State Education Commissioner Mary Ellen Elia says she won’t prevent parents who want their children to skip the state’s standardized tests from doing so.
Diane Ravitch is reporting New York State Education Commissioner Mary Ellen Elia will not try to stop parent opt-out. This is a welcome relief for hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers I’m sure. New York had the highest opt-out rates of any state in the country last spring, and all indications are pointing to these numbers increasing nationwide next year. Bottom line: parents are fed up and sick of their children going through these state assessments.
In Delaware, we will find out how our state did tomorrow when the mighty Markell and the distorted DOE release the 2015 results for the Smarter Balanced Assessment. Will they release the participation rate for the test? Or will we have to wait for the State Board of Education presentation on September 17th for that? Whatever the opt-out numbers are, they WILL increase in 2016.
I’m already hearing about how districts are bragging that they did better than they thought. But there is no indication if this is better than the proficiency rates for DCAS from last year. One common thing I am hearing in Delaware as well as the rest of the country: students with disabilities did very bad on the Smarter Balanced. Really bad. Single digit proficiency in a lot of cases…
Will Dr. Steven Godowsky, the Interim Delaware Secretary of Education do anything? He has been very quiet since the “resignation” of Mark Murphy two and a half weeks ago. Will he be a Markell puppet or his own man? One thing is for sure, if districts, charters and the DOE thought they had their hands full with opt-out requests this year, they might want to fasten their seatbelts, because REFUSE THE TEST DELAWARE is going to give them a long and bumpy ride!
The Season Of Myths 