WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. – Lawmakers and political candidates are lashing out at federal bureaucrats in the U.S. Department of Education over a plan to punish schools where a large number of parents opt their children out of standardized tests.

Congress approved a replacement for the federal No Child Left Behind Law known as the Every Student Succeeds Act with an explicit focus on returning much of the control over public education to states, but an amendment proposed to ESSA by U.S. Secretary of Education John King aims to influence local schools by imposing penalties, according to LoHud.com.

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The proposal, made public at the end of May, would require state education departments to assign schools “the lowest performance level” under school accountability measures if at least 95 percent of students don’t take standardized tests, the news site reports.

The Department of Education, tasked with implementing ESSA, has spent the last couple of months collecting public comments about the proposal, and nearly 16,000 Americans have weighed in, including the original author of the ESSA and locals running for federal office.

“This is the federal government and the Department of Education using schools as sticks to bully parents way from exercising their legal rights,” Julie Killian, Rye City Councilwoman and candidate for New York state Senate, told reporters at a rally in White Plains this week.

“This designation of ‘in need of improvement’ would be catastrophic for our schools,” said Killian, who protested against the change alongside Phil Oliva, candidate for the U.S. House. “It would damage our schools’ reputation and send property values plummeting.”

Parents across the country have opted their children out of standardized testing pushed on schools through President Obama’s Race to the Top education initiative, primarily because the tests align with wildly unpopular Common Core national education standards.

In the White Plains area, about 20 percent of parents requested that their children are not subjected to the Common Core tests last year, and numerous other school districts are reporting similar figures.

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U.S. Rep. John Kline, chairman of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, had harsh words for Kline’s proposal to punish schools with lower standardized test participation at a hearing with the Secretary of Education in late June.

“The Every Student Succeeds Act is based on the principle that state and local leaders can run their K-12 schools better than Washington bureaucrats. The law represents the best opportunity we’ve had in decades to provide every child in every school an excellent education,” he said in a statement, and in the committee hearing. “We will not allow the administration to destroy that opportunity by substituting its will for the will of Congress and for the will of our state and local education leaders. …

“We will continue to use the tools at our disposal to ensure the letter and intent of the law are strictly followed. Our nation’s parents, teachers, and students deserve nothing less,” he said.

King has also met the wrath of U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander, who issued a warning the day King announced plans to punish schools using ESSA.

“If the final regulation does not implement the law the way Congress wrote it,” Alexander said, “I will introduce a resolution under the Congressional Review At to overturn it.”