Standardized testing has long been a part of public education. Since 2002, the U.S. Department of Education has required that states receiving federal education funding test third- through eighth-grade students in reading and math, which is usually done in the spring and used to generate school and district report cards. Some states and districts have added annual tests in other grades and subjects, or even added fall testing. The most controversial new tests are those that have been added to the schedule in order to evaluate teachers.
Parent protests against tests “pop up like wildfires” about every decade, says the Brookings Institution’s Tom Loveless, who has written about the phenomenon. The last group of protests was a nearly decade ago, when parents in places like Scarsdale, New York, protested No Child Left Behind’s annual testing requirements—as did several states (and the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union). But the protests never caught on.
Pulling a child from standardized test can be quite simple for individual parents. Some places, it involves little more than a signed permission form downloaded from a state or district website. In other places, parents have cobbled together their own letters or simply handwritten a note. “That’s all you need,” says Tulsa parent Deedra Barnes, who drafted a opt-out letter for parents to use at her son’s Tulsa middle school. “It doesn’t have to be an official form.”
Full story: When parents yank their kids out of standardized tests