Parents and Students in New York Protest Against Standardized Tests

It’s that time of year once again for students in the State of New York to take the annual English Language Arts exams, the first of three standardized education evaluation tests given by the state for schoolchildren in the third to eighth grades, but the parents and students instead took to the streets in droves across the state in protest rather than take the exams.

In Buffalo, Brooklyn and Boerum Hill, it is estimated that the crowd of protesters Tuesday was higher than the 60,000 students that refused to participate in the exams last year. The superintendent of the Fairport Central School District said she heard other superintendents placing the number of school children who opted out of the exams to reach about 300,000 this year.

The number of students opting out of the state-mandated exams represent the majority of the public schools’ student population. A parent of a student in Boerum Hill Public School 261 said that she does not see any diagnostic educational benefit in the exams. She added that there is no driving evidence that the exams is an accurate and fair means to assess teachers and schoolchildren. She added that the tests actually interfere with meaningful assessment and learning. Other parents are saying that the teachers were being forced to skew their teaching toward the tests so that they could keep their jobs, thus shortchanging their students in the process. They are not against assessment per se, but they want a more meaningful assessment.

The opt out on state mandated exams had been ongoing for years but it was just this year that it escalated to a more larger protest. It has been reported that in several upstate school districts and in Long Island, those who did not take the exams could be around 40 percent. District Superintendent Michael Hynes reported that about 65 percent of grades three to eight students at the Patchogue-Medford School District in Suffolk County also opted out.

Close to 70 percent of students at the West Seneca District also refused to take the tests. The same is true at the Southold School District on North Fork, Long Island and at the Rockville Center, where 60 percent of the students did not participate in the exams. Twenty percent of the students in Ossining, a town in Westchester also boycotted the English Language Arts exams.

The actual number of students who did not take the exams will not be known for a few weeks according to the Department of Education in New York State. Despite this fact, they are already estimating that this year’s number will far exceed the 2,000 that opted out of the exams last year in New York City schools.

Toni Smith-Thompson, a leader of the protest and also the Parents Association co-president at East Harlem’s Central Park East 1 said they are concerned how the new evaluation system that Gov. Cuomo supported will have on the teachers. The newly-approved legislation states that 50 percent of the teacher’s performance will be based on the scores the students will get in the tests.

Image Copyright: Public school in Brooklyn, NY taken by Leonard Zhukovsky / 123RF Stock Photo