Resistance to standardized testing: A racial divide?

A major outcome of standardized testing and an annual review of those results has been a persistent gap in performance (in general) between wealthier, whiter students and poorer students of color. After nearly 15 years of required annual testing of students in math and language arts under either "No Child Left Behind" or its successor "Every Child Succeeds Act", the gap in performance has been persistent and unchanging despite its illumination and proposed solutions.

Converting traditional public schools to charter schools has not eliminated the achievement gap between students of means and students in poverty.

Changing teacher tenure laws to allow for easier dismissal of teachers whose students have not performed up to expectations has not eliminated the disparity of performance between schools with larger numbers of students new to the United States (and the English language) and those in areas where only English is spoken at children's homes since they were born.

Annual standardized testing has merely shown a spotlight on the problem, but testing is not the solution that policymakers suggest will fix these gaps in performance.

As more and more families learn about the folly of testing, a form of civil disobedience began to grow over the past few years. However, another gap grew - this time in the background of families that chose to not permit their children to be tested each year. This year, a hashtag on Twitter became a symbol of this gulf, playing off of the Academy Awards' persistent omission of actors, actresses, and directors of color - #OptOutSoWhite.

This hashtag reflected Arne Duncan, former Secretary of Education, and his comments in late 2013 about "white suburban moms" who were, in his words, upset that "their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were, and their school isn’t quite as good as they thought they were." These comments were directed at criticism of the Common Core standards rather than annual testing, but his words clearly tried to minimize families' critiques about testing, and brought race into the conversation.

The New York Times included an article about #OptOutSoWhite, remarking that more families from "urban schools" - an unfortunate synonym the Times decided to use to refer to schools with larger populations of children of color - are expressing their displeasure with the standardized testing regime, possibly observing that the more money that goes into these tests, the less money there is for classroom teachers, for adequate resources to support enriching programs like art and music, along with some genuine conspiracy theories about tracking and predicting future criminals. 

Lots of validity in the first two concerns, but the conspiracy theories might be a stretch.

I write with caution about what non-white and non-wealthy families and schools should think or do. But the criticisms the  Times names are those that impact all schools regardless of the color of their students or the wealth of their parents.

The more money that states and school districts are required to allocate towards standardized testing and the curricula that is taught to the Common Core standards is less money that schools can have for art, for music, for drama, for mental health professionals, for school nurses, for up-to-date science laboratory equipment, for enriching field trips, for gifted and talented programs, for interventions for struggling students. (this list is incomplete)

This is a zero-sum game - there are finite resources that schools and school districts have, and if each student is charged a minimum of $24 according to thePARCC web site (PARCC is the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Career and is one of the nationwide standardized assessments), then that means less money schools have to make choices about what enrichment programs they can provide outside of the Common Core standards.

More and more families are now seeing this as a problem, and more and more families of all backgrounds are pushing back by refusing permission for their children to be subjected to these annual tests. And as the Times' article concludes, quoting Warren Simmons from Brown University,

Student testing is like using a thermometer to try to diagnose what kind of cancer an individual has...I think what people are understanding is we don't need another round of testing to tell us that schools are struggling.

Budgetary decisions are moral choices, as Jim Wallis from Sojourners Magazine has said. These decisions about where to allocate money for public education - to people, programs and materials vs. standardized testing and its accompanying instructional curricula - have pushed families of all backgrounds to question that moral decision.