Students learn best if they are supported by people in all facets of their lives. If school and government leaders, teachers, and parents work together, students benefit.

The recent movement of parents having their children opt out of state-required tests must be tough on kids.  Some of their peers are working away on required tests while, depending on the district, the opt-out students are home or in another part of the school. Maybe some kids are happy to please their parents and teachers by opting out — or to skip a test. But others may feel confused or be hurt by being used as a political tool.

The tests in question were given last month to students in third through eighth grades in both math and English. At Voorheesville, about 18 percent opted out; at Guilderland, 17.5 opted out of English and 20 percent out of math; and at BKW, 38 percent opted out of the English tests and 44 percent out of math.

The numbers of students across New York who opted out won’t be released by the state until the summer when the test scores are released, according to a spokeswoman for the State Education Department, Jeanne Beattie.

The effect on school funding will be decided on a “case-by-case basis,” said Beattie.  She wrote in an email to The Enterprise, “The U.S. Department of Education has made clear that when a district fails to ensure that students participate in required state assessments, the state education agency is expected to consider imposing sanctions on that district, including — in the most egregious cases — withholding programmatic funds.”

Certainly, punishing children for clashes among parents, teachers, and state leaders is wrong. Beattie goes on to point out that Merryl Tisch, chancellor of the Board of Regents, which governs public education in New York, has said as much.

“We are confident the Department will be able to generate a representative sample of students who took the test,” Beattie stated, “generate valid scores for anyone who took the test, and calculate valid State-provided growth scores to be used in teacher evaluations.”

Perhaps to the dismay of parents who did not want their children to be subjected to tests, those children may now be subjected to still more tests. “If fewer than 16 students take the test in a class taught by a teacher who would normally have used a state-provided growth score as part of his or her evaluation,” Beattie stated, “a backup student learning objective will be used instead.” The SLOs, as they are called, are to measure student growth and, said Beattie, “The systems in place right now call for that.”

For parents who had their children opt out as a way to protest teachers having to spend time on tests instead of instruction, they may be unhappy to learn those teachers will now be saddled with still more evaluative work with the required SLOs.

A close look at the various strands of the tangled controversy is warranted to sort the truth from the fiction and to chart a reasonable course despite the frenzy.

There’s a widespread misperception that students, since the introduction of the Common Core standards, are being tested more now than they were previously.

This simply is not true. Students last month were tested in English for 70 to 90 minutes on three days, and then, the next week, on math over three days, again for 70 to 90 minutes. This is no more testing than they went through before the Common Core standards were introduced.

Students will be taking tests all their lives. If they want to go to college, they’ll take entrance exams. If they join the workforce after school, in many fields, from cosmetology to law, they’ll have to pass certification exams.

Testing doesn’t have to be a dirty word. Exams can teach the test-taker as well as the evaluator. The tests that are most obviously useful in a classroom are the ones that let teachers know right away what a student knows so that, if there are gaps, they can be filled. If a student performs exceptionally well, enrichment can be provided.

The standardized state tests, however, don’t fall in this category. The results come too late for that  — although the State Education Department announced on April 30 that the results for this year’s elementary tests would be earlier than before, on July 1, so educators can better plan for the next school year.

A close-to-home example of how the state’s standardized testing improved education can be seen at Guilderland’s Lynnwood Elementary School. In 2011, based on standardized test scores, Lynnwood, which houses programs for special-needs students from across the district, did not meet the state’s mark for “adequate yearly progress” and so was placed on a list of “Schools In Need of Improvement.”

When the news broke four years ago, the Guilderland superintendent told us, “We have to look at this not as a curse but an opportunity” to serve students better. In a recent budget workshop, she described how school and district leaders “scrambled” to find ways to improve scores.

Lynnwood’s principal, Alicia Rizzo, said the work involved “drilling down” through the numbers to the names of individual students to set targets for them. Further, Lynnwood embarked on a new model for training teachers, embedding “literacy coaches” in the school. Scores improved, and Lynnwood was declared a school in good standing.

This spring, at a budget workshop, Rizzo and her teachers enthusiastically told the school board about the progress they’d made. Assistant Superintendent for Instruction Demian Singleton said results at Lynnwood would be studied as a model to use at the district’s other schools, calling the coaching approach “incredibly powerful.”

Used this way, standardized test results are worthwhile. Warring factions across the state and in our midst need to seek common ground for the good of the students that all sides say they are fighting for.

First of all, anger toward or dismissiveness of tests shouldn’t be linked to the Common Core standards. We urge parents to read the standards. The Enterprise devoted its Aug. 28, 2014 back-to-school edition to the Common Core (online at AltamontEnterprise.com).

Developed through a consortium of governors, the Common Core standards are better than the standards formerly used in New York. They focus on literacy, not just for English, but for all subjects. In math, the standards focus on problem-solving rather than rote recall.

Second, all sides agree the Common Core standards were implemented poorly in New York. Students were tested on materials they hadn’t learned and teachers themselves had no time to prepare. A survey by Education Week showed that teachers on average in the states that adopted the new standards had fewer than four days of Common Core training for math and English combined.

No program can succeed with such arrogant haste on the part of state leaders. If the Common Core, or any other standards for that matter, is to succeed, there needs to be more care in adoption and a means to genuinely involve those who are the most knowledgeable — the teachers.

Third, the standards don’t dictate curriculum; that is determined at the district level. Teachers and districts can decide for themselves what and how they want to teach.

This is important as school board elections approach. We urge you to read the profiles (on our website) on board candidates before you vote to understand their views on implementing the Common Core standards and on state testing.

Fourth, the tests need to be appropriate for grade level, and they need to be well crafted in order to elicit meaningful data. Three years ago, New York hired Pearson, a British company, to produce its tests. Formerly, the tests were developed by teachers through the State Education Department.

Teachers have complained that, since Pearson took over, the tests are not as well constructed. Singleton said the current tests are not “authentic.” He gave the example of a child being asked to determine the theme expressed in line two of paragraph three to see how it relates to section five.

The frustration levels for both students and parents would decrease if the tests were crafted well.

Fifth, most of the force for the opt-out movement comes from educators being unhappy that their job evaluations are now tied to their students’ test results. The New York United Teachers originally agreed to testing for teacher evaluation in order for the state to receive federal Race to the Top funds.

We’ve written in this space before that tying a teacher’s livelihood to high-stakes tests makes students suffer and does little to improve actual classroom teaching.

The Guilderland Teachers’ Association took a bold, brave step this year, agreeing to forgo the added layer of pre- and post-assessment tests by which their worth is measured. The growth from one year to the next will apply equally to all teachers in a school. The goal of the teachers’ union was to meet state mandates for teacher evaluation without “testing students to death,” Erin McNamara the president of the GTA told us at the time.

This is a model the unions at other districts should follow. “Now the building is looking through a common lens. They are rowing the boat in the same direction,” Singleton told us at the time, “not worrying about the score of each individual teacher.’

This approach of all for one and one for all is what is needed for the well being of our students.

Even before New York caved in to the federal plan, too much emphasis was placed on high-stakes testing. This ignores a convincing body of research that shows students’ success — as measured, yes, by test scores but also by later life’s work — is most directly correlated to family background and expectations.

So the heart of the matter isn’t whether to test students or not; the heart of the matter is how the tests are used. If they are constructed for and used so schools could improve their teaching, helping students succeed, that would be fine.

But if they are used to evaluate teachers, teachers too often feel compelled to teach to the test, reducing their effectiveness. Like so much in America these days, differences fall along racial lines. A Siena poll last week showed that a majority of whites thought parents were right to have their children opt out of recent state tests while majorities of blacks and Latinos thought they were wrong.

True barriers to learning in our state too often fall along racial and income lines. The state has highlighted gaps in performance along racial lines with results showing blacks and Hispanics statewide doing far worse than whites and Asians.

The biggest indicator of all is poverty. While the Siena poll results did not include income, it did note that New York City voters thought parents were wrong to have their children opt out by a 57 to 38 percent margin, while downstate suburbanites thought the parents were right by a 12-point margin and upstaters thought parents were right by a nearly 2-to-1 margin.

If the opt-out movement is largely a movement of white privilege, that would make it worse still for all of our students. As New Yorkers, we need to work together to come up with a system that educates all of our children well.

— Melissa Hale-Spencer