Scott Brinton

How ‘opt out’ roiled Common Core

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For every large-scale social movement, there is a “tipping point, that magic moment when an idea, trend or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips and spreads like wildfire.”

So wrote New Yorker staff writer Malcolm Gladwell in his first book, “The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference,” published in 2000, which itself caught fire and became a best-seller.

For the standardized-test “opt out” movement, the tipping point came four years ago, when it went from small-scale to big-time, and it has grown exponentially ever since.


A relatively small number of parents in affluent school districts had quietly started keeping their children out of state tests as early as 2000, according to a study published in August by Columbia University’s Teachers College, titled “Who opts out and why?” by Drs. Oren Pizmony-Levy and Nancy Green Saraisky. Those parents continued to do so for more than a decade, without fanfare. Then, in 2012, the equation changed. Suddenly, tens of thousands of parents were opting their children out of the standardized exams.

The opt-out movement caught state education officials unaware, roiling plans for full-scale implementation of the Common Core State Standards, a set of rigorous national educational objectives that students must meet starting as early as third grade and continuing through high school.

At first, state officials –– especially Gov. Andrew Cuomo –– defended the testing regimen, though a number of state legislators criticized it. With an all-out parent rebellion on their hands, lawmakers relented in 2015, agreeing to reform Common Core. In addition, the state placed a four-year moratorium on the use of students’ state test scores to evaluate teachers’ classroom performance.

The national-opt out movement was sparked by four organizations –– Long Island Opt Out, headed by Jeanette Deutermann, a stay-at-home mom from North Bellmore; the New York Alliance for Public Education; the Badass Teachers Association and United Opt Out, according to the Columbia University study.

Pizmony-Levy and Green Saraisky examined 1,641 surveys from 47 states for their study, which was conducted online. Through their research, they developed a profile of a parent likely to keep his or her children from taking the exams.

“The typical activist,” they wrote, “is a highly educated, white, married, politically liberal parent whose children attend public school and whose household median income is well above the national average.” Most survey participants were mothers, and most had only heard about the opt-out movement in the past three to four years.

Once upon a time, state exams, particularly at the elementary level, were “low-stakes diagnostic tools of student learning,” the researchers noted. Then, over time, they morphed into “high-stakes exercises with significant consequences attached.”

To my mind, it all began in the 1990s, under President Bill Clinton, who supported so-called benchmark exams for students at the beginning and end of fourth, eighth and 12th grades. The tests were intended to paint a portrait of students’ performance throughout their academic careers and to ensure that basic educational goals were met. The buzzword was accountability.

President George W. Bush ramped up the testing regimen. Gone were the benchmark exams. Under No Child Left Behind, students had to be tested every year in English and math.

At the same time, student passing rates were published in “school report cards” produced in New York by the State Education Department, ostensibly for the sake of transparency. The media had a field day, comparing schools and districts with one another. The success stories were lauded. Parents wanted their children in high-performing districts, and property values steadily edged up in such places. Meanwhile, in low-performing districts, where property values were more tenuous, parents demanded answers.

Boards of education sought to hold administrators accountable for student failure. Administrators, in turn, sought to hold teachers accountable.

Then President Obama took it all a step further under Race to the Top, requiring states to adopt the Common Core standards or lose hundreds of millions of dollars in education aid. The federal government also required that evaluation of teachers be tied to students’ scores on Common Core exams.

There the seeds of the opt-out movement were sewn, according to Pizmony-Levy and Green Saraisky. The movement exploded into the national consciousness, in large part because of the attempt to grade teachers according to their students’ test scores, they noted. A number of movement leaders were teachers or were related to teachers, and knew how to utilize social media to recruit parent volunteers and spark interest in the cause. (Long Island Opt Out started as a Facebook page.)

I have long opposed Common Core, not because I disagree with the program’s stated goal of raising standards. Rather, I have found New York’s implementation of the standards abysmal. They were thrust on teachers with little to no warning or training. That was unfair.

We do need to raise the educational bar. We live in a hyper-competitive world that desperately needs a highly educated workforce. If we are to raise standards, however, we must do so over time –– through evolution, not revolution.

Scott Brinton is the Herald Community Newspapers’ senior editor for enterprise reporting and staff development and an adjunct professor at the Hofstra University Herbert School of Communication. Comments? SBrinton@liherald.com.