Her son began hating school. What happened when she found out why.
The movement among parents to refuse to allow their children to take Common Core-aligned standardized tests has been growing for several years in states around the country, with some 20 percent of eligible students refusing to take them this past spring in New York and tens of thousands more sitting out the exams in other states as well. Here’s why and how one mother began the opt-out movement in New York.
This was written by Carol Burris, the executive director of the nonprofitNetwork for Public Education Fund. Burris retired in June as an award-winning principal at a New York high school, and she is the author of numerous articles, books and blog posts (including on The Answer Sheet) about the botched school reform efforts in her state. She was named New York’s 2013 High School Principal of the Year by the School Administrators Association of New York and the National Association of Secondary School Principals. In 2010, she was selected as the 2010 New York State Outstanding Educator by the School Administrators Association of New York State.
By Carol Burris
Jeanette Deutermann did not intend to become the leader of the most effective testing opt-out organization in the United States. She was a suburban mom trying to figure out why her son no longer wanted to go to school.
The year that Long Island Opt Out began, Tyler Deutermann was an unhappy fourth grader with school anxiety that was increasing every day. During February 2012, Jeanette Deutermann began investigating why her son who once loved school so much now hated it.
“I saw it emerge a little bit during testing season in third grade,” Deutermann said. “But then the test anxiety became constant in fourth grade. After speaking with teachers and parents, I knew it was the testing.”
The 2011-12 school year was the first year that teachers in New York State were to be evaluated by the test scores of their students. Anxiety across the board was running high. She read a letter signed by over one-third of New York’s principals that explained why evaluating teachers by test scores would have unintended negative consequences on students. Jeanette began to connect the dots, and she realized that high-stakes testing was the reason that her child and his education were falling apart.
“I had to speak out and let other parents know. I felt like a whistleblower—I did not have a choice,” she explained.
Tyler, she decided, would not take the test. In order to organize other like-minded parents, she began a Facebook group—Long Island Opt-Out. It started out small—the first year, 1,000 students on Long Island refused the test. Membership in the group ballooned to over 16,000 in year two. Today, Long Island Opt Out has over 23,000 members.
Opt Out has spread across the state of New York like wildfire. In the spring of 2014, between 55,000 and 65,000 students refused to take the Grades 3-8 Common Core tests, with about half of those numbers coming from Long Island. In 2015, the number was in excess of 200,000 test refusals—which meant that 20 percent of all possible test takers’ parents said, “not my child.”
New York is not alone in test resistance. Opt out in Florida began when teacher Ceresta Smith, joined five others from Florida, Colorado, Maryland, Her son began hating school. What happened when she found out why. - The Washington Post:
