Families skipping tests say they expect more company this year

A small coterie of parents who oppose high-stakes testing expect to gain a little traction across the city as elementary and middle school students prepare to take state tests tomorrow — tests that city and state officials have warned for months are likely to result in plummeting scores.

Six parents who said they were representing parents from 33 schools across the city gathered in a small office in the Upper West Side’s Bloomingdale Family Program preschool today to announce a boycott of Tuesday’s tests, the first to be tied to new standards known as the Common Core.

“We are fed up with the efforts that go into test preparation,” said Cynthia Copeland, the parent of a fourth-grader at a Lower East Side school.

“I have a sixth grader who’s passionate about math and language arts and it’s killing his passion,” said Evelyn Cruz, a parent from an East Harlem school. She said her son has a 97 average in math and does well on standardized tests, but the testing environment is causing him stress and making him less enthusiastic about school.

None of the parents at the press conference would name the schools their children attend. They said they wanted to protect their children’s teachers and principals, some of whom have been helping the families as they work toward opting out of the exams.

A member of Time Out from Testing, which is helping parents organize to advocate against high-stakes testing, was listed as a media contact, and the group’s banner was displayed behind the parents. But the parents said they are not formally affiliated with any organization.

Last spring, amid growing criticism of standardized tests and how their scores are used, just 113 New York City students opted out of the state tests, and state and city officials have publicly downplayed the scale of opt-out sentiment this year.

“There’s been a lot of chatter, a lot of conversation, but we feel it’s best for their child or their children to take the tests,” Chancellor Dennis Walcott said at a press conference in Brooklyn earlier this morning where he unveiled an advertising campaign to quell families’ fears.

The four parents who spoke to a room full of reporters said they could not speculate about how many parents would ultimately opt out during the next two weeks of state tests. But Jamie Mirabella, who has a third grader in a Brooklyn school, said the movement is growing.

“It’s happening in conversations from person to person,” she said.

And Copeland said the families who are choosing to sit out the state tests are more diverse than their critics have charged. Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch, for example, said last year that the opt-out movement is largely made up of parents from high-performing schools in middle-class neighborhoods whose children face few consequences if their children skip the tests.

“There have been people coming from Ocean Hill-Brownsville. … We’ve got people in the Bronx,” Copeland said. “We really are reaching out.”

One parent from a school in East New York could not attend the press conference but sent a statement that was distributed to attendees. “Many special needs students were blamed for not making Annual Year[ly] Progress,” her statement read. “As a result, the schools’ progress reports were low. How can we blame special needs students, the most needy children in our education system?”

State test scores are used to help evaluate students, schools, and principals — and under state law, they will factor into teachers’ ratings in the future, too. The scores are also used to determine whether a child will be promoted to the next grade or get into screened programs and schools.

Copeland, whose son is in fourth grade, said she contacted middle schools to find out if boycotting the exams might affect her son’s application for admission. Fourth-grade test scores are used in middle school admissions, and selective high schools use seventh-grade exam scores to make admissions decisions.

“For the most part we’re being told it’s not going to have any bearing,” Copeland said.

Students who boycotted the exams last year were evaluated on a more subjective portfolio of their work, which their teachers prepared and submitted as evidence that the students should move on to the next grade. Schools will follow the procedure again this year for students who opt out of the tests or miss them for other reasons, such as illness.

Parents who do not want their children to take the exam are expected to submit a protest letter to their schools. A copy of the letter can be downloaded from the websites of Change the Stakes and Time Out from Testing, two organizations that are advocating against high-stakes standardized testing in New York City. Parents said they would still send their children to school tomorrow and expect that they will do something else during the exam.

Briefing reporters about the state tests last week, state education officials emphasized that schools are under no obligation to provide programming for students who refuse to take the tests. The tests are the regular academic program for students in third through eighth grade during testing periods, the officials said.

That fact has constrained the opt-out movement, Mirabella said.

“I know of many parents that wanted to refuse and they talked to their children and their children didn’t want to be the only one in their classroom,” she said, adding that she and her daughter had a serious conversation about the tests and her daughter agreed to opt out.

The parents were not worried that their children would miss out on being evaluated or feel isolated from the rest of their classmates who are taking the tests.

“This is a real-world experience,” said Copeland.