The Parent Bill Of Rights For Education

Since the Center for American Progress, Delaware Governor Jack Markell, and the President of the National PTA want to get 10,000 signatures on their Testing Bill of Rights within the next month, I think it is only fair parents who opt their children out of high-stakes assessments do the same.  With that being said, this article needs 20,000 commenters, or official signatures, within the next month.  We need to tell these corporate education reformers: NO MORE!  If we get 50,000, even better.

Our parental bill of rights regarding opt out or refusing the test bill of rights will be a work in progress, morphing and changing based on the need.  We will make sure every single legislator and decision-maker as it pertains to education in our country has a copy of this.  Parents and guardians are the stewards of our children, not corporations and politicians.  They are not “your” property.  They are unique and individual.

THE PARENTAL BILL OF RIGHTS FOR OUR CHILDREN IN EARLY EDUCATION, PRE-SCHOOL, ELEMENTARY AND SECONDARY EDUCATION

CONCERNING HIGH-STAKES STANDARDIZED ASSESSMENTS, OUR RIGHT TO OPT OUT OR REFUSE OUR CHILD OUT OF THOSE ASSESSMENTS, THE COLLECTION OF STUDENT DATA, AND OUR RIGHT TO GATHER

BE IT ENACTED BY THE PARENTS OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Definition of parent: any biological parent, or a parent through legal adoption, or foster parent, or guardian, or court-appointed guardian, for children through the ages of birth to 18 or 21 with guardianship through the end of an IEP, whichever is later.

Whereas parents have been given the responsibility to raise a child and to help guide them to adulthood, as their primary caregiver, and

Whereas parents, through United States Supreme Court decisions and other laws, have the right to decide what is best for our children in education matters until they come to a legal age when they are able to make those decisions on their own, and

Whereas, we believe public education should be reserved for the public at large and not the corporations, be they profit or non-profit, and that decisions based on education are best made at the local level, and

Whereas, we believe any assessments given to our children should provide immediate feedback for the student, teacher, school, and parent as defined for the sole purpose of giving reasonable and interpretive analysis of academic progress for our child’s allotted grade.

Whereas, as the caretakers of our children, we demand that decisions regarding data and the collection of data are parental decisions and that we furthermore have the absolute, unconditional right and ability to consent or not consent to any sharing of said data

(1) As parents, we have the fundamental, moral, and constitutional right to make decisions on behalf of our children in regards to their education.

(a) This includes the type of school we decide they go to, whether it be in a traditional school district, public charter school, vocational school, private school, homeschool, or homeschool co-op program.

(b) This includes our ability to refuse or opt our children out of standardized assessments despite accountability measures placed upon a school.

(1) Once we have submitted our letter indicating our choice to refuse or opt out our child, we shall receive no verbal or written words meant to threaten, bully, or intimidate, in an effort, whether intentional or coincidental, to coerce us into changing our minds.

(2) We expect our children to receive instruction while their peers take the state assessment that is of equal or greater value to the type of instruction they would receive prior to or after the administration of the state assessment.

(3) If our child is forced to take a test after we have already given our consent to refuse or opt out, we reserve the right to call the local police and press charges against the local education administration.

(4) If we witness parents who are bullied or intimidated, we will advocate on their behalf with their consent, if they feel they are unable to do so.

(2) We reserve the right, as dictated by United States of America Federal Law, Title 34, Subtitle A, Chapter 1, Part 99.32 (b), to request all personal identifiable information sent as data or official records to all parties indicated in the entirety of Title 34, Subtitle A, and to receive the entire list of all those who have disseminated, received, or researched said data, and to receive such record keeping as required by federal law, within the 30 day timeframe.

(a) Parents also reserve the right to have any aggregated data on our child, which could conceivably set up a pattern of identification based on our unique and individual child’s health records, social-emotional behavior, discipline, socio-economic, or any such identifiable trait or history of said traits, be banned from any education research organization, personalized learning computer system, or blending learning computer systems, standardized assessment(s), or any other form of educational environment practice or computer-based digital learning environment, whether it is through algorithms already built into a system or any other form of data collection that does not include the legal definition of personal identifiable information, at our request.

(1) This would also include any State Longitudinal Data System, or any Federal system, up to and including the Federal Learning Registry, a joint system shared by the United States Department of Education and the United States Department of Defense.

(2) Parents have the right to reject any “competency-based education” decisions for our children that we feel are not based on reasonable, valued, well-researched, or statistically-normed guidelines or analysis.

(3) Parents may freely reject any form of data collection, data-mining, or data sharing that would lead to our child having a pre-determined pathway to a career based on any such data unless we give consent for said behavior, before the actual data collection, data-mining, or data sharing by any education agency or institution, and as such, we reject and forbid any trajectory-based decisions for our child unless we have given complicit consent.

(3) For any education decisions regarding our children that we, as parents, feel is not safe, or is inadequate, or is unhealthy for our children, we hereby reserve the right to be able to give public comment to any governing body, without incident or refusal, based on compliance with existing, applicable, and reasonable rules of public meeting conduct, based on our First Amendment Rights.

(4) As parents, we reserve the right to gather, discuss, and give advice to other parents or concerned citizens, in any public meeting or gathering place or social gathering place, whether it is physical or on the internet, without censorship, removal, or banishment, based on existing, applicable, and reasonable rules of conduct set forth by the host of the public meeting place or social gathering place.

(5) Parents have the right to lobby elected officials or local school board officials or state board of education officials, regarding pending, suggested, or passed legislation or regulation, that parents deem harmful to their child or children in general, without cause or incident, based on existing, applicable, and reasonable law.

(a) We expect our elected officials, based on their availability, to make every concerted effort to personally respond to our request(s) and to not send a generic form letter, but rather to constructively engage with parents to the same effort they would with any official registered lobbyist who is paid to do so.

(6) As parents, we reject the ability of corporations to “invest” or “hedge” in education with financial predictors of success, including social impact bonds, or any other type of investments where financial institutions or corporations would gain financial benefit or loss based on student outcomes, as we believe a child’s education should be based on the unique and individual talents and abilities of each child, not as a collective group or whole.

(7) As parents, we believe our child’s teacher(s) are the front line for their education, and therefore, have the most immediate ability and responsibility to guide our children towards academic success, and therefore, should have the most say in their instruction.

(a) Therefore, we believe no state assessment can give a clear picture of a teacher’s ability to instruct a student or group thereof, and therefore, we reject any evaluation methods for teachers based on high-stakes standardized testing.

(b) Therefore, we believe a teacher’s best efforts should remain at the local level, in the classroom, and not to conform to a state assessment or to guide instruction towards proficiency on a state assessment, but rather on the material and instruction present before the students based on the material and instruction they have learned before.

(8) We reject any basis of accountability or framework system meant to falsely label or demean any teacher, administrator, school staff, or school, based on students outcomes as it pertains to state or national standardized assessments.

(9) As parents, we are the primary stakeholders for our child’s education, and therefore demand representation on any group, committee, task force, commission, or any such gathering of stakeholders to determine educational decisions for children, be it at a local, state, or national level.

(a) We demand equal or greater representation on any such group as that allotted to outside corporations.

Updated, 7:58pm, EST: I have started a petition at Change.org which will be sent to United States Representative John Kline (MN) who serves as the Chair of the House Education and the Workforce Committee in Congress.  If you have already signed the article, please sign the change.org petition instead.  I apologize for the confusion!  It has been a crazy day!

Updated, 11:46am, EST: Apparently, Facebook does not like the idea of a Parent Bill of Rights for Education that touches upon an item concerning censorship of a parent’s First Amendment Rights to express their opinion that poses no physical harm or safety risk to any individual…

 

Updated, 3/29/16, 6:42pm: I am still in Facebook jail.  I’ve sent appeals to Facebook three times with no response whatsoever.  I guess they really don’t like parents protecting their rights…

Is The Delaware DOE A Victim Of Federal Mandate As Much As Our Students & Educators?

The more I look into education on a federal level, the more I think it is not just parents who are bullied and intimidated, but also each state Department of Education.  For the past week, I have been closely examining the “school report card” fiasco in Delaware.  Dubbed the “Delaware School Success Framework”, this is a new accountability system for public schools in Delaware.  The controversy around it has centered around a participation rate penalty which the Delaware Department of Education said was a “non-negotiable” and “required” item on the framework.  While this is still being investigated by this blog and others at this point, and what the DOE said and did at different pints in time, it is becoming obvious US DOE “mandates” can be non-regulatory but said in a way it could be easily perceived as threatening or intimidating.

The participation rate is the percentage of children who take the state assessment, which in Delaware’s case is the Smarter Balanced Assessment.  The rule is that it can’t go below the 95% mark, otherwise there would be penalties.  For years, everyone assumed this was a cut in federal funding, which has never happened.  But as I review Delaware and other state’s 2015 ESEA Flexibility Waivers, I’m finding some states are choosing the participation rate penalty in lieu of checking the area off where they would receive cuts in funding.  If the feds have never done this before, when many schools have clearly gone way below the 95% mark, why would they be harping on this now?

When states like New York, New Jersey and Washington had very high opt-out rates statewide, this drew a lot more attention to the issue.  States like Delaware and Oregon had opt-out legislation passed by their legislators.  In Oregon, the Governor signed it.  In Delaware, the Governor vetoed the bill.  But opt-out will continue, and probably in larger numbers this school year.  This is not a train that can be stopped.

Other mandates by the US DOE, such as the labeling of Title I schools as priority or focus, seem to be closely watched and monitored by the feds.  These schools labels are all based on the proficiency ratings from the state assessments, which is very dangerous.  High poverty schools can not be compared to regular schools whose students are not within the same sub-groups.  It is a system designed specifically to measure up or close.  The very term “sub-group” would indicate these students are below others.  I watched the Delaware DOE stumble through this last year, and I was privy to internal and external emails surrounding this debacle through released FOIA material.  The whole process is so convoluted it would take a Mensa genius to figure it all out.

Who in Delaware will stand up to the Feds once and for all for the sake of our children?  If you are banking on Governor Markell, I don’t see that happening.  Will the interim Secretary of Education, Dr. Steven Godowsky, step up?  And how will the upcoming ESEA reauthorization impact all of this?  And will President Obama even sign the bill if Congress gets together and successfully combines both versions of the legislation?  The next few months will be very interesting for education.

Senator Lamar Alexander: States Can’t Give Parents The Right To Opt Their Children Out, We Already Own That Right!

The United States Senate just killed the opt-out amendment in their ESEA reauthorization bill according to The Washington Post.  Senator Lamar Alexander, according to the article by Emma Brown, spoke against the amendment for the following reason:

“But Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) — the Republican co-sponsor of the carefully crafted bipartisan bill — spoke forcefully against the proposal, saying it would strip states of the right to decide whether to allow parents to opt out.”

Excuse me Mr. Senator?  Nothing on this planet will ever give me a “right” or “allow” me to opt my son out except for the fact that I already have that right and allowance as a father.  Politicians created this mess, and you need to get our children out of it.  I take great offense at your suggestions this is not a right I already possess.

I agree with Diane Ravitch who just stated:

“I have great respect for Senator Alexander but his argument is not logical. The federal government mandates the tests, but it leaves to states the power to decide whether parents have the right to opt out. Why is the federal government mandating any tests? Why is this not a state responsibility? If he were being consistent, he would leave the testing and the right to opt out to the states. I would just remind the Congress that the Elementary and Secondary Act of 1965 was a resource equity act, not a testing and accountability act. It was meant to send money to schools and districts that enrolled students who lived in poverty. It was No Child Left Behind that turned the ESEA into a testing and accountability act in 2001-02. And it was the Improving America’s Schools Act of 1994 that first proposed that states create their own standards and assessments.”

Both Delaware U.S. Senators Tom Carper and Chris Coons voted no for the opt-out amendment.  There are two other opt-out amendments in S.1177 Every Child Achieves Act, but this does not bode well for the other two amendments.  I seriously hope both Carper and Coons don’t think the citizens of Delaware will forget this the next time they are up for re-election…

To find out if your state senator stiffed parents, go here:

http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=114&session=1&vote=00235

If Markell Signs House Bill 50, What Will The Actual Opt-Out Law Be?

The engrossed version of House Bill 50 is now available on the Delaware General Assembly website.  I am really hoping Governor Jack Markell does the right thing here and honors parents.  It could be a matter of days folks.  Keep in mind that even if the Governor does veto this, the General Assembly can override it.  They may not be able to do it by June 30th, but they can certainly do it by January 2016.  The next year of Smarter Balanced Assessment won’t even start until well after that, so we would be okay.

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