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Overcast Opt-out rates rise in L.B. schools
Boycotts against Common Core exams sweep Long Island
More than 40 percent of eligible Long Beach students in third through eighth grades sat out the state English Language Arts assessments last week, a sizable increase over the number of students who opted out of the exams last year.
A total of 626 students in the district’s elementary and middle schools — 41.2 percent of the testable population — did not take the ELA test, Superintendent David Weiss said, 206 more than last year, an increase of nearly 50 percent.
Parents chose not to have their students take the exams in protest of what they see as onerous, stress- and anxiety-producing standards put in place by the state. The tests are given over three days and take many hours to complete.
“This is one of the measures we use to judge success of programs, and it’s also one of the ways in which the state looks at how well different subgroups in the state are doing on these assessments,” Weiss said of the Common Core exams. “So when people opt out and you can’t make those kinds of comparisons, there’s a different kind of ramification than there is to an individual child.”
Weiss added that although the tests are not perfect, he doesn’t think they are not as bad as they are often portrayed. The district does not take a stance on whether parents should direct their children to sit for the exams.
“This is not an area that the district wants to be fighting parents on — this is their choice,” Weiss said. “I think that there are different perspectives on the value of the assessments, and the quality. If you believe that these are not quality assessments that have any value, then you’re saying, Why should I take it?”
The exam’s detractors question their length, the coupling of the results with teacher evaluations — currently on a four-year moratorium amid the outcry over Common Core — and the lack of timely feedback by the state. Unlike Regents exams, past ELA and math tests are not available to the public, and scores are revealed months after students take them, which Common Core opponents argue eliminates teachers’ opportunities to help their charges learn from the results.
Mary Ellen Caggiano, co-president of the Long Beach Middle School PTA, said that her eighth-grade daughter has not taken a Common Core test since the assessments were first offered to her in third grade. “I do not feel at all that it is any way to mark how a child is learning or how a teacher teaches,” Caggiano said, adding that the PTA does not take a position on the exams, either. “I think that is just insane. I’ve never seen one good thing come from this test.”
In addition to the stress they put on students and teachers, Caggiano said, her biggest problem with the exams is the amount of time classes spend preparing for them, which takes time away from other subjects in the curriculum.
“From my years of investigating and looking into it, I find that the entire system from beginning to end is flawed,” she said. “I still don’t understand even how it … came about.”
A Facebook group called Long Beach Opt Out/Refuse the Common Core Information has attracted more than 600 members from across Long Island. According to a survey by Newsday last week, which included data from 108 of the Island’s 124 public school districts, more than 89,000 eligible students — just over 51 percent — chose not to take the ELA assessment this year. In Nassau County, 44.2 percent refused to sit for the exam.
Nearly 38 percent of students did not take last year’s math assessment, the survey also reported. This year’s math exam was scheduled for this week.
Weiss said there is debate about whether parents, who notify a school’s principal that their child will not be taking the exam, actually have the right to do so. Either way, he said, it is not the district’s problem.
“This one is really up to the state to solve,” Weiss said. “The state needs to solve it by having high-quality assessments that make sense to parents.”
