12 standardized testing, primarily focusing action on encouraging parents to refuse to allow their kids to take tests, i.e., opt out of testing. The absolutely bizarre part of this is that large scale test scores are rarely used for individual impact on the student, and that tests take up only a tiny fraction of school time throughout the year. An extremely well-written paper was recently released that explored this befuddling situation, written by Randy E. Bennett at Educational Testing Service (ETS). Dr. Bennett is an internationally-renowned researcher whose opinion is quite respected. He came to an interesting conclusion about the opt out of testing topic.

After a brief background, he states the situation:

Despite the fact that reducing testing time is a recurring political response, the evidence described thus far suggests that the actual time devoted to testing might not provide the strongest rationale for opting out, especially in the suburban low-poverty schools in which test refusal appears to occur more frequently.

A closer look at New York, the state with the highest opt-out rates, found a less obvious but stronger relationship (page 7):

It appears to have been the confluence of a revamped teacher evaluation system with a dramatically harder, Common Core-aligned test that galvanized the opt-out movement in New York State (Fairbanks, 2015; Harris & Fessenden, 2015;PBS Newshour, 2015). For 2014, 96% of the state’s teachers had been rated as effective or highly effective, even though only 31% of students had achieved proficiency in ELA and only 36% in mathematics (NYSED, 2014; Taylor, 2015). These proficiency rates were very similar to ones achieved on the 2013 NAEP for Grades 4 and 8 (USDE, 2013a, 2013b, 2013c,2013d). The rates were also remarkably lower than on New York’s pre-Common-Core assessments. The new rates might be taken to imply that teachers were doing a less-than-adequate job and that supervisors, perhaps unwittingly, were giving them inflated evaluations for it.

That view appears to have been behind a March 2015 initiative from New York Governor Andrew Cuomo (Harris& Fessenden, 2015; Taylor, 2015). At his request, the legislature reduced the role of the principal’s judgment, favored by teachers, and increased from 20% to 50% the role of test-score growth indicators in evaluation and tenure decisions (Rebora, 2015). As a result, the New York State United Teachers union urged parents to boycott the assessment so as to subvert the new teacher evaluations and disseminated information to guide parents specifically in that action (Gee, 2015;Karlin, 2015).

I am certainly sympathetic to the issues facing teachers today, being the son of two teachers and having a sibling who is a teacher, as well as having wanted to be a high school teacher myself until I was 18. The lack of resources and low pay facing most educators is appalling. However, the situation described above is simply an extension of the soccer-syndrome that many in our society decry: how all kids should be allowed to play and rewarded equally, merely for participation and not performance. With no measure of performance, there is no external impetus to perform – and we all know the role that motivation plays in performance.

It will be interesting to see the role that the Opt Out Of Testing movement plays in the post-NLCB world.

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Nathan Thompson, PhD

Nathan Thompson earned his PhD in Psychometrics from the University of Minnesota, with a focus on computerized adaptive testing. His undergraduate degree was from Luther College with a triple major of Mathematics, Psychology, and Latin. He is primarily interested in the use of AI and software automation to augment and replace the work done by psychometricians, which has provided extensive experience in software design and programming. Dr. Thompson has published over 100 journal articles and conference presentations, but his favorite remains https://pareonline.net/getvn.asp?v=16&n=1.