Opting not to let kids be guinea pigs

Loveland resident Juliet Tissot has children in the fifth and seventh grades.

The question has been asked, "Why are you opting your children out of PARCC/AIR testing?" and before I answer I find myself taking a deep breath. There are so many reasons to refuse these new tests that it's hard to know exactly where to start.

PARCC/AIR tests are not needed for my children to graduate. PARCC/AIR tests are not needed for them to advance to the next grade. PARCC/AIR tests are not needed for them to get into honors classes, or looked at by colleges and there is no law requiring them to take the tests.

PARCC stands for Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, and AIR stands for American Institutes for Research. These tests are a byproduct of Common Core, a set of national academic standards developed to rid our community of local control over education and hand decisions made about our children's education over to the government.

Teachers – the very people we trust our children with each day – are no longer in charge of their classrooms. They are forced to give up instruction time for test prep. With 50 percent of teachers' evaluations being based on these test results, it's easy to understand why teachers have to focus on them. However, is it fair to base their evaluations on the tests to begin with? The Common Core standards have never been tried, tested or proven anywhere. Even Bill Gates, who finances the Common Core movement, said, "It would be great if our education stuff worked, but that we won't know for probably a decade."

As an informed parent I choose not to sacrifice a decade of my child's learning for the experiment of those who stand to make a lot of money whether the experiment succeeds or fails. I also choose not to belittle teachers by thinking someone else is better at making decisions for their classrooms than them. These standards hurt our kids by narrowing the curriculum. They lower the math bar by two years and emphasize informational text over classical literature. As admitted by one drafter of the math standards, Jason Zimba, Common Core is designed to prepare students for a nonselective two-year community college, not a four-year university.

PARCC/AIR tests are also the gateway to a national database of information on our children. While the previous tests, called OAAs, only used to give aggregate data to the state about how our children perform, PARCC/AIR makes up to 400 points of personal, individual student information available to the consortium of states that sign up for PARCC/AIR tests. Why would another state need any of my child's personal information and why would I allow it? The government will now have the ability to collect, store and sell that data to contractors and vendors, and I am adamantly against that.

With the Safe Harbor law (HB 487) in effect this year, protecting school districts from adverse effects of low report cards, this is the year to take a stand and tell the governor this is not what we want for our children. We want local control of education restored to school districts statewide. We want our children pushed to excel not held back to conform. Ohio schools used to test one day for three hours when they used the OAA. PARCC/AIR tests last nine hours now and nine hours in the spring. That's on top of regular course tests, MAP tests and all the practice tests in between. When kids are spending this much time testing they aren't spending it learning.

I want better, and that's why I refuse the test!