Despite controversy, few Nevada students opt out of Common Core testing

By Ian Whitaker

Wednesday, May 13, 2015 | 2 a.m.

A growing number of students around the country are refusing to take standardized tests.

In New Jersey, students opting out of the computerized tests this year reached into the tens of thousands. In New York, more than 10 percent of students opted out of the test.

In the aftermath, education activists and officials have questioned the effect the opt out movement will have in a country where millions in funding is tied to federal testing requirements.

In Nevada, that question is moot. Only a negligible number of students chose to opt out of the Smarter Balanced Assessment this year. And failures in communication between testing companies all but botched the tests in the state this year anyway.

Between Washoe County and Clark County, the state’s two largest school districts, the number of students who opted out of the test barely scratched 200. That’s out of 214,000 third- through eighth-graders eligible to take it.

Students opting out of tests in Washoe County accounted for just 0.4 percent of the 30,260 eligible to take it. In Clark County, only around 75 opted out of the tests.

Carson City schools reported a whopping zero opt-outs when they started testing last month.

It’s a similar story for the state’s rural counties. White Pine schools reported no opt-outs, while Eureka and Storey counties reported just two opt-outs each. The sparsely populated Humboldt County, however, saw 25 students opt out of the tests.

Standardized testing has long been a controversial issue. But with Common Core testing set to begin in Nevada for the first time this year — bringing with it residual national angst over the federal standards, plans to judge teachers based on scores and students increasingly exhausted from constant test preparation — the question of whether students would be able to opt out of standardized testing became a much bigger issue than in years past.

School districts clashed with parents demanding their children be exempted from the test. In one exchange, documented on an anti-testing site, a mother of five CCSD students was told by district assessment chief Leslie Arnold that laws “do not provide the latitude to accommodate the choice of ‘opting out.’”

Later, a legal interpretation by Attorney General Adam Laxalt found state law wasn’t clear about whether the tests were mandatory or optional. As a result, state Superintendent Dale Erquiaga left it up to each school district to decide.

After all that, why did so few ultimately decide not to take the test? Anti-Common Core activists point to the school districts.

“The school districts are not telling parents they can opt out,” said John Eppolito, Nevada’s most visible Common Core and standardized testing opponent.

On the East Coast, organized networks of education activists and the occasional teacher’s union have been effective at spreading the movement to parents.

Eppolito is the president of Nevadans Against Common Core, the state’s only organized group opposing the standards and the high-stakes testing that goes along with it.

After he and his supporters failed to push bills in the Legislature to get the Common Core standards thrown out of the state, they decided to focus on testing. That’s because Common Core is a divisive issue, while Eppolito found that most parents tend to oppose subjecting their kid to hours of tests that don’t go on their academic record.

On April 21, during the height of the state’s problems with the SBAC test, Eppolito held a public meeting in Incline Village, where he lives. The title of the meeting: “Why You Should Not Let Your Child Take the SBAC Exam.”

As of this week, schools in Incline Village have opt out rates of over 9 percent, the highest in Washoe County and likely the entire state.

At CCSD, most third- through eighth-graders were poised and ready to take the test until the district was forced to halt testing indefinitely.

In a reverse of the situation in Nevada, a review of test refusals in New York found that students in New York City were drastically less likely to opt out of the test than their suburban and upstate counterparts.