“We think the testing will have a positive impact in instruction across the city this year,” Ms. Lopatin said.

THE anti-testing activists are not so sure. Last spring, Martha Foote remembers, her son, an avid Yankees fan, would come home looking sullen after taking standardized tests in school. He was not allowed to play or read if he finished an exam early, so he would hold imaginary ballgames in his head, he said. Ms. Foote stopped asking about school and started asking about the games. Occasionally, he would shake his head dejectedly and say: “Not so good. The Yankees lost.”

She became convinced that the emphasis on standardized tests was ruining her son’s experience at school. Other parents at P.S. 321, and schools like it, felt the same way. They talked about their concerns on the sidelines of soccer fields and during dance classes. And they came together in groups like Parent Voices, New York, to which Ms. Foote belongs, to make themselves heard.

Anti-testing activists say their movement is not geared exclusively at politicians or school officials, though they have gotten Assemblyman James F. Brennan, a Brooklyn Democrat, to sponsor amendments to buy the state time to reconsider whether tests should be used to evaluate teachers. They have also gotten a resolution in front of the City Council that, if passed, would call for the state to re-examine school accountability and testing policies.

That is not enough, testing opponents say. They want to bring parents from across the city into their movement. While they do not expect to get a critical mass of boycotters this fall, their progress can be seen in the outcropping of new committees at city schools’ parent associations with the words “community” or “action” in their names.

Jen Nessel leads the newly formed Community Action Committee of the P.A. at the East Village Community School in Manhattan. The group came together after the field tests in June, when nearly all parents in the school signed a letter, delivered to the principal, stating that they would decline to have their children take the test.

“We had this overwhelming sense that we need to do something,” Ms. Nessel said.

Like many of the schools that have been centers for this movement, East Village Community routinely does well in its annual progress report and is in no danger of being shut down because of poor performance on the standardized tests. Most of the schools with activist parents have more white children and are more likely to be middle-class than the system as a whole.