How to opt out of PARCC at Deal?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:See concurrent thread. Know that opting out presents real challenges in DC. Go in with your eyes wide open because the hassle-filled process may not be for your family. Summing up the advice dispensed:

*Know how many unexcused absences your child has tallied at the school before you begin the process. If the kid can't miss several PARCC testing days, and perhaps another several school days when make-up tests are given, without nudging 9 or 10 unexcused absences (9 is the limit before an intervention), opting out almost certainly means that DCPS truancy officials will try to crack down. Document PARCC related absences in correspondence with the school, in writing, keeping copies. You can claim that the child is out sick for as many as 5 school days in row. Keep good records of testing days missed in case you wind up fending off the school's registrar, a city social worker, or even a DC Superior Court judge.

*Keep your student home on testing days. Your cannot expect your child to be supervised outside a testing room during PARCC testing in DC. Deal will almost certainly not accommodate students opting out on campus.

* A day or two before your student returns to school, send admins and your child's homeroom teacher a brief note asking that your student not be subjected to make-up testing. No need to explain your reasons, but you can. Don't expect your note to be honored. The school is likely to play hardball with you by plonking the kid in front of a computer to take make-up tests.

*Train your student to refuse make-up tests to the best of their ability. With a MS kid, you might want to consider slipping them a cell phone they hide on their person, which they agree only to use to call you if they're placed in front of a computer to take a make-up test against your wishes. Know that if a child is unable to duck out of make-up tests, he or she cannot be required to answer any questions.

*Don't engage with OSSE, administrators, or other parents on opting-out. While you should expect no support or clear information from any quarter, the language of the Every Student Succeeds Act (2015) is still on your side, as are your 14th Amendment rights. Truancy hassles are really the only cudgel DCPS has to try to prevent an in-boundary family from opting out, and it's a blunt instrument.

Good luck.

*PP, I see a better alternative to the kid missing the entire school day each day when the test or make-ups are given. See if you can find out when the testing is scheduled for the child's cohort. On those days, have an adult authorized to pick up the child from the school remove him or her from class. The adult and student can either stay in the school building during testing (e.g. in the cafeteria or library) or leave campus. A school clearly has no right to incarcerate a kid in the school building during testing blocks (unless the entire school is on lock-down due to a threat).

*Admins at or DCPS ES told us when testing will take place take place for our child's cohort - one week in May. We've arranged with them to come in each day during that week to take the child out of testing. The job will be shared between a parent and a babysitter. We've explained to the child what the plan is, and told her not to discuss the matter with peers and their parents to avoid jeopardizing the arrangement and inviting nasty gossip. She's on board.

*The blunt instrument of truancy enforcement becomes even blunter when the kid turns up for school and, presumably, is marked present first thing in the morning on each testing day. We will send daily emails to the school's registrar stating that we will remove the child from her classroom for testing that day, stay on campus during testing, and return her to class the minute testing has ended. We've documented meetings with admins about PARCC testing, and written them a letter stating our decision to opt out (which we've CC'd to DCPS attendance people and OSSE). The letter states that we plan to opt out silently, but will challenge noisily if DCPS and OSSE come at us hard (e.g. via blogging about how and why to opt out). We are engaging with the system but minimally, not asking permission, but stating intent.

*If we land in Superior Court for having opted out, so be it. We will produce our emails and letter, stand our ground, call witnesses/friends who opted out at other DCPS schools without being hassled, and hope for the best. One of us is a lawyer. Our child is going into the process without any unexcused absences (and only 1 excused absence), because we've been planning ahead since the school year started. We don't mind the hassles, as long as the kid learns the lesson that it is not incumbent on our family to further enrich shareholders and executives of an $800 million multi-national corporation we can't stand. We tell the child that we much better things to do during 10 hours of testing. We've asked her to pick a topic she wants to focus on learning about during testing time - she's weighing options.

[Anonymous]

Sounds like some DCPS elementary school admins are working with parents who opt out, but not Deal admins. Not an easy situation.

