A growing number of New York parents want the state to stop testing students on Common Core standards — this year.

The parents are from school districts across the state and they're better prepared than in years past to tell school administrators that their children won't participate in this year's English Language Arts and math state tests based on Common Core standards. The exams are scheduled to begin in mid-April. Armed with refusal letters and data, these parents are spreading out into their respective districts to educate other families on why they say the tests don't help their children and what parents can do to make a difference in state testing mandates.

"We do not refuse these tests for our children because they are too hard or because we are against testing," said Tricia Farmer, a parent who has children in Burnt Hills-Ballston Lake Central Schools. "We refuse these tests because they are flawed and based on a set of flawed Common Core standards which were forced on our schools."

The frustration of parents opposed to the tests has increased with the implementation of the Common Core. Opponents say the new standards have shaped questions on the tests and also blocked transparency from the state Education Department on the material being tested.

Farmer has two children — a sixth-grader and a 10-grader — and has been refusing the tests since spring 2013, when they were retooled to fit Common Core standards, she said. Almost every parent she knows has an issue with the large amounts of data being collected on their children without the scores being put to good use, she said.

The state Education Department said there is no option under New York state law for opting out or refusing the mandated tests. But in reality, parents have been refusing the tests for years.

The department also said that students refusing state tests will have a negative impact on a school or school district's ability to show student progress. All school districts are required to have a 95 percent participation rate in state testing, according to the Education Department.

Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch told the New York State Council of School Superintendents last week that she believed refusing the state tests is a "terrible mistake," asking why parents wouldn't want to know whether their child is on a pathway for success in college or how he or she is performing compared with other students around the state.

"I do not pretend that test results are the only way we know, but they are an important piece of information," Tisch said. "They are the only common measure of progress we have. We are not going to force kids to take tests. That's not the New York way. But, we are going to continue to help students and parents understand that it is a terrible mistake to refuse the right to know."

Currently, school districts receive their ELA and math test scores in mid to late summer, after students have progressed to the next grade level and are no longer under the supervision of the teacher they had during the testing window. The data are then used to show how students are performing across the state and in comparison to similar school districts, as well as rate the school's overall performance.

Teachers are also evaluated on the improvement their students show on the tests and the proficiency levels their students achieve as part of their overall teacher evaluations each year.

Opposed parents ideally want to have 250,000 students refuse the state tests this year, which would result in about 5 percent of New York students opting out of the state mandates, Farmer said. Should that many students not participate, Farmer said the data will be skewed and the state Education Department and Board of Regents will be forced to re-evaluate the testing standards. A state Education Department spokesperson said this is not true.

Farmer said she believes the anti-testing movement gained momentum this year due to the increased pressure on teacher evaluations proposed by Gov. Andrew Cuomo in this year's budget. Cuomo's proposal calls for upping the weight of student test scores to 50 percent of a teacher's evaluation, which has come under heavy fire by the teachers' union New York State United Teachers and parents like Farmer.

The state Education Department said that schools not meeting the 95 percent participation rate could face consequences. The department said the standing of a school and its funding are at stake when a district posts low participation rates.

But state data and teacher evaluations aren't the crux of this issue, said Albany school district parent April Bacon. She's not against teachers being evaluated on their students' performances. She's also not worried about providing data to her district — her main focus is her child.

The people being lost in this conversation, Bacon said, are the students and, more specifically, her fourth grader.

"I believe in raising the standard for every student," she said. "But these tests don't benefit the teacher or the student. By the time you get the test results, my daughter is in another grade... I don't believe one test is going to tell you how my daughter is doing."

Many parents, including Bacon, are presenting parents in their districts with a template refusal letter from New York State Allies for Public Education, which aims to remove excessive state testing and data collection of students from the public school system. The letter helps parents make their refusal clear in asking that their child be marked as a refusal in the test scoring, rather than absent — an absence requires them to make up the state tests — and asks that students also be provided an alternative activity during the testing period such as classroom instruction or silent reading.

Katie Thimineur, who has a fourth-grader and an eighth grader in the Ballston Spa School District, said her daughter was one of only five students that Thimineur knew of who refused the tests in 2013. In 2014, that number grew to 62, according the district.

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"My kids don't refuse the tests because I'm afraid that they're going to do poorly," she said. "This is a way for parents to stand up and say we don't think this is right. We don't like what's happening."

Confusion about what parents are allowed to do for their children is the main concern now for those looking to increase the test refusal numbers. NYSUT has released its own fact sheet on the "opt-out" movement and the template refusal letter continues to circulate online. Assemblyman James Tedisco, a Glenville Republican, announced a bill on March 17 that would require school districts to clearly notify parents that they can opt out their children from the Common Core tests this year, though the bill has not yet been passed by the Legislature.

"There are a whole bunch of parents who are home dealing with this Common Core situation who don't know what their rights are," Tedisco said at the news conference. "What we would like to do with this bill is not only inform them but get them engaged in the process."

But for many parents, the only way their children will start taking any state tests again will be if Common Core standards are abandoned.

"You want to know that you're improving and doing better from the last time," Thimineur said. "But these tests don't do that for our students."

bhorn@timesunion.com • 518-454-5097 • @brittanyhorn