NY Chancellor & NYSED Commissioner tell districts & schools to honor parental right to opt out

On social media, public school teachers have shared horror stories about children taking many hours to complete the excessively long, arduous untimed NY ELA exams this week. Stories of children frustrated with glitches in the computer-based tests, and losing their work because of the inability of Questar for the second year in a row to deal with the internet traffic are also widespread.

Parents at schools throughout the state have revealed how their children have been offered bribes and threatened  with punishment to try to compel them to take these exams. Nevertheless, 46% of eligible students opted out on Long Island, according to a preliminary figures published by Newsday.

Now this morning, Regents Chancellor Betty Rosa and Commissioner MaryEllen Elia released a statement instructing schools and districts to honor parents' rights to opt out of these exams.

Here it is:

Spread the word, and please share this information with other parents as well as your principals and district superintendents. 

So many reasons to #optout: Let’s keep it going until our kids get the schools they really deserve!

It’s that time of year again: Students throughout NY State will be subjected to the burdensome, stressful, overly long, confusing and poorly constructed state exams.The ELA exams will be held from Tuesday, April 5 to Thursday, April 7, and the math exams from Wednesday, April 13 – Friday, April 15.  (Schedule here.)

Johanna Garcia, parent leader in Upper Manhattan

There were stories in today's New York Daily News and Politico New York about the dynamite NYC Opt Out press conference yesterday at City Hall, in which parent leaders demanded that DOE inform parents throughout the city that they have the right to opt out of the upcoming exams.

There is a dearth of information in many schools about this, particularly in immigrant and Latino neighborhoods, as Johanna Garcia of District 6 Presidents Council pointed out at the press conference – despite the fact the state tests are especially inappropriate for English Language Learners and provide no useful information about their skills or progress. 

Other parent leaders in schools with predominantly students of color spoke of principals who had misinformed them, saying that their kids could be held back if they opted out -- even though there is a state law barring this.  The disparity in information provided across the city is in itself a civil rights violation, parents maintained,  reflecting and perpetuating separate and unequal conditions in our schools.

Last year, I appeared on a news show with Angelica Infante-Green, then NY Associate Commissioner of the Office of Bilingual Education, now the Deputy Commissioner.   Ms. Infante-Green agreed that the state tests provide NO useful diagnostic information for ELLs, and that then-Commissioner John King had asked for a waiver from the US Department of Education so that ELLs would not have to take the state test for two years.  The waiver  was denied.

Yes, this is the same John King who is now US Secretary of Education.  Ms. Infante-Green said the state really believed that ELLs should be excused from taking the test for three years, but they hadn't asked for that as they had thought they couldn't get such a waiver.

The test is also particularly abusive to kids with special needs.  At the press conference, Brooke  Parker spoke about how at a private meeting of District 14 parents with Chancellor Farina, she had asked the Chancellor if her dyslexic daughter, a struggling reader, should take the test, and the Chancellor said no. 

Here's an account of a similar private meeting with parents in District 15, in which the Chancellor said that parents of children with special needs and immigrants should opt their children out.  But why tell this to parents in private meetings, without making this information public throughout the city?

Last year,  only 6.9 percent of NYC students with disabilities and 4.4 percent of ELLs “passed” or were deemed proficient on the ELA exams.

Council Member Helen Rosenthal also spoke about the resolution she sponsored that was unanimously approved by the City Council last year, calling for the right of parents to opt their children out of state testing to be included in the DOE Parent Bill of Rights and  sent to every NYC public school parent each year.

Although in Schoolbook, it was suggested that there is a risk of losing federal funds in schools with high opt-out rates, this has never happened.  As Jeanette Deutermann of Long Island Opt out pointed out at the press conference, there are many schools and districts throughout the state that haven’t made the 95% participation rate for three years and have not suffered any loss of funds.  Budget cuts because of high opt out numbers are even more unlikely to occur this year, as it would cause a firestorm and are openly opposed by the Governor, the Commissioner, and  the new  Chancellor of the Board of Regents Dr. Betty Rosa.

More than anything, opting out of the state exams is the most effective tool parents have to protest and disrupt the push to defund, dismantle and privatize our public schools – and turn them into test prep factories where children are treated as data points rather than human beings.

The huge 20 percent opt out rates in NY State last year led directly to the Governor changing his position on linking teacher evaluation to test scores, and also helped lead to the selection of Betty Rosa as the new Regents  Chancellor. 