Hope you guys stick to your guns. The ESSA was written to permit opting out.

[Anonymous]

Whoa - this thread has been interesting!

1. I agree it is obnoxious that the PARCC test appears (according to folks on this thread - but I haven't otherwise looked into it)to be an enrichment opportunity for a for-profit company (shades of De Vos - shudder). I don't like the incentives there (for a company to push testing to make money).
2. I'd like to hear more about why ten hours of testing a year is so bad? My view so far has been that there is a lot of testing in life (even as an adult, "testing" exists, just in different forms, e.g., preparing for an appellate oral argument!), and maybe it is not so bad to get early experience with it, and learn how to deal with the stress.
3. At least at my kid's school - Brent - there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of teaching to the test. Kids appear to be doing lots of interesting things and learning lots of important stuff. Plenty of field trips and projects. I don't know that ten more hours of field trips or projects instead of ten hours of testing would be better for the kids' development.

[Anonymous]

There was nothing preventing OSSE from developing its own test. They chose to hire a vendor to do it (there were two available) which probably saved them money.

The science proficiency test was done by another vendor just for DC and was so badly done — because of poor and unclear requirements from OSSE — that it had to be scrapped and redone.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Whoa - this thread has been interesting!

1. I agree it is obnoxious that the PARCC test appears (according to folks on this thread - but I haven't otherwise looked into it)to be an enrichment opportunity for a for-profit company (shades of De Vos - shudder). I don't like the incentives there (for a company to push testing to make money).
2. I'd like to hear more about why ten hours of testing a year is so bad? My view so far has been that there is a lot of testing in life (even as an adult, "testing" exists, just in different forms, e.g., preparing for an appellate oral argument!), and maybe it is not so bad to get early experience with it, and learn how to deal with the stress.
3. At least at my kid's school - Brent - there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of teaching to the test. Kids appear to be doing lots of interesting things and learning lots of important stuff. Plenty of field trips and projects. I don't know that ten more hours of field trips or projects instead of ten hours of testing would be better for the kids' development.

Have you taken a sample PARCC test on-line? Easy to do. I recommend it.

I found the ELA section, which took me around an hour to navigate, abominable--all five hours of it--but the math OK. The several ELA sections are almost all pointless-seeming kiddie literary analysis, with so many poorly written questions and such awkward formatting that I got dizzy reading through them. But that wasn't the least appealing aspect, not for me anyway. It was this: no knowledge of facts a kid should learn is tested in any section of the PARCC (e.g. "Who was the First US President?" or "How many states are there in the USA?"). I see no point in my eight year-old answering strange, deeply dull ELA questions for 10 minutes let alone for five hours. She reads to me from books she likes almost every night, and we talk about what she reads. I can see that this insipid test will teach her to like school a little less, nothing more.

Can't stand the PARCC on any level, so opting out at our WotP DCPS. Big headache, might end up in court. Still opting out this year and plan to do so for each year we stay in DCPS as long as DCPS adheres to the crappy PARCC (dropped by 17 states since 2013, with only NJ and DC left in the club).

[Anonymous]

Maybe this was covered earlier in the thread, but I’m here late, and I’m just wondering what the motivation is for opting out. I mean, do you think your kids will be tortured or emotionally distressed while taking the test? If they’re experiencing intense anxiety about it before the test, perhaps that points to a different problem that should be addressed? And do you care that often the most affluent, privileged families are opting out, which means that test scores will be dragged down for the remaining students who actually take the test at your school? I just don’t get it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Maybe this was covered earlier in the thread, but I’m here late, and I’m just wondering what the motivation is for opting out. I mean, do you think your kids will be tortured or emotionally distressed while taking the test? If they’re experiencing intense anxiety about it before the test, perhaps that points to a different problem that should be addressed? And do you care that often the most affluent, privileged families are opting out, which means that test scores will be dragged down for the remaining students who actually take the test at your school? I just don’t get it.

New poster here and I wonder the same and over the years have come to the conclusion that parents who go this ballistic over things like the PARCC have some degree of mental instability. I am stopping short of saying mental illness. The previous poster is talking about taking PARCC opposition as high as DC superior court and is risking alienating her child from teachers and administrators all in the name of avoiding a 10 hour test. Trust me, it's going to be far more harmful for her child (and her) to be known by the school as the PITA family than it is for her kid to take a standardized test. There are plenty of things that are subjective in a school---class placements, teacher placements, a whole lot of grades (writing, etc) that you just don't want to be labeled as "the crazy, PITA family. And whether or not your kid is behind it this PARCC crusade, the teachers are going to associate your child with you. I have seen people take similar battles and ultimately it's just REALLY unfair to their kids.

Thankfully, the vast, vast, vast majority of highly educated (and not highly educated and everyone in between) DCPS parents are balanced humans who realize that the PARCC has it's positives and negatives. As such, their kids sit and take the test and life goes on without a blip. I myself have 3 kids in DCPS and have found the PARCC extraordinarily useful for them to take in terms of prepping for the inevitable standardized tests that they will face later in life. My oldest just had his heart set on attending a particular "big3" private school for 7th grade. Part of the application process was taking the ISEE or SSAT which are not easy tests. However, my kid went in and rocked the test and wasn't at all phased by the format (a 4 hour multiple choice exam) because "it's just like the PARCC mom". An an extension of this, the SAT and ACTs of today are based on Common Core standards and the PARCC is actually s shadow of these exams (and is thought by many to be why in part so many kids are scoring so high on the ACT and SAT in recent years). The PARCC gives kids many years of practice with tests of this type.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Whoa - this thread has been interesting!

1. I agree it is obnoxious that the PARCC test appears (according to folks on this thread - but I haven't otherwise looked into it)to be an enrichment opportunity for a for-profit company (shades of De Vos - shudder). I don't like the incentives there (for a company to push testing to make money).
2. I'd like to hear more about why ten hours of testing a year is so bad? My view so far has been that there is a lot of testing in life (even as an adult, "testing" exists, just in different forms, e.g., preparing for an appellate oral argument!), and maybe it is not so bad to get early experience with it, and learn how to deal with the stress.
3. At least at my kid's school - Brent - there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of teaching to the test. Kids appear to be doing lots of interesting things and learning lots of important stuff. Plenty of field trips and projects. I don't know that ten more hours of field trips or projects instead of ten hours of testing would be better for the kids' development.

Have you taken a sample PARCC test on-line? Easy to do. I recommend it.

I found the ELA section, which took me around an hour to navigate, abominable--all five hours of it--but the math OK. The several ELA sections are almost all pointless-seeming kiddie literary analysis, with so many poorly written questions and such awkward formatting that I got dizzy reading through them. But that wasn't the least appealing aspect, not for me anyway. It was this: no knowledge of facts a kid should learn is tested in any section of the PARCC (e.g. "Who was the First US President?" or "How many states are there in the USA?"). I see no point in my eight year-old answering strange, deeply dull ELA questions for 10 minutes let alone for five hours. She reads to me from books she likes almost every night, and we talk about what she reads. I can see that this insipid test will teach her to like school a little less, nothing more.

Can't stand the PARCC on any level, so opting out at our WotP DCPS. Big headache, might end up in court. Still opting out this year and plan to do so for each year we stay in DCPS as long as DCPS adheres to the crappy PARCC (dropped by 17 states since 2013, with only NJ and DC left in the club).

Good idea - I just (for the first time) checked out the ELA. Whoa - that is not an easy test! On the one hand, I appreciate that they are requiring the kids to do some serious critical thinking and analysis about the texts they are reading. On the other, I am pretty skeptical that it is fair to have only one (scored) "right" answer to a lot of the questions - to me (as an adult) there were usually a couple of reasonable choices (and arguments that could be made supporting the correctness of one or another answer).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Maybe this was covered earlier in the thread, but I’m here late, and I’m just wondering what the motivation is for opting out. I mean, do you think your kids will be tortured or emotionally distressed while taking the test? If they’re experiencing intense anxiety about it before the test, perhaps that points to a different problem that should be addressed? And do you care that often the most affluent, privileged families are opting out, which means that test scores will be dragged down for the remaining students who actually take the test at your school? I just don’t get it.

New poster here and I wonder the same and over the years have come to the conclusion that parents who go this ballistic over things like the PARCC have some degree of mental instability. I am stopping short of saying mental illness. The previous poster is talking about taking PARCC opposition as high as DC superior court and is risking alienating her child from teachers and administrators all in the name of avoiding a 10 hour test. Trust me, it's going to be far more harmful for her child (and her) to be known by the school as the PITA family than it is for her kid to take a standardized test. There are plenty of things that are subjective in a school---class placements, teacher placements, a whole lot of grades (writing, etc) that you just don't want to be labeled as "the crazy, PITA family. And whether or not your kid is behind it this PARCC crusade, the teachers are going to associate your child with you. I have seen people take similar battles and ultimately it's just REALLY unfair to their kids.

Thankfully, the vast, vast, vast majority of highly educated (and not highly educated and everyone in between) DCPS parents are balanced humans who realize that the PARCC has it's positives and negatives. As such, their kids sit and take the test and life goes on without a blip. I myself have 3 kids in DCPS and have found the PARCC extraordinarily useful for them to take in terms of prepping for the inevitable standardized tests that they will face later in life. My oldest just had his heart set on attending a particular "big3" private school for 7th grade. Part of the application process was taking the ISEE or SSAT which are not easy tests. However, my kid went in and rocked the test and wasn't at all phased by the format (a 4 hour multiple choice exam) because "it's just like the PARCC mom". An an extension of this, the SAT and ACTs of today are based on Common Core standards and the PARCC is actually s shadow of these exams (and is thought by many to be why in part so many kids are scoring so high on the ACT and SAT in recent years). The PARCC gives kids many years of practice with tests of this type.

Who's going ballistic? That would be you, PP. I come from a live-and-let-live Quaker family. We want nothing to do with registering for the draft, like our ancestors, and nothing to do with the corporate standardized testing for children in America's public schools.

If you support PARCC testing, finding it of great value to your family, wonderful. Nothing to stop you from embracing PARCC, celebrating it, spreading of the gospel of its merits. We know all about the PARCC yet choose to opt out via quiet non-cooperation.

The first standardized test I took in my life was the SAT (I skipped the PSAT). I scored in the high 700s on both sections, helping me gain me entry to an Ivy on massive fi aid. We don't need the PARCC to shadow anything in our family life but the lovely learning experiences we're going to privately revel in during the 10 hours we will be preserving for learning (by avoiding a test we know and reject). To each her own.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Whoa - this thread has been interesting!

1. I agree it is obnoxious that the PARCC test appears (according to folks on this thread - but I haven't otherwise looked into it)to be an enrichment opportunity for a for-profit company (shades of De Vos - shudder). I don't like the incentives there (for a company to push testing to make money).
2. I'd like to hear more about why ten hours of testing a year is so bad? My view so far has been that there is a lot of testing in life (even as an adult, "testing" exists, just in different forms, e.g., preparing for an appellate oral argument!), and maybe it is not so bad to get early experience with it, and learn how to deal with the stress.
3. At least at my kid's school - Brent - there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of teaching to the test. Kids appear to be doing lots of interesting things and learning lots of important stuff. Plenty of field trips and projects. I don't know that ten more hours of field trips or projects instead of ten hours of testing would be better for the kids' development.

Have you taken a sample PARCC test on-line? Easy to do. I recommend it.

I found the ELA section, which took me around an hour to navigate, abominable--all five hours of it--but the math OK. The several ELA sections are almost all pointless-seeming kiddie literary analysis, with so many poorly written questions and such awkward formatting that I got dizzy reading through them. But that wasn't the least appealing aspect, not for me anyway. It was this: no knowledge of facts a kid should learn is tested in any section of the PARCC (e.g. "Who was the First US President?" or "How many states are there in the USA?"). I see no point in my eight year-old answering strange, deeply dull ELA questions for 10 minutes let alone for five hours. She reads to me from books she likes almost every night, and we talk about what she reads. I can see that this insipid test will teach her to like school a little less, nothing more.

