It Takes An Educated Community to Escape The Testing Frenzy

Amy Valens

“ Our decision to use non-competitive, non-standardized means to assess growth was a natural outgrowth of our individualized approaches. We have always made use of California’s Education Code provision that allows parents to exempt their children from standardized tests”

At the end of the 1960’s our little rural valley in Northern California was just far enough away from San Francisco to have the kind of low housing costs in a beautiful setting to attract a mix of counter culture people with roots in the arts, the trades, and social services ready to start families. With equal amounts of political savvy (coming out of Viet Nam and civil rights protests) and pure luck, they elected a couple of progressive people to the school board who supported not just a progressive school program but also a back to basics approach that other community members wanted. The dynamic of a board being responsive to the community that was born in the early 70’s is probably the most important reason that our schools have escaped the test frenzy that has taken over the nation’s public schools.

When an ethos was created of listening to what parents had to say, a high percentage of parents took seriously the responsibility of staying informed and voicing their opinions about what is included in their children’s education. School Board meetings can sometimes be contentious, but no matter what, everyone gets heard. The board actively supports the core beliefs they developed with community input:

• Children come first – Every child in our community deserves a quality education.
• The school district is successful when the community has shared goals and a shared vision for the future.
• The school district is successful when parents and community members are heard, supported, involved and participate to the best of their ability in the  activities of the district.

The program that I have been involved with since 1974 is a parent participation Open Classroom. It is one of 3 elementary school programs currently offered in the district. These are not charters, and their size is dependent on the choices that parents make when they enroll their children, but our program has consisted of 4 classrooms and around 95 students for many years. There is one principal for the entire 300+ student district, and a half time superintendent. All the students attend the same middle school.

Open Classroom parents and teachers have been meeting on a monthly basis since its inception, developing common understandings about the school’s philosophy, and how it looks in practice. Although a small number of parents have always chosen to have their children participate in standardized testing, the school has never used standardized tests as a tool. Our decision to use non-competitive non-standardized means to assess growth was a natural outgrowth of our individualized approaches. We have always made use of California’s Education Code provision that allows parents to exempt their children from standardized tests.

So it was no surprise that most of our parents made use of that opt-out provision when No Child Left Behind came along. The problem was that now we might be seen as penalizing the entire district by our decision. To address this we held a series of public meetings and forums, attended by all our school board members and a good cross section of the community. Community members views were heard, and expert testimony given--including that of the Assistant State Superintendent of Schools! Many spoke from an educational stand point—objecting to the arbitrariness of the tests, and how it narrows education, others from a practical place—in a small school it is almost impossible to get to 95% participation. At the end of an extensive two year process the board voted to support parents’ right to opt their child out of testing. They wrote to the state that they intended to return money given them to improve test scores because they had no intention of forcing students to take a test if their parents did not want them to. But they also refused to return Title one funds that NCLB had tied to participation in testing. As of this writing there has been no consequence to their actions. Perhaps it is because we are so small. Perhaps because our students do so well in high school. Perhaps because we are in the right and have our community behind us.

Amy Valens began her teaching career in 1968 in the public schools of Dayton Ohio. After a brief stint teaching in an independent Summerhill based school in Los Angeles, she returned to public school teaching in Northern California.  She joined the Open Classroom of the Lagunitas School District in 1974.  Amy is the author of two children’s books Jesse’s Daycare, (Houghton Mifflin 1990), and Danilo The Fruit Man ( Dial, 1993).  She retired from full time teaching in June of 2006, and has worked since then as co-producer/director of the film her husband Tom Valens shot the last year she taught: AUGUST TO JUNE Bringing Life to School.  You can learn more about the film at www.augusttojune.com

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