Opinion

Who all the testing is meant to help

Parents in Park Slope and other well-to-do neighborhoods are organizing a boycott of this week’s 40-minute field tests in math and English. Led by groups like Time Out From Testing and ParentsNYC, they oppose high-stakes testing in the public schools, which they see as a distraction from the real education their children could be receiving.

They actually have a point — but then, the testing isn’t really about their kids.

High-stakes testing has been shown to offer clear benefits — particularly to lower-income students. In one study, Martin Carnoy and Susanna Loeb of Stanford found that, when teachers and schools were held responsible for their students’ test scores, the performance of minority children improved significantly. Examing data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, they found gains especially for African-American and Hispanic eighth-graders.

Thomas Dee of Swarthmore and Brian Jacob of the University of Michigan came to a similar conclusion. In the journal Education Next in 2010, they wrote that the accountability provisions of the No Child Left Behind law “had the greatest impact on the math scores of African-American and Hispanic students and those eligible for subsidized lunch.” They found that these accountability systems erased roughly a quarter of the math achievement gap between black and white fourth-graders.

One of the nation’s leading education experts, Jay Greene of the University of Arkansas, agrees that high-stakes testing doesn’t do much for upper-class kids; it may even take some time from “art and recess.”

Here’s the thing, though: The policy isn’t meant to serve them, but the children whom our schools haven’t been serving well.

This week’s boycott is the second this year; the first was in June. And the parents have a resolution at the City Council demanding that the state re-examine school testing.

(Of course, adding to their political punch is the city’s teachers union, which objects to testing because it can help expose teachers who aren’t up to the job.)

Some well-off parents have been objecting to high-stakes tests for years. Back in 2001, Scarsdale moms kept their seventh-graders home from schools to show, as one put it, “that we will not sacrifice our children so that some politician can wave numbers around and talk about how our schools are doing.”

And two years ago, the movie “Race to Nowhere” wowed the suburbs with claims that kids stressed out by too many tests and too much homework are a national crisis.

Vicki Abeles, the movie’s producer and co-director, told me she thinks that “Race to Nowhere” resonated “with all kinds of people who believe that the current narrow focus [on testing] isn’t leading to people who are innovative and creative.”

But these are the concerns that the upper classes can afford to have.

High-stakes testing isn’t a crisis, but a response to one. A majority of African-American and Latino children in 4th grade struggle to read a simple children’s book. Black and Latino 12th-graders read and do math at the same level as white eighth-graders. In New York, only about half of African-American and Latino students graduated on time last year.

The activists are apparently oblivious to all this. One parent told The New York Times of her hopes “to have more lower-income parents being more visible and more active” in the anti-testing movement. Sorry: The ones with time to get involved in their kids’ education have other priorities, like making sure their children learn to read and add.