Honors students forced to repeat grade for opting out of

Posted: Aug 15, 2016

In Florida, a group of parents are suing state education officials for coercing their children to repeat third grade because they were opted out of government standardized testing. The Orlando Sentinel reports: "One Orange County plaintiff had a daughter who was on the honor roll, the suit said, but "is being retained in the third grade because of no FSA scores and because her teacher was not informed of the criteria for developing a student portfolio during the school year." State law allows students who fail the FSA to be promoted through a portfolio of class work, but the Florida Department of Education issued "conflicting information" on that provision for students who didn’t earn an FSA score, the suit says." (Note: the "FSA" is a standardized test.) A parental rights group, Opt Out Florida, wrote on its website that the suit was "an indictment of test and punish ... systems everywhere", and that "a positive outcome from this case will have repercussions nationally – for the benefit of ALL children in public schools." The lawsuit aims to have the policy declared unconstitutional. This is an excerpt from the lawsuit: Parents of students who received report cards with passing grades — some of whom were honor roll students — seek emergency declaratory and injunctive relief alleging that, because they opted out of standardized testing for their child, defendants arbitrarily and capriciously interpreted statutes and rules in a manner that requires retention, rather than promotion, of third grade students. The result is that students with no reading deficiency are retained in the third grade solely because they opt-out of standardized testing. Defendants’ policy means that a third-grader who takes standardized tests and scores poorly — whether intentionally or not — can still be promoted. Yet, an outstanding student who regularly produces proficient school work in the classroom for which they receive passing grades will be retained simply for not taking a standardized test that they are permitted to opt of under the Florida Statutes. Because the receipt of federal dollars is at stake unless 95 percent of students participate in standardized testing, test participation is treated as more important than actual performance. It has been common knowledge among those who are informed about the truth behind public education that standardized testing, especially for younger children, is simply a smokescreen for the government's plan, through measures such as Common Core, to gather data on every single student in the United States. For example, Barack Obama's secretary of education, Arne Duncan, revealed in 2009 the true aim of the standardized testing agenda. "Hopefully, some day, we can track children from preschool to high school and from high school to college and college to career. " - Arne Duncan Common Core assessments, which Florida has essentially adopted, collect over 400 separate data points on every child who takes them, according to Will Estrada of the Homeschool Legal Defense Association. The data points that are collected include questions about "likes and dislikes", "health questions", and students' "home situation." In addition, Common Core tests are often educationally pointless and ridiculously worded. For example, this is how math is taught and tested using Common Core: Word problems are now called "math situations", "carry the one" is now "regroup ten ones as a ten", and the simple term "borrow" has been convoluted into "take a ten and regroup it as ten ones." Common Core worksheets tell children that the president "makes sure the laws of the nation are fair", and that "the commands of government officials must be obeyed by all." They teach children to "revise" the Bill of Rights and require that two amendments are erased. History textbooks completely omit the Second Amendment as well as state gun-rights provisions, and worksheets claim that government officials can seize guns, even when they are properly licensed. Common Core, along with International Baccalaureate, is the greatest threat to student and family privacy, as well as the greatest purveyor of political propaganda in public schools. ;