To the Editor:

This is what I wrote to the members of the Voorheesville Board of Education.

I am a mom of three kids in the Voorheesville School District. My husband and I have one child in sixth grade, one in third grade, and one who will start kindergarten in the fall. I am writing you today to inform you that our children will not be taking the New York State English language arts or math tests this spring.

We are refusing the tests on behalf of our children.

Although I have an education background, we are just beginning to pay close attention to the current politics of education. Our daughter took the state standardized tests in third grade, and did fine.

It was only when we tried to interpret the results that we started to become aware of the problems with the test. We contacted our daughter's teacher (who happened to move up to fourth grade with her) to try to understand some of the areas in which our daughter could improve. It was then that we learned that very little test information was available to her teacher.

We started to dig a little deeper, and learned that teachers are not allowed to see the tests, are not given item-specific information about the results, and often the results are not available until after the students have moved on to a new teacher or a new building.

So what's the point of tests that don't inform instruction for the teacher or the student?

My husband and I then realized that there was little value to these tests. But, our daughter is a strong student, so we decided to just go through the motions. We even told her not to worry about it; the tests don't really matter.

After another round of tests, we heard about Annual Professional Performance Review, and how teacher performance was tied to the tests. We also heard about the length, the poor quality of the tests, and how developmentally inappropriate they are.

This information alone was enough to decide to opt out of, or refuse, the tests for our daughter last year. Notice that I haven't even mentioned Common Core, charter schools, Governor Andrew Cuomo, Pearson [Education, a British-owned publishing and testing company], political action groups, poverty, Finland, social media monitoring, "sit and stare,” or pineapples [referring to an eighth-grade reading exam question on a story featuring a talking pineapple].

The more you dig, the dirtier your fingernails get.

We want our kids to be lifelong learners. We want them to love school, to lean in to challenges, to be enriched by their education. We want their amazing Voorheesville teachers to feed their brains with a rich, flexible, and autonomous curriculum, a curriculum developed by educators, not lawyers or politicians.

We want their math homework to reinforce learning, not be an exercise in frustration. We want them to be exposed to the amazing literature available to them. We want the spring to be about Blackbird Paradise, the school garden, not test prep.

We encourage Voorheesville parents to become informed about the current plans for education reform, and to consider refusing to have their children take the state tests in third through eighth grades. There are a lot of rumors about refusing the tests. Sixty thousand kids refused the tests statewide last year.

No school has been penalized for refusals to date. New York State Allies for Public Education (www.nysape.org) is a good place to start getting informed.

We would also encourage the board of education to inform parents of their option to refuse testing, allow teachers to speak freely about the tests, and, ideally, to refuse to give the New York State English language arts and math exams.

Kerry Connolly

Voorheesville