Dive Brief:
- New York state education commissioner MaryEllen Elia is working to create a toolkit for school and district leaders to utilize in responding to testing opt-outs.
- The toolkit follows a rash of opt-outs that swept New York this spring and could include advice for superintendents on the legal testing mandates.
- Some hope the toolkit will include guidance on what teachers and administrators can and cannot say about their attitudes toward state testing, as Elia has previously criticized teachers who spoke out against testing in their classrooms.
Dive Insight:
Many states lack clear guidance on how to address opt-outs. Some explicitly prohibit them, though enforcement can be challenging. In others, decisions are left up to districts. As the opt-out movement grows, some states are rethinking their strategies. In Colorado, state lawmakers passed a bill making it clear that administrators could not force parents to change their minds. Elsewhere, educators and school officials have publicly pressured students in both directions: urging them to refuse the tests or demanding they take them.
In some cases, the lack of clarity has led to confrontations between parents and administrators over a student’s decision to not take a test. In Denver, school administrators clashed with a parent last year over the decision to keep her child out of testing. The resulting hubbub forced Denver to rethink its approach for dealing with opt-outs: Prior to the conflict, some administrators would not allow students who had refused testing to attend regular classes.
When opt-outs take place on a large scale, as they did in some districts in New York, administrators can face another layer of challenges around how to determine performance. Without data to demonstrate improvement, they may struggle with state and federal accountability systems.