The opt-out wave & its undertow

s more than a million New York public school kids begin state-mandated exams this week, the growing movement to boycott the tests is expected to take a great leap into the unknown.

Last year, roughly 60,000 students didn’t take the tests, meant to measure their mastery of math and English, without presenting a valid excuse. This year, that number is expected to soar, thanks in part to an organized campaign by the state teachers union and its political allies to persuade parents to have their children opt out.

I think the idea of keeping one’s kids from taking the test is reckless and unrealistic for lots of reasons — more on that in a minute. But if parents are determined to continue the fight against standardized tests, they should be aware of the snares and pitfalls that any new movement faces.

First and foremost, parents should guard against allowing their movement to get hijacked by the money and political clout of union officials, whose motivation and ultimate goals on this issue are very different from those of parents.

The recent leap into the opt-out movement by New York State United Teachers was inspired by a new law, passed by the Legislature and strongly backed by Gov. Cuomo, that makes test scores the basis of tougher evaluation standards intended to detect poorly performing teachers and steer them out of the classroom.

As lawmakers debated whether student test scores should count for 20% or 50% of a teacher’s evaluation, Karen Magee, president of the state union, gave away the game in an interview published in the Binghamton Press & Sun-Bulletin.

“We have 20% right now. We’d be happy with zero, because it’s not a true indicator of what’s going on in the schools,” said Magee.

“Happy with zero” means the union would just as soon not have its members’ job security or prospects for promotion affected in any way by whether the students have actually learned reading, writing or math. And in pursuit of that goal, the union’s strategy — backed by groups including the Working Families Party — is to cripple the evaluation system by encouraging so many kids to opt out that the tests won’t represent a reliable sample.

That’s not the same agenda as parents, who simply dislike the stress and lost classroom hours that inevitably come with prepping for a high-stakes standardized test.

Back in January, in a fiery State of the State address, Cuomo vowed to revamp teacher evaluation systems that he dismissed as “baloney” because nearly every teacher gets rated as effective, even as thousands of kids are clearly getting a less than adequate education.

Magee’s response? “The truth is, there’s no epidemic of failing schools or bad teachers,” she said in a statement responding to Cuomo. “There is an epidemic of poverty and underfunding that Albany has failed to adequately address for decades.”

I suspect parents in Buffalo would beg to differ. The state’s second-largest city spent an eye-popping $26,903 per student in 2010, the third-highest amount in America, but only 55% of its high school students are graduating — a smaller percentage than in Newark or Detroit — and 77% of its schools are designated as “priority” schools by the state Education Department.

A look at the much-reviled standardized state tests reveal that 98% of students entering Buffalo’s 13 general admissions high schools are not proficient in math, and 95% are not proficient in English Language Arts. If successful, the opt-out movement will prevent parents from knowing when something has gone very wrong, as it clearly has in Buffalo.

Similar problems can be found in systems including Rochester, Syracuse and throughout New York City (as detailed in the recent Daily News “Fight for Their Future” series).

Parents who object to any type of highstakes testing, especially now that New York has adopted the challenging Common Core standards, should realize that highstakes testing is, for better or worse, the norm in our complex modern society. Universities base admissions decisions on SAT and ACT scores; graduate schools do the same with LSATs, GREs, MCATs and more.

And virtually all Civil Service employees, be they firefighters, bus drivers or entry-level sanitation workers, must pass a high-stakes standardized test to get the job. The legal and medical professions famously require exams of punishing difficulty, as do architecture and aviation.

I wouldn’t knowingly go to a doctor who couldn’t pass a battery of high-stakes tests, and neither would you. We owe it to our kids and ourselves to acknowledge that simply opting out of tests is no path to success.

The union has one goal, parents another