Common Core Testing Opt Out

Parent calls 911 after public school refuses to release child Posted on March 10, 2015 Written by eagnews.org

WINTER PARK, Fla. – A Florida par­ent was forced to take dras­tic mea­sures when her pub­lic school refused to release her child dur­ing a dis­pute over stan­dard­ized testing.

Jacqui Myers says another mother with a child at Win­ter Park’s Brook­shire Ele­men­tary School called her after she arrived at the school to opt her fifth-grade daugh­ter out of stan­dard­ized test­ing related to the Com­mon Core national stan­dards initiative.

“They’re not giv­ing me my child, can you help?” the mother told Myers.

Myers, the mother of a first grader, is active in a group work­ing to opt chil­dren out of state tests and was at the school coun­sel­ing parents.

She called 911 to report that the school wouldn’t release the child.

The school told the mother they did not want to release the child because she was in the mid­dle of test­ing. But when police arrived, the school relented and turned her over.

Myers tells the Orlando Sen­tinel that emails from school admin­is­tra­tors stated that “releas­ing stu­dents dur­ing test­ing would be dis­rup­tive and not be allowed.”

But after the inci­dent, a school spokesman denied such a pol­icy existed.

“We do not hold chil­dren if par­ents come to pick them up,” Shari Bobin­ski says, accord­ing to the paper.

The opt out move­ment has sprouted up across the coun­try in the last year amid con­cerns the fed­er­ally funded stan­dard­ized tests are col­lect­ing per­sonal data on stu­dents beyond how well they’re read­ing and writing.

Fox News reported par­ents sent a let­ter to then-Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Cor­bett with their con­cerns about the extent of data that could end up in state and fed­eral databases.

“The per­son­ally iden­ti­fi­able infor­ma­tion includes infor­ma­tion on every student’s per­son­al­ity, atti­tudes, val­ues, beliefs, and dis­po­si­tion, a psy­cho­log­i­cal pro­file called Inter­per­sonal Skills Stan­dards and anchors,” reads the let­ter sent to Cor­bett in December.

“This data has been ille­gally obtained through decep­tive means with­out the par­ents’ knowl­edge or con­sent through screen­ing, eval­u­a­tions, test­ing, and sur­veys. These ille­gal meth­ods of infor­ma­tion gath­er­ing were actu­ally fraud­u­lently called ‘aca­d­e­mic stan­dards’ on the [Penn­syl­va­nia] Depart­ment of Edu­ca­tion web­site portal.”

“This fol­lows them from the cra­dle to the grave,” Tracy Ramey, of Penn­syl­va­ni­ans against Com­mon Core, told FoxNews.com.

While some states allow opt­ing out of test­ing, oth­ers, like Florida, do not.

To fight back, par­ents are instruct­ing their chil­dren to take the ini­tial step of par­tic­i­pat­ing – break­ing the seal on a test book­let or log­ging into the test on a com­puter – but then refuse to do any­thing else.

The Ohio leg­is­la­ture passed a bill that bars schools from pun­ish­ing stu­dents who opt out.

Prior to the leg­is­la­tion, state offi­cials and edu­ca­tors said stu­dents could face “seri­ous con­se­quences, includ­ing third-graders not advanc­ing to fourth grade and high school seniors denied diplo­mas,” accord­ing to WCPO.

Related Posts

• Opt­ing Out as the Rem­edy May Mean Acci­den­tally Accel­er­at­ing Non­con­sen­sual Transformations
• New Jer­sey 10-year-old explains why Com­mon Core tests are ‘nonsense’
• Watch Out For Opt Out!
• ‘Top teacher’ win­ner quits due to Com­mon Core
  Filed Under: Education, Family Autonomy, Police State
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