Standardized testing offers no significant benefit for student education, the trustees of the Lagunitas School District have declared. Last week, trustees unanimously passed a resolution that cites numerous drawbacks to state-mandated evaluations, from student stress to administrative costs, making a statement they hope will clarify the district’s stance on standardized testing for parents and teachers.

“It’s an effort to educate folks in general, legislatures in particular, to point out the problems with standardized testing,” trustee Richard Sloan said. “Every student is a special student. We should be devising an individual learning program for every student.”

The resolution comes at the same time the district is administering the latest incarnation of statewide standardized testing, called the Smarter Balanced Assessment, to 276 students in third through eighth grades. Of these students, 98 have elected to opt out of the test, including one entire class in the district’s Open Classroom program.

Only one student opted out of the test in West Marin’s other large districts, Shoreline Unified and Bolinas-Stinson Union.

Though some Lagunitas students have become upset due to the test’s difficulty, most have been able to complete it without feeling overwhelmed. The real challenge for administrators this week, said the district’s principal, Laura Shain, has been keeping up with the flood of opt-out requests.

“We welcome the requests and respect our parents’ role in considering whether the tests are beneficial for their children,” Ms. Shain said, “However, the volume and pace of the requests requires a constant monitoring of email and notes so that our testing lists are up to date each day.”

The resolution follows a series of discussions by the district’s trustees, administrators, teachers and parents over the past several months in response to Smarter Balanced, which caught media headlines last month after a wave of students across the United States boycotted the test. While the district’s resolution does not go so far as to signal an outright boycott of the test, it does announce the district’s public opposition to standardized testing in general.

The resolution articulates numerous reasons why Lagunitas trustees want no part in standardized testing; these include their belief that the tests increase student stress, significantly take away from instructional time and are a way for persons and companies to profit at the expense of students. Trustees also noted that they have no interest in the test results of their students being compared to other districts, a main purpose for administering tests such as Smarter Balanced in the first place.

But trustees also do not wish to impose their views on parents who want their children to participate in standardized tests, or to engage in any kind of “test shaming.” Rather, the resolution is solely meant to record how trustees feel about standardized testing at this point in time.

“It is a statement about how we feel about testing,” said trustee Denise Bohman-Santa Cruz. “It isn’t an action.”

The effort to create a united position on standardized testing was spearheaded by Mr. Sloan, a longtime trustee who this week will receive Marin County’s Golden Bell Award for “Trustee of the Year.” 

Mr. Sloan emphasizes that higher test scores are correlated with family income. “Poverty is what lowers test scores, folks!” said Mr. Sloan, who participated in studies that examined test taking while he was enrolled as a psychology student at the University of California, Berkeley, in the 1950s. “The only thing that raises test scores is family income. Not anything else.”

Others in the district have echoed Mr. Sloan’s views. A former middle school student, Dylan Escobar, explained that tests like Smarter Balanced disrupt regular class activities and do not accurately reflect what students have learned. Mr. Escobar has opted out of every state-mandated test since elementary school and noted that many of his peers are surprised that he is allowed to opt out of tests, unaware that the option even
exists. 

“Standardized tests that treat all the kids the same just don’t fit in with the way we learned at Lagunitas,” said Mr. Escobar, who is now a junior at Tamiscal High School in Larkspur. “Everything was designed to bring the best out of us, not force us to compete against each other and other schools.”

The trustee’s resolution has been nearly a decade in the making. Beginning in 2006, the district skirted tough sanctions for failing to comply with guidelines required by the Standardized Testing and Reporting, or STAR, program, an outgrowth of the No Child Left Behind Act. Mr. Sloan voiced similarly strong opposition to standardized testing at the time.

“I have been trying since 1970 to get this school board to take such a position,” Mr. Sloan said at the April board meeting. “Why in the world are we comparing one student with another? I would love for us to actually publish the opinion that they’re detrimental to education, that they don’t measure what you think they measure and that they have no value.”