Parents resist school standards

States back down after pressure builds against

tougher student goals
 

By Richard Whitmire / Gannett News Service
 
 

WASHINGTON -- The once-sporadic resistance to

education reforms, especially high-stakes testing, is blossoming

into a broader rebellion.

As parents protest the consequences of high-stakes testing,

where children can be forced to repeat a grade or graduate

without a diploma, states have been forced to lower more

ambitious standards.

In Los Angeles last week, school officials backed off a plan

to begin ending "social promotions" -- passing along children

who failed a grade -- after determining that 350,000 would be

held back.

In Massachusetts, state officials had little choice but to place

the passing grade on its new state assessment at just above

failing. Had they not, as many as 83 percent of Latinos and 80

percent of blacks would be denied a high school diploma.

One of the governors leading the nation's education reform

movement is Tommy Thompson of Wisconsin. There, his plan to

impose graduation tests was scuttled when parents began

complaining to state legislators.

"They were afraid of it," said Thompson when he appeared

the other day at the 10th anniversary of the National Education

Goals Panel, "and they got the Legislature to water it down."

"You're always going to have people pushing back, saying

'We can't do this - it's too difficult,' " Thompson said.

When many of the governors and some business leaders met

earlier this year in New York to discuss reforms,IBM chief Lou

Gerstner dubbed the movement "pushback."

"In any turnaround there are a couple of dangerous points," he

told the governors at the Education Summit. "This is one of

them."

The best example of a rebellion brewing among parents can

be found in Virginia, where a well-organized group of parents

communicating through an Internet list server is taking on that

state's standards of learning, which lays out in great detail exactly

what each child should learn in each grade.

It is considered the most ambitious of the state standards --

some 20 states have copied it. While the high-stakes

consequences for the Virginia tests don't kick in until 2006, there

was a 97-percent failure rate when they were first given last year.

The resistance movement started among a group of mothers

talking to one another at basketball games in Bedford, outside

Roanoke, said Mickey VanDerwerker, a mother of five.

"We saw this as a political game for our children, and it

needed a political solution," she said. When no other parents

stepped forward, she and others formed the Parents Across

Virginia United to Reform the Standards of Learning.

Pro-voucher politicians set impossibly high standards to

discredit public schools, VanDerwerker said.

She offers this third-grade standard: "Students will explain the

term civilization and describe the ancient civilizations of Greece

and Rome in terms of geographic features, government,

agriculture, architecture, music, art, religion, sports and the roles

of men, women and children."
 

Copyright 1999, The Detroit News