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February 18, 2015
Parents who do not approve of Louisiana’s adoption of Common Core State Standards may take a stand against them by opting their children out of testing in March.
Enough parents declining to allow their children participate in federally mandated standardized testing may hurt students and schools, said Lottie Beebe, Board of Elementary and Secondary Education representative for District 3, which includes Lafourche and Terrebonne parishes.
The test, using a new standardized test developed by a consortium of 12 states and Washington, D.C., is scheduled to begin March 16 for students in grades three through eighth.
The Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, or PARCC, test was developed to assess students against the Common Core standards.
The Common Core State Standards are the new more stringent academic standards approved in 43 states that are “comparable to the expectations of other leading nations,” according to the CCSS website, corestandards.org. Louisiana schools have been preparing for more stringent testing for the last five years.
In an executive order issued in late January, Gov. Bobby Jindal urged BESE to not take punitive action against students whose parents opt to not have their children participate in testing.
The executive order refers to a state law entitled “Parents’ Bill of Rights for Public Schools” that codifies parents’ right to opt their children out of surveys requesting personal information.
Beebe said in an emailed statement that federal and state laws require all students to participate in state assessments and that any student who doesn’t take the test will receive a zero score as existing policy dictates. The school will have to calculate that zero toward their school performance score, which is calculated almost entirely from standardized testing.
Jindal suggested BESE consider using alternatives to the PARCC test, including shortened versions of the test used for benchmarking.
But according to Chris Domalski, a senior associate at the National Center for the Improvement of Educational Assessment and an expert in standardized testing, to take results from one test and compare them to another would be a technical feat.
“It’s technically possible to create more than one assessment to serve a shared purpose but that is a high technical bar to demonstrate that scores on those tests can be used interchangeably,” Domalski said.
Board of Elementary and Secondary Education President Chas Roemer said in an emailed statement that “the Executive Order has no constitutional authority over” BESE and “the governor has proven time and time again he will do whatever he can to disrupt this process.”
Jindal, a potential 2016 presidential candidate, spoke to the American Principles Project in Washington, D.C., and said the standards were created by “the elite in D.C.,” according to an email sent by bobbyjindal.com over the weekend.
Roemer also said BESE is aware of “the need for a transition period where we would not denigrate schools, humiliate educators or punish students.”
Beebe has requested a special meeting for BESE to discuss not taking any punitive action for students not taking the PARCC test, likely to be held on March 5 – 11 days before testing begins in Louisiana.
Terrebonne Superintendent Philip Martin said he believes the executive order is “confusing parents across the state,” but that if BESE can figure out what to do with non-participants in testing, then “everything else falls in line.”
“School districts are extremely concerned about this, particularly with our [educators]. Our students have been working so hard to be able to prove that they are able to accomplish the test,” said JoAnne Matthews, Lafourche superintendent. “It is a very difficult situation for all of us.”
Several school officials have said that when Louisiana switched from the California Achievement Test (CAT) to the Louisiana Educational Assessment Program (LEAP) standardized test, there was a drop in scores, which is also expected with the PARCC test.
“It’s a good program that is executed poorly,” retired teacher and grandmother of a Lisa Park Elementary sixth grader Vicki Siddon said of Common Core.
Jennie Morner, whose daughter attends the school’s Pre-K program, said, “I didn’t learn Common Core, so when my daughter comes home with homework, I don’t know it, and I can’t teach it.”
“I don’t have a problem with the Common Core standards. I think its great expectations for kids. It’s going to make our kids competitive with the rest of the world,” said a parent with children in the first and third grades at Lisa Park, who asked not to be named. “How it’s being taught and the way that it was implemented is my problem. I think we should’ve taken it a grade at a time, and not just rolled it out for everybody all at once.”
A Bayou Blue Elementary School fourth-grader adds fractions on a smart board during Math class. Gov. Bobby Jindal has issued an executive order urging BESE not to punish students whose parents opt out of Common Core testing in March. Some parents may be keeping their children from testing in protest of the Common Core standards.