The selection of Dr. Rosa, an experienced Bronx educator with years as a teacher, a principal and a Superintendent, to replace Merryl (“Push kids into the deep end of the pool”) Tisch would never have happened without the huge opt-out movement in NY over the last two years. 

In fact, in her very first press conference Dr. Rosa said that if she still had kids in the public schools, she would opt them opt.  See yesterday's  Juan Gonzalez column for more on this: "This grass-roots civil disobedience stunned the politicians and data-obsessed bureaucrats who have dictated public education policy for more than a decade.Ever since then, the bureaucrats have been scrambling to win back the confidence of fed-up parents."

  

Here are even more reasons to opt out of testing this year:

•  Pearson, the company known for writing the ridiculous Pineapple passage and many other confusing and badly designed questions, is still writing the exams this year.

• The number of test questions has not been significantly shortened. See the chart to the right.

• While the exams will be untimed, this may mean your child could be subjected to even more hours of pointless stress.       

• ·         In NYC and many other districts, teachers are pulled out of their classrooms for up to three days to score these exams.  The fewer students take the tests, the fewer days they will lose their teachers.  Last year, in some Long Island districts, Jeanette Deutermann told me, teachers only were pulled out for scoring for one day instead of three – because so many students had opted out. 

• ·         There is also the critical issue of privacy.  Nearly two years after the state law passed requiring the appointment of a chief privacy officer and a Parent Bill of privacy rights to be created with public input, neither of these events has happened – despite the fact that the legal deadline for both was July 2014.  And as we recently found out, the State Education Department decided in 2013 to place all the personally identifiable student data it holds, including their test scores, into the State archives potentially forever – a decision which, despite protests, it still has not revoked. 

Here’s a nifty quiz you can take yourself about the exams.  Here is a sample letter you can send to  your principal from NYSAPE; here’s one from Change the Stakes.   

 Here are more detailed explanations by testing expert Fred Smith, Jessica McNair of Opt out Central NY, and NYC teacher Katie Lapham about exactly what has and what hasn’t changed ,and why the current testing regime produces unreliable results and is bad for kids. 

This Saturday, at the office of Senator Bill Perkins at 10 AM, there's a meeting to provide parents with more information on this issue.  Address: Adam Clayton Powell State Office Building 163 West 125th Street, Conference Room B.

See the video below from NYS Allies for Public Education and another from filmmaker Michael Elliot, with simple instructions on how to opt out.

Let’s keep the opt-out movement going until our kids get the schools they really deserve!

HOW TO OPT OUT OF THE NY STATE TESTS from Shoot4Education on Vimeo.

Regents agree to give NY student data to limited corporation run by Gates and operated by Murdoch's Wireless Gen

This week, the Wall St Journal reported that the NY Board of Regents approved the state's sharing of student and teacher information with a new national data base, to be funded by the Gates  Foundation, and designed by News Corp's Wireless Generation.

All this confidential student and teacher data will be held by a private limited corporation, called the Shared Learning Collaborative LLC, with even less accountability,  which in July was awarded $76.5 million   by the Gates Foundation, to be spent over 7 months.  According to an earlier NYT story,  $44 million of this funding will go straight into the pockets of Wireless Generation, owned by Murdoch's News Corp and run by Joel Klein.

The Regents approved this project, despite the NY State Comptroller’s veto this summer of the State Education Department’s proposed no-bid contract to Wireless to build a state-wide data system, apparently because the state is not paying money to participate.  According to sources who were present, while several Regents expressed concerns, Betty Rosa of the Bronx was the only member to abstain.  The others apparently thought that even though the Comptroller-- and the public as well—had opposed this contract in large part because of the privacy issue and the involvement of Murdoch’s company,  which is still embroiled in a major phone-hacking scandal in the UK, these issues were not important enough to ask for more information or to delay the state from going forward with the deal.

Here is what SED writes, in explanation of their intent to share this confidential data: 

The cost of the development of the SLC will be the responsibility of the SLC, not New York State. Consistent with the Comptroller's concerns regarding Wireless Generation, no New York State funds will be paid directly or indirectly to Wireless Generation or any of its subsidiaries for the development of these SLC services. … As mentioned above, each state and school/district will retain sole ownership of its data. Only anonymous data will be used for SLC system development. As in any system development project, a limited number of authorized vendors will need to access actual educational data for system operation and improvements.

