Macario Guajardo was one child left behind on Wednesday when his classmates took the Texas statewide reading test for promotion to the sixth grade.
Actually, 11-year-old Macario, an unlikely crusader, left himself behind. He stayed out of school in protest against what he called "the big deal" of the testing program, which he said "keeps kids from expressing their imagination."
"I don't think I'm brave," he said at his home here in the Rio Grande Valley. "Any kid could do this. It does take a little bit of guts."
Amid sharp critiques of the Texas-inspired federal education law called No Child Left Behind and its mandatory annual testing to measure school success or failure, a handful of students like Macario have taken the risky step of boycotting their tests. Some students say that the state tests, some of which predate the federal program, focus the learning process on test preparation.
"The protests are very significant -- I just think they're nearing the breaking point," said Angela Valenzuela, an associate professor of curriculum and instruction at the University of Texas and the editor of a collection of critical essays, Leaving Children Behind, just published by the State University of New York Press.
In San Antonio on Tuesday, a 14-year-old high school freshman, Mia Kang, refused to take the required reading test, known as the TAKS, for Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills. Two years ago, another San Antonio freshman, Kimberly Marciniak, 15, made headlines when she boycotted the same reading test in its debut year.
Also in 2003, two high-school sophomores in the state of Washington refused to take that state's mandatory exams. In 2002, parents in Scarsdale, New York, organized a boycott of the eighth-grade test.
And in Stewart, Ohio, a high-school senior, John Wood, 17, who has refused to take any statewide test since the seventh grade, has lost out on graduating this spring, presenting a dilemma for his father, George -- the school's principal, and co-editor of Many Children Left Behind, a book critical of the federal law. George Wood said he supported his son, who has been accepted by two private colleges.
In Texas, students like Macario who do not pass a state test can be promoted if a panel of the child's parents, teacher and principal all agree to make an exception.
"The children are really hurting themselves," said Debbie Graves Ratcliff, a spokeswoman in Austin for the Texas Education Agency, which oversees the state's school system.
Ratcliff said that each year 3 million students from grades three to 11 took the assessment tests in subjects including math, reading, writing, English, science and social studies, and that boycotts were "a rarity."
She defended the current tests as "harder, covering more grades and more subjects," and said that by law children had to pass the tests to be promoted.
Jose Luis Salinas, superintendent of Micario's district, acknowledged that "a lot of critics feel we are teaching to the test and not to the child. As an individual I think a lot of that is true."
But Salinas, with 32 years as an educator, said that "as the individual in charge, I must follow the law. This district stands behind the legislature, regardless of what some of us may feel."
Macario's parents, both educators, said they supported his action without trying to influence him either way although, they said, he had been under such stress over the past two years from a succession of substitute teachers and the earlier assessment tests that he had developed a nervous tic.
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