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Opting Out

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Good news out of Minnesota, where the number of high school juniors opting out of the bogus standardized testing that has significantly hurt American education has jumped significantly.

In 2016, 2,227 high school juniors opted out of the MCA tests statewide. That’s just a drop in the bucket, compared to the 55,975 students who did take it. But it is more than three times the number of eleventh grade students–694–who opted out of the MCAs in 2015.

This is a startling jump, taking place in schools and cities as diverse as suburban St. Louis Park, rural Pine City and Minneapolis. (The examples below pertain only to the Math MCA tests for high school juniors.)

In 2016, ten Pine City juniors refused the MCA tests, while 102 students took the test; that’s a small but significant bump up from the three students who refused the tests in 2015. At St. Louis Park High School in 2016, 87 juniors sat for the MCA tests while 66 students opted out. But in 2015, just one student refused the MCAs.

An eye-popping 209 juniors at Minneapolis’s Henry High School opted out of the math MCAs in 2016. That’s a huge leap from 2015, when just eleven students refused the tests. Only seven percent of Henry’s 1,100 students identify as white and eighty-percent live in poverty, according to federal standards. This might help poke holes in the story that only “suburban moms” and white, wealthier kids are pushing the opt out movement. And, across town at Roosevelt High School, 66 juniors took the math MCAs in 2016 while 98 opted not to. Like Henry, Roosevelt is not a majority white school and almost seventy percent of its students qualify for free and reduced lunch.

Over at South High School–Minneapolis’s largest and most diverse–so few students took the MCAs in 2016 that there are simply blank spaces on the Department of Education’s spreadsheet for the school. That’s because, when fewer than ten students take the tests, the data has to be blocked out for privacy reasons. In 2015, 306 students–or nearly ninety percent of eligible juniors–at South did not take the tests.

Let’s hope this movement for quality education instead of test prep continues and grows. Taking back our schools means actually learning and helping students’ minds and curiosity grow instead of sitting for bogus exams.

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