Including Wireless, one must assume. But this is not all. Here is more from the SED document: 

The Shared Learning Collaborative (SLC) is a consortium of states organized to help increase the benefits and long-term sustainability of data, curriculum, and instructional improvement initiatives. The SLC is facilitated by the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) and has received initial funding from the Carnegie Corporation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Participating states include Colorado, Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, North Carolina, Louisiana, and Massachusetts.

 A primary purpose of the SLC is to help promote the efficient expenditure of taxpayer funds by coordinating the efforts of multiple states to provide for the common needs of all participating states, including shared infrastructure and services that integrate, deliver, and display educational data and curriculum resources for educators, students, and families. Legally binding agreements will ensure that each state’s data remain separate and distinct from the data of all other states…”

Along with  Wireless, some of the other companies involved will be two consulting companies: Alvarez and Marsal, who were behind the disastrous reorganization of NYC school bus routes in the winter of 2007, and McKinsey, which led the first reorganization of Children’s First in 2003, which included dissolving the district structure (contrary to law) and totally writing off parent input.

Here is an excerpt from a Gates’ fact sheet about this project:

“In addition to making instructional data more manageable and useful, this open-license technology, provisionally called the Shared Learning Infrastructure (SLI), will also support a large market for vendors of learning materials and application developers to deliver content and tools that meet the Common Core State Standards and are interoperable with each other and the most popular student information systems.”

In other words, companies will be making more money off our kids’ test scores. 

Meanwhile, it is not reassuring that the Gates document says that “the long-term governance model” of this national data base “is still in development.” 

They add a standard disclaimer, that “Designing protections for student privacy will be addressed throughout the development of the system, and data access and usage models will be designed to support compliance with the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act and other privacy laws” without any assurances of how this will be achieved.

SED adds:

The SLC is making plans for its long-term governance, including the protection of data privacy and security; the development of a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization structure; and the articulation of a business model for long-term fiscal sustainability. This work will be guided by participating states and informed by input from a panel of expert advisors, including Cheryl Vedoe, President and CEO of Apex Learning; David Riley, President of the Alembic Foundation and an open source technology expert; Dr. Michael Lomax, President and CEO of the United Negro College Fund; Randi Weingarten, President of the American Federation of Teachers; Michael Horn, Co-founder and Executive Director for Education at Innosight Institute; and Andrew Rotherham, Co-founder and Partner of Bellwether Education Partners.

I wonder how many of those organizations receive funding from Gates. 

Where are the independent experts on privacy, and even more importantly, the input of parents, who really should be allowed to opt out of this national database? 

History of NYC governance and lessons for Mayoral control

Check out the first public session sponsored by the Parent Commission on School Governance and Mayoral control, about the history of NYC governance in our schools, held on September 17 at Murry Bergtraum High School.

On the panel was Diane Ravitch, eminent historian and critic, Jitu Weusi, former teacher and one of the organizers of the Ocean Hill-Brownsville events, Betty Rosa, former principal and superintendent of District 8 in the Bronx and now a Regent. The session was moderated by Pedro Noguera of NYU.




The introductions are a little lengthy (my fault!) but start watching at about ten minutes in and the rest is dynamite.

What's amazing is that these panelists, coming from very different backgrounds and with quite different political views, should agree so profoundly that the current governance system puts too much power into the control of two men, neither of them educators, lacks transparency and accountability, and should be significantly reformed by the Legislature when Mayoral control sunsets next spring.

First public education session sponsored by the Parent Commission on School Governance

The History of NYC Public School Governance

When: Wed. Sept. 17th at 7:30 PM.

Where: Murry Bergtraum HS, 411 Pearl St., Manhattan, behind City Hall.

Speakers include:

• Diane Ravitch, eminent educational historian;
  

• Jitu Weusi, veteran educator, community organizer, and one of the organizers of Ocean Hill-Brownsville;
  

• Betty Rosa, former Principal and Senior Superintendent, District 8, elected as a Regent from the Bronx in 2008;
  

• Moderated by Pedro Noguera, NYU Professor.

Please spread the word! A flyer (in pdf) you can distribute or post in your school is posted here or just click on the picture to the right.

For more information, please email parentcommission@gmail.com