To the Members of the Voorheesville Board of
Education,
I am a
Mom of three kids in the Voorheesville School District. My husband and I
have one child in 6th grade, one in 3rd grade, and one who will start
Kindergarten in the Fall. I am writing you today to inform you that our
children will not be taking the NYS ELA or Math tests this Spring. We are
refusing the tests on behalf of our children.
Although
I have an education background, my husband and I are just beginning to pay
close attention to the current politics of education. Our daughter took
the NYS standardized tests in 3rd grade, and did fine. It was only when
we tried to interpret the results that we started to become aware of the
problems with the test. We contacted our daughter's teacher (who happened
to move up to 4th grade with her) to try to understand some of the areas in
which our daughter could improve. It was then that we learned that very
little test information was not available to her teacher.
We
started to dig a little deeper, and learned that teachers are not allowed to
see the tests, are not given item specific information about the results, and
often the results are not available until after the students have moved on to a
new teacher or a new building. So what's the point of tests that don't
inform instruction for the teacher or the student?
My husband
and I then realized that there was little value to these tests. But, our
daughter is a strong student, so we decided to just go through the
motions. We even told her not to worry about it, the tests don't really
matter. After another round of tests, we heard about APPR (Annual
Professional Performance Review), and how teacher performance was tied to the
tests. We also heard about the length, the poor quality of the tests, and
how developmentally inappropriate they are.
This
information alone was enough to decide to opt out of, or refuse, the tests for
our daughter last year. Notice that I haven't even mentioned Common Core,
charter schools, Governor Cuomo, Pearson, political action groups, poverty,
Finland, social media monitoring, "sit and stare", or
pineapples. The more you dig the dirtier your fingernails get.
We want
our kids to be lifelong learners. We want them to love school, to lean in
to challenges, to be enriched by their education. We want their amazing
Voorheesville teachers to feed their brains with a rich, flexible, and
autonomous curriculum, a curriculum developed by educators, not lawyers or
politicians. We want their math homework to reinforce learning, not be an
exercise in frustration. We want them to be exposed to the amazing
literature available to them. We want the spring to be about Blackbird
Paradise, the school garden, not test prep.
We
encourage Voorheesville parents to become informed about the current plans for
education reform, and to consider refusing to have their children take the NYS
tests in grades 3-8. There are a lot of rumors about refusing the
tests. Sixty thousand kids refused the tests statewide last year.
No school has been penalized for refusals to date. New York State Allies
for Public Education (www.nysape.org) is a good place to start getting informed. We would
also encourage the Board of Education to inform parents of their option to
refuse testing, allow teachers to speak freely about the tests, and ideally, to
refuse to give the NYS ELA and Math Exams.
