Charles F. Coleman Jr., a civil rights attorney and former Brooklyn, NY prosecutor, explains why opting out of standardized state tests is the wrong choice for kids, particularly for suburban parents whose children are immunized from poor schools often attended by children of color. Here’s an excerpt, but I recommend that you read the whole thing.
To put it plainly: white parents from well-funded and highly performing areas are participating in petulant, poorly conceived protests that are ultimately affecting inner-city blacks at schools that need the funding and measures of accountability to ensure any hope of progress in performance. For example, in New York, while the numbers of students choosing to opt out was substantial, only 2% of the students who did opt out were from New York City. When the number of students who opt out in a state dips below a certain number in a state–often as high as 95%–it can affect both federal and state funding for school districts. The areas are often hit hardest are often the ones that were already performing poorly, where support and accountability are two imperatives toward improvement.