Can't stand the PARCC on any level, so opting out at our WotP DCPS. Big headache, might end up in court. Still opting out this year and plan to do so for each year we stay in DCPS as long as DCPS adheres to the crappy PARCC (dropped by 17 states since 2013, with only NJ and DC left in the club).

Good idea - I just (for the first time) checked out the ELA. Whoa - that is not an easy test! On the one hand, I appreciate that they are requiring the kids to do some serious critical thinking and analysis about the texts they are reading. On the other, I am pretty skeptical that it is fair to have only one (scored) "right" answer to a lot of the questions - to me (as an adult) there were usually a couple of reasonable choices (and arguments that could be made supporting the correctness of one or another answer).

Yes, too many competing answers. My main complaint about the math sections is that they're loaded with convoluted word questions ELL kids who may be have considerable math prowess are likely to struggle with. Not a great message to send to an immigrant kid- you suck at math because you suck at English. It's more of an English test than a math test really. Poor design of questions is a real problem with PARCC. Taking a practice test opened my eyes to why the overwhelming majority of states who adopted PARCC have dumped it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Maybe this was covered earlier in the thread, but I’m here late, and I’m just wondering what the motivation is for opting out. I mean, do you think your kids will be tortured or emotionally distressed while taking the test? If they’re experiencing intense anxiety about it before the test, perhaps that points to a different problem that should be addressed? And do you care that often the most affluent, privileged families are opting out, which means that test scores will be dragged down for the remaining students who actually take the test at your school? I just don’t get it.

New poster here and I wonder the same and over the years have come to the conclusion that parents who go this ballistic over things like the PARCC have some degree of mental instability. I am stopping short of saying mental illness. The previous poster is talking about taking PARCC opposition as high as DC superior court and is risking alienating her child from teachers and administrators all in the name of avoiding a 10 hour test. Trust me, it's going to be far more harmful for her child (and her) to be known by the school as the PITA family than it is for her kid to take a standardized test. There are plenty of things that are subjective in a school---class placements, teacher placements, a whole lot of grades (writing, etc) that you just don't want to be labeled as "the crazy, PITA family. And whether or not your kid is behind it this PARCC crusade, the teachers are going to associate your child with you. I have seen people take similar battles and ultimately it's just REALLY unfair to their kids.

Thankfully, the vast, vast, vast majority of highly educated (and not highly educated and everyone in between) DCPS parents are balanced humans who realize that the PARCC has it's positives and negatives. As such, their kids sit and take the test and life goes on without a blip. I myself have 3 kids in DCPS and have found the PARCC extraordinarily useful for them to take in terms of prepping for the inevitable standardized tests that they will face later in life. My oldest just had his heart set on attending a particular "big3" private school for 7th grade. Part of the application process was taking the ISEE or SSAT which are not easy tests. However, my kid went in and rocked the test and wasn't at all phased by the format (a 4 hour multiple choice exam) because "it's just like the PARCC mom". An an extension of this, the SAT and ACTs of today are based on Common Core standards and the PARCC is actually s shadow of these exams (and is thought by many to be why in part so many kids are scoring so high on the ACT and SAT in recent years). The PARCC gives kids many years of practice with tests of this type.

Thank you, PP, for reminding us of the value in not mentioning our decision to opt out to other parents at our school. Families are entitled to pass their deeply-held beliefs onto the next generation. Name calling is allowed, but unhelpful.

[Anonymous]

I don't get why PPs slam parents who've decided to opt out for whatever reasons. I also don't understand why school admins and OSSE officials tend to beat up on these folks.

DC makes opting out difficult to pull off, even if school admins are willing to work with parents who opt out. This helps explain why very few DC public school families currently opt out. EotP, the number is tiny. Moreover, unless a more than 5% of the students in a particular DC public school fail to take the test, the school's PARCC scores are not impacted in any way. This has never happened in the District, and, by the sounds of it, never will.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Maybe this was covered earlier in the thread, but I’m here late, and I’m just wondering what the motivation is for opting out. I mean, do you think your kids will be tortured or emotionally distressed while taking the test? If they’re experiencing intense anxiety about it before the test, perhaps that points to a different problem that should be addressed? And do you care that often the most affluent, privileged families are opting out, which means that test scores will be dragged down for the remaining students who actually take the test at your school? I just don’t get it.

New poster here and I wonder the same and over the years have come to the conclusion that parents who go this ballistic over things like the PARCC have some degree of mental instability. I am stopping short of saying mental illness. The previous poster is talking about taking PARCC opposition as high as DC superior court and is risking alienating her child from teachers and administrators all in the name of avoiding a 10 hour test. Trust me, it's going to be far more harmful for her child (and her) to be known by the school as the PITA family than it is for her kid to take a standardized test. There are plenty of things that are subjective in a school---class placements, teacher placements, a whole lot of grades (writing, etc) that you just don't want to be labeled as "the crazy, PITA family. And whether or not your kid is behind it this PARCC crusade, the teachers are going to associate your child with you. I have seen people take similar battles and ultimately it's just REALLY unfair to their kids.

Thankfully, the vast, vast, vast majority of highly educated (and not highly educated and everyone in between) DCPS parents are balanced humans who realize that the PARCC has it's positives and negatives. As such, their kids sit and take the test and life goes on without a blip. I myself have 3 kids in DCPS and have found the PARCC extraordinarily useful for them to take in terms of prepping for the inevitable standardized tests that they will face later in life. My oldest just had his heart set on attending a particular "big3" private school for 7th grade. Part of the application process was taking the ISEE or SSAT which are not easy tests. However, my kid went in and rocked the test and wasn't at all phased by the format (a 4 hour multiple choice exam) because "it's just like the PARCC mom". An an extension of this, the SAT and ACTs of today are based on Common Core standards and the PARCC is actually s shadow of these exams (and is thought by many to be why in part so many kids are scoring so high on the ACT and SAT in recent years). The PARCC gives kids many years of practice with tests of this type.

Who's going ballistic? That would be you, PP. I come from a live-and-let-live Quaker family. We want nothing to do with registering for the draft, like our ancestors, and nothing to do with the corporate standardized testing for children in America's public schools.

If you support PARCC testing, finding it of great value to your family, wonderful. Nothing to stop you from embracing PARCC, celebrating it, spreading of the gospel of its merits. We know all about the PARCC yet choose to opt out via quiet non-cooperation.

The first standardized test I took in my life was the SAT (I skipped the PSAT). I scored in the high 700s on both sections, helping me gain me entry to an Ivy on massive fi aid. We don't need the PARCC to shadow anything in our family life but the lovely learning experiences we're going to privately revel in during the 10 hours we will be preserving for learning (by avoiding a test we know and reject). To each her own.

You should really consider pulling your kids from public schools because corporations are being enriched from many different directions in your kid's school all day long. For better or worse public education is just another billion $ America industry.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I don't get why PPs slam parents who've decided to opt out for whatever reasons. I also don't understand why school admins and OSSE officials tend to beat up on these folks.

DC makes opting out difficult to pull off, even if school admins are willing to work with parents who opt out. This helps explain why very few DC public school families currently opt out. EotP, the number is tiny. Moreover, unless a more than 5% of the students in a particular DC public school fail to take the test, the school's PARCC scores are not impacted in any way. This has never happened in the District, and, by the sounds of it, never will.

Because the Council has not approved opting-out (other states have). School admins are not allowed to "work with" parents who want to opt out (although a few do). If it becomes known that they are, the central office will try and shut that down.

[Anonymous]

Here's another perspective. Would my child be getting the amazing pull-outs for reading she gets if the school wasn't afraid of her ELA PARC scores nest year? I don't know. I think thsi is how its supposed to work though. Without high stakes testing at my high achiveing school, would they pay as much attention to her?