Movement encourages opting out of ISTEP

Juerling argued the annual tests were neither reliable nor valid measures of what her children knew. But school administrators warned of dire consequences for her children and their school if she pulled them out of the mandatory assessments, now known as ISTEP+.

“I felt totally alone,” she said.

No more. Over the last week, a Facebook page that Juerling created to show parents how to “opt out” of the coming ISTEP tests has tripled its followers to more than 1,700.

It’s unclear how many parents may join her, but the increased interest reflects what’s become a national protest against standardized testing.

In Indiana it's directly correlated to the news revealed at last week's Indiana State Board of Education meeting. More rigorous ISTEP tests scheduled to start late this month will take more than twice as long to complete this year when they given to more than 450,000 students in third through eighth grades.

The increased exam time — from 6 to 12 hours — didn’t just incense parents, teachers and administrators who have long argued that ISTEP takes time away from classroom teaching and puts undue stress on children.

It angered Gov. Mike Pence, too. On Monday, he signed an order aimed at shortening the test times and called for an emergency review by an expert in educational assessment.

“Doubling the length of the ISTEP+ test is unacceptable, and I won't stand for it,” said Pence, a Republican. He blamed state Superintendent Glenda Ritz, who’s been warring with Statehouse Republicans since taking office in 2013.

Ritz, in turn, blames increased state and federal standards that demand routine assessments to see if students are on track to be college- and career-ready.

Her staff says Pence should have known that longer test times are partly due to the Legislature’s decision to reject the national Common Core State Standards first adopted in 2009 and write its own.

Juerling and others say the blame-game misses the point: a broader discontent with standardized tests and their consequences, which in Indiana range from teacher pay to student retention.

“What you’re seeing across the country and in Indiana is pushback by parents against politicians and policies that have turned our schools into test factories,” said Bob Schaeffer of FairTest, a Ford Foundation-funded nonprofit dedicated to eliminating the misuse of standardized tests.

Schaeffer said there’s been an unprecedented surge in rebellion by parents, teachers and students fed up with standardized testing.

He cites a range of incidents, from an Oklahoma middle school where half the parents pulled their children from a standardized reading test in spring 2013 to a protest last April when 60,000 students in New York were opted out of a test by parents protesting its use to evaluate teacher performance.

“It’s a form of civil disobedience,” he said.

Last April, Indiana education officials fielded what they called “numerous inquiries” from schools where parents wanted to opt out of ISTEP, or Indiana Statewide Testing for Educational Progress.

The requests came after a second year of widespread computer problems, stalling the beginning of the days-long exams that are taken online.

State officials' responded in a memo to school administrators: “Indiana law neither provides for an 'opt-out' procedure nor recognizes 'opting out' of assessments.”

But they warned of consequences. While it’s not illegal for a parent to refuse to allow a child to participate in the tests, it is against Indiana’s compulsory school attendance laws for a parent to refuse to send a child to school. The memo warned that students must take the tests to graduate.

On her Opt Out Indiana Facebook page, Juerling has posted sample letters used by other parents to exempt their children from ISTEP and says they’ve done so without consequences.

She concedes the number of parents doing so is small.

“That’s because parents feel bullied,” she said.

There may be increasing sympathy from school administrators who question the value of the state tests but face consequences of their own if students refuse to take them.

“Who am I to tell parents that they have no choice in how their children are tested and evaluated?” said J.T. Coopman, head of the Indiana Association of Public School Superintendents.

But that's a message administrators have had to deliver: Under the federal No Child Left Behind law, at least 95 percent of students in a school must be tested.

Falling below that level can jeopardize a school's funding and result in a lower grade under Indiana’s controversial, A-to-F school ranking system. That, in turn, affects teachers' pay.

Phil Downs, superintendent of Southwest Allen County Schools, said he found himself explaining those consequences to a handful of parents last April who were ready to pull their children from the tests.

“When I explain the impact it can have, parents get frustrated,” Downs said. “They don’t want their schools to be punished, but they want to know why they’re being coerced into something they don’t believe in. And I don’t have a very good answer for that.”

Coopman said the pockets of protesting parents around the state may grow from now until April as the tests are administered, especially with recent developments over test times and the political battle in the Statehouse.

“Once a movement gets started and other parents jump on that bandwagon, it’s like a snowball going downhill," Coopman said.

While he questions the value of the ISTEP test, Coopman said he doesn’t oppose assessing student progress. He argues that better tests already exist and yield more information about a student’s progress with assessments at multiple times during the year.

“If we’re going to test students, let’s do it the right way," Coopman said.

Ritz has called for a moratorium on using ISTEP results to determine schools’ A-to-F grades, to give teachers and students a year to adjust to its higher expectations.

Pence opposes that option, however.

“You don’t throw out the grades,” he said. “You fix the test.”