Have You Any Decency? What Every American Needs to Know About High Stakes Testing and the Latest Threat to Civil Liberties | Yohuru Williams

Have You Any Decency? What Every American Needs to Know About High Stakes Testing and the Latest Threat to Civil Liberties | Yohuru Williams:

Have You Any Decency? What Every American Needs to Know About High Stakes Testing and the Latest Threat to Civil Liberties

 Education bloggers revealed that the company retained by testing giant Pearson, to ensure the integrity of its assessments, has been monitoring student's social media accounts in conjunction with policing the controversial Common Core Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) and Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) tests. These are only the latest in a series of scandals dogging corporate education reform. Such revelations should give parents even greater reason to feel secure in their decisions to refuse high stakes testing for their children.

Curiously, the same cabal that tends to spring to the defense of testing and corporate education reform remained silent with regard to the latest issue. It seems obvious that the talking points memo issued with hