A Revolution Against Corporate Education Focuses On Its Achilles Heel | PopularResistance.Org

A Revolution Against Corporate Education Focuses On Its Achilles Heel | PopularResistance.Org:

A Revolution Against Corporate Education Focuses On Its Achilles Heel

UNCATEGORIZED EDUCATION 
By Roshan Bliss, www.PopularResistance.org
April 10th, 2014

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Above: Education protest in Chicago

Denver Gathering Seeks to Galvanize Corporate Education Reform Resistance

Late last month, over 100 teachers, students, and parents from across the country gathered in Denver for the United Opt Out National Spring Action, a conference aimed at growing the resistance to corporate education reform and high stakes standardized testing across the nation. Throughout the weekend, the education activists brainstormed and planned in area-focused work groups, interspersed with talks from, among others, a Finnish teacher and education scholar, a parent turned education activist, and a high school senior. All of it revolved around one central theme: organizing resistance to the global corporate education reform movement.

The event was organized by United Opt Out (UOO), an all-volunteer organization of parents, teachers, and students dedicated to ending the use of high stakes standardized testing in schools by creating organized, large-scale refusal to participate in high stakes testing regimes. UOO originally formed with the intention to increase the number of people “opting out” of high stakes standardized tests – whether parents preventing their students from taking them, students refusing to take them, or teachers refusing to administer them – but it has become much more.

While the opt out strategy remained central, the conference attendees participated in weekend-long discussion groups focused on devising even broader strategies to build a broad-based movement aimed not only at stopping the corporate education reform machine, but at transforming and democratizing public education as a whole. The groups focused on a number of areas from winning back local control of school boards to strengthening teacher unions to educating the broader public about the effects of corporate reform on their communities and their children’s futures. Their aim is nothing short of a revolution in the public education system.

Revolutionary Transformation of Education Developing

“This is the education revolution,” said high school senior and conference speaker Alex Kacsh. “We are creating a better tomorrow.”

How is not taking or administering a school test part of the revolution? High stakes A Revolution Against Corporate Education Focuses On Its Achilles Heel | PopularResistance.Org: