Common Core opt out-rate higher than last year

Almost half of eligible Long Beach students in grades three through eight refused to take the Common Core English Language Arts exams last week.

A total of 717 out of 1,565 enrolled students chose to sit out the tests — 45.8 percent of the testable population. Last year, 626 students opted out of the ELA exams.

Since the ELA and math Common Core standards were implemented in New York schools in 2012, the growing opt-out movement has been attributed to the concerns of parents and teachers about the value and the difficulty of the tests. Many have spoken out against the Common Core curriculum, saying that the material and exams are developmentally inappropriate for students and fail to adequately assess teachers’ effectiveness.

“We use the information from the assessments that students take,” Schools Superintendent David Weiss said. “That information would be much more useful for us if all students took the assessments. Clearly, the State Education [Department] has a ways to go both in improving the assessments and in restoring parents’ confidence. They need to permanently separate measuring student performance from APPR” — the Annual Professional Performance Review, the process by which teachers and principals are evaluated on an annual basis — “They have to reduce the length of testing and move to an adaptive model that adjusts to students’ ability level.”

Matt Adler, a Seaford High School math teacher, has kept his son, a fifth-grader at East Elementary School, out of the tests for the past two years. He said he believes that parts of the Common Core curriculum do not match students’ abilities, and that the testing is detrimental to their learning.

“Our kids lost a week of instruction this past week because they spent three days testing,” Adler said. He emphasized that before the exams are administered, the students focus on test preparation rather than actual subject matter.

Adler added that the state does not release exam results until the year after students take them, when they have moved on to the next grade, so teachers and parents are unable to use the information to help them.

“The test questions do not get released, so where is the educational purpose in the classroom and the instruction?” Adler said.

He also noted that there has been a lack of progress in improving the tests on the state level, despite all the complaints. “Nothing has changed,” he said. “If anything, [the State Education Department] made it worse with the untimed exams, so there’s more stress for the kids.” Last year, the department removed time constraints so that students could spend as much time as they needed on the tests.

The Education Department also reduced the number of questions on the exams, and instituted a four-year moratorium on using test scores to evaluate teacher performances. But many believe that more changes are needed.

Rich Napolitano, father of a fourth grader at Lindell Elementary School and a teacher in Suffolk County for 25 years, contributes to a Facebook page called Long Beach Opt Out/Refuse the Common Core Information.

“I didn’t like what education was becoming, and decided I wanted to get involved here in Long Beach,” Napolitano said.

“I taught in middle schools for 17 years, and I watched these tests come up and I watched how it changed education. Schools were becoming test-centered, not child-centered.”

Gerri Maquet, co-president of the Long Beach Central Council PTA, did not respond to the Herald’s request for comment.

The focus of the Common Core standards, Adler said believes, should lie in the subject matter. “We have a philosophy from our state where the test is driving the curriculum,” he said. “The curriculum should drive the assessment, [instead of] the assessment driving the curriculum.”