...stand-alone field testing constitutes a fig leaf
covering the State Education Department and Pearson’s incompetence in
managing the state’s testing program. It provides the appearance but not
the reality of credible test construction. ... CTS to Farina
CTS, the NYC leading opt out group, is being amongst the honorees on June 9 by Leonie Haimson/Class Size Matters at the Skinny (not Broad) Awards event. Through the efforts of our own Fred Smith, the Field Tests using our kids as guinea pigs by Pearson is being foisted on so many kids and so schools. The CTS crew wrote the
You can still get tickets and be in the company of the leading forces battling ed deform here in the city. And you can also support the opt out movement by attending or donating to assist in the work Leonie and Class Size Matters is doing. Click
here.
Open Letter to the Chancellor
-
Carmen Fariña INFORM PARENTS OF THE UPCOMING
FIELD TESTS
INFORM PARENTS OF THE UPCOMING FIELD TESTS
May 28, 2015
Dear Chancellor Fariña,
We urgently ask you to inform all parents in New York City about the
stand-alone field tests due to be given starting next week. The tests
target 1,013 schools and approximately 135,000 children, and the state
is trying once again to have schools administer them without any
obligation to inform parents that this is happening.
The rapidly growing rebellion against state-mandated testing is about
one thing: parents asserting our constitutional right to determine the
shape of our children’s educations. We want teachers, parents and local
communities to run our schools—not corporations and privateers. This
is also one of your strongly proclaimed objectives.
Perpetuating high-stakes testing has been the core means by which
for-profit corporations and the politicians they back have attempted to
usurp authority over our schools. Stand-alone field testing is the
expedient but discredited method Pearson has followed to generate test
items and preserve its hold on the educational marketplace. The approach
has resulted in the development of low-quality ELA and math exams to
which our children, their teachers and we have been painfully subjected.
This is not just a philosophical argument over who should control
public education and the fortunes of our children, although it certainly
is that.
There are three basic problems with stand-alone field tests
all parents should be concerned about:
1) Stand-alone field testing does not come close to reflecting
best industry practices. It has been deemed by testing experts to be an
inadequate way to develop test questions, because children do not take
the exercise seriously. The information gained from the field tests is
inherently unreliable and has repeatedly led to abominable ELA and math
exams.
2) Even if it met professional criteria for producing high-quality
test material, field testing constitutes product development for
commercial purposes that demands disclosure and should require informed
consent by parents before children are allowed to participate.
3) In short, stand-alone field testing constitutes a fig leaf
covering the State Education Department and Pearson’s incompetence in
managing the state’s testing program. It provides the appearance but not
the reality of credible test construction.
We appreciate the change in Department of Education policy that
recognized the right of parents to refuse their children’s participation
in the statewide tests. We know it also applies to field tests, but
here we believe the situation requires a separate action.
We ask that you immediately inform all parents precisely when and
where the coming field tests will be administered. We further request
that you simultaneously direct principals to advise parents that
children are not required to take them. Principals ought to obtain the
written consent of parents whose children are targeted for
testing—allowing their children to participate. The DOE could set up the
same kind of protocol it uses to gain parental permission for children
to go on field trips.
In the past four years there has been no advance notice to parents
that field tests were being given, much less an effort to obtain
consent. This includes your first year as the Chancellor when your
spokeswoman Devora Kaye reportedly said, “We understand the frustration
among parents and educators with the frequency of testing. This (field
testing) is one of many practices we plan to review this summer and
evaluate for the coming year” [Juan Gonzalez, Daily News, June 4,
2014]. What conclusions have you drawn about addressing that
frustration, which has only grown this past year? Surely our request for
greater transparency is one that you can meet.
The grass roots opt-out movement has been fueled by an increasing
awareness of both the misuses of the tests and their alignment with the
Common Core, which ever-growing numbers of parents reject. The
opposition will accelerate as more parents realize the state is not only
forcing the use of test scores for purposes they never were intended to
serve, but is also using the current secrecy surrounding the
development and content of the tests to conceal a fundamentally unsound
product.
Whatever your own opinion of the role of state tests in our education
system, please take action immediately to support the right of parents
in New York City to be fully informed about, and to give or deny consent
for, their children’s participation in NYSED and Pearson’s June field
tests. As you said in a news report on WNYC just the other day, “If you
want to make real change, everyone in the community has to buy in.”
Parents cannot buy into Pearson’s experimental field testing if they do
not know it is happening.
Respectfully,
The parents and educators of Change the Stakes
changethestakes.org
changethestakes@gmail.org
changethestakespress@gmail.com
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