The New Abolitionists
Offered on Thursday at Arne Duncan's workplace:
Testing Abolitionists
We are engaged in a struggle to abolish high stakes standardized tests and to bring back local public control to a public school system that serves the needs of all children who choose it. Resistance is growing among teachers, parents, students, legislators, and unions (at least in Chicago). And though our numbers are still thin and our voices, perhaps, muted and our sprouting resistance sometimes subverted and coopted, that does not keep our actions from advancing, nor does it diminish the rightness of our cause. Let me share with you a little background on how we got here today at this tipping point.
The efforts during the 1960s to fix social and racial inequality relied largely on increased educational opportunity to get the job done. Increasing educational access, more financial assistance, more job training, federal monitoring—these