One in six New York students opted out of federally-mandated math or English Language Arts tests this spring. New data sheds light on which types of students opted out of those tests aligned with the Common Core standards.
School districts in which more students opted out had widely varying characteristics, but leaned toward serving wealthier students.
A majority of students opted out of the tests in 13 percent of New York school districts. In those districts, less than 30 percent of students were eligible for the federal free lunch program, an indicator of poverty. For comparison, in districts where less than one in 10 students opted out, 48 percent of students were eligible for the program.
Still, this is only a lean toward wealthy students. “No single student characteristic is a perfect predictor of opt-out rates,” writes Matthew Chingos, a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, who analyzed the data.
Chingos made the point that less-affluent districts are the ones targeted by education reform efforts. It may be that families in low-income school districts support the Common Core-aligned tests because it helps improve their education outcomes.
Chingos retrieved data from United to Counter the Core, an organization that advocates for opting out. Despite their tilt, Chingos called it “the most comprehensive opt-out dataset currently publicly available.”
Chingos showed that, after accounting for wealth in a school district, districts with lower test scores had more opt outs. He suggested this may be caused by administrators who encourage opt-outs to cover low school performance.
Chingos’s data had two weaknesses. First, not every school district had information available. Second, the available data are at the district-level, so it’s possible that poor students in wealthy districts are the ones opting out.
Eventually, the New York State Department of Education will publish even deeper demographic information on opt-out students. For now, Chingos’s data provide the most accurate description of opt-out students.
