Pick the Best Answer

At the root of this talk is a hypothesis about school reform that goes like this: If you give parents the right to choose which schools their children attend—open the market, so to speak—then good schools will prosper and multiply, like so many McDonald's restaurants; and bad schools will lose their students and funding, and close.

It's a tidy hypothesis. Experimenting with it might help us find a wonderful way forward for schooling in America, or might lead to a national catastrophe. For now, all we know is that this new banner of "parent choice" means that many parents, especially parents like me with reliable cars and political savvy, have justification, even encouragement, to abandon the public school down the street and scour the town for a public school that will best match their kids' needs.

You can't blame a parent for exercising choice in this way—any of us would—but I do feel there's a larger opportunity here, a possibility to take advantage of this "parent choice" trend to help our community rethink the way we are educating all kids. Because above and beyond choosing where we send our kids, there's a host of other choices we can begin making about our schools.

One such choice is whether or not we choose to opt our children out of standardized testing. Tens of thousands of public school parents across the nation have come together to exercise their legal right to decline participation in the current standardized testing craze. Having taken and given my share of standardized tests as a student and teacher, I can vouch for the research that supports this opt-out movement. Standards themselves can be useful guides for teachers, but standardized tests, unlike assessments designed by classroom teachers who actually know the students, trigger fear and performance-anxiety among teachers and students alike, and end up more of a distraction than an aid to real learning.

I've yet to hear a good argument for not opting out of testing. I haven't found a study proving that a battery of high-stakes tests is good for children or learning or that there aren't other valid ways to collect data on what children know. And the argument that opting out "hurts" a school, because the state lowers the school's grade or takes punitive actions as a result, is not an argument at all, but a manipulation. If I make the legal and moral decision to opt out of testing, I must hold myself accountable for how that decision affects the growth and well-being of my daughter. If the people in departments of education decide to impose punitive measures on schools, for whatever reason, then it's those people—not me—who must be held accountable for how their decision affects the growth and well-being of schools.

For me, then, it's a no-brainer to exercise my parent choice by opting out of standardized testing. But it's also just a first step, a way for parents to feel our way into assuming greater choice in the way we do school. After all, opting out is a reactive decision—a rejection of what we don't want—when what we need in public education are creative decisions—solutions that point to what we do want.

If we really are in an era of parent empowerment, let's embrace it. Let's choose how much time young people spend learning out of classrooms—in nature, in the workplace, on the playground. Let's choose how much time young people are given the opportunity to engage in arts, music or physical education every day. Let's choose how our teachers will be evaluated, how our schools will be graded—or if they are graded at all.

Opting out's a good start, but opting in is what we need—parents, teachers, students and administrators willing to set aside unrealistic or harmful mandates from people who don't know us or our children, willing to opt in to real research on learning and into our collective knowledge, wisdom and hopes about what learning and schools can be.

Santa Fe Reporter