It's not too late to opt out & more reasons to do so-- including to protect your child's privacy and deny them the data!

On Tuesday begin three days of NY state ELA exams for grades 3-8.  Last year, about 265,000 NY students in these grades opted out --22% of students statewide.  It's not too late to opt your child out now!

See the video below with ten good reasons to opt out, from NYC Opt Out.  Check out their website for sample opt out letters you can email to hand to your child's principal and teacher.

Top Ten Reasons To Opt Out from Shoot4Education on Vimeo.

If you're not convinced yet, here are eight more reasons, from teacher/blogger extraordinaire, Peter Greene.  Here are even more reasons from NYC teacher and parent Katie Lapham.

Still not convinced? NYSAPE has some excellent fact sheets and refutations of NYSED's talking points, showing how the tests are still overly long, developmentally inappropriate, and essentially flawed, designed to show the majority of the state's students as failing.

As mentioned by several of the links above, denying the data-miners and privacy violators is a top reason to opt out.  After nearly three years, New York State Education Department has still not enforced the student data privacy law passed in 2014 after the collapse of inBloom.  The outsourcing of students' personal data continues essentially unregulated, with few if any security protections.  The Parent Bill of Student Privacy Rights is still flawed and incomplete - as we have repeatedly pointed out to state officials, and has not been expanded as a result of public input, as the law requires.

Even though NY state law proclaims  that these unreliable test scores are not supposed to go into your children's permanent record, they go straight into the state longitudinal database -- which is the definition of a permanent record. And despite promises made by the state to the federal government in 2009, NYSED has failed to establish a stakeholder data advisory board, so that citizens can oversee the collection, storage and disclosure of the massive personal data that the state collects.

Here is the letter NYSAPE and Class Size Matters sent State Education officials Beth Berlin, Alison Bianchi and Temitope Akinyami after meeting with them March 1. Below are just some of the glaring problems with the Parent Bill of Rights and the state's refusal to enforce the state privacy law, that we shared with them following our meeting.

Updated CSM and NYSAPE Privacy Concerns 3.17 by Leonie Haimson on Scribd