PORTLAND, Maine - As public schools in Maine prepare to give a new online standardized test this spring, small - but vocal - groups of parents are moving to prevent their kids from taking the exam.
The parents object to the nature of certain questions, the personal data they say the exam gathers on kids and the academic standards it measures. State law allows parents to opt their kids out of standardized tests. But the law isn't clear.
Julie McDonald-Smith has three kids. Two attend a charter school and one goes to a traditional public school. Smith, who lives just outside Portland, has spent a lot of time researching the Common Core standards in English language arts and math that form the backbone of Maine's learning guidelines for students.
She's also delved into the new standardized test that kids will take this spring, measuring their knowledge of these tough new academic standards. "It's literally shocking - the data that's being collected on our children," McDonald-Smith says.
As part of a competition to secure millions in education funding from the federal government, Maine and other many other states agreed to model their learning standards after the Common Core. They also agreed to build huge longitudinal data systems to track student information.
The new assessment test tracks the kind of data you'd expect - things like a student's gender and ethnicity, for example. But McDonald-Smith says it also, through the kinds of questions it asks, extracts more personal information.
"Things like your family's belief systems, values, attitudes," she says. "It's creating a profile on your child. Are they rule followers? Are they risk takers? These are personality-level type questions that they're trying to get at, under the guise of either close reading or reading comprehension."
McDonald-Smith finds this creepy. So she sent letters to the district superintendent, the commissioner of the Maine Department of Education and the principals of her kids schools. Her children, she wrote, would be opting out of the new Maine assessment test this spring. She's not the only parent taking this route.
"I can't let you go without addressing the question about parents opting their kids out of the test," says Charlene Tucker, at a recent training session for teachers on Maine's new assessment test. Tucker heads up the assessment and accountability office at the state Department of Education.
Growing numbers of parents, it turns out, have been asking teachers about the possibility of opting their children out of this spring's exam. Some states, Tucker noted to teachers in the room, have actual language in state statute, saying parents can take this step. But Maine law is more murky.
"Currently, right now, parents do have an option," says Sara Gideon, a Freeport Democrat, who is the assistant majority leader of the Maine House of Representatives. Gideon says a U.S. Supreme Court decision gives parents the right to opt kids out of standardized tests. "The issue is that, in Maine, we don't have anything in state law that makes this clear," she says.
So Gideon is sponsoring a bill in the Legislature that makes it clear, under state law, that parents have this option, and requires teachers and school administrators to let them know about it. The desire on the part of some parents to have their kids sit out the test puts the state Department of Education in a tricky position.
"The department of education here in Maine strongly believes in parental rights," says Samantha Warren, the department's spokeswoman. "And we also believe that the state assessment is a critical tool to improving teaching and learning and holding our schools accountable for how they are serving all students."
Warren says the state has no plans to punish school and districts where parents opt their kids out. But those decisions could potentially have ramifications for the education funding Maine gets from Washington. The federal government requires 95 percent of children in any given school to sit for annual standardized tests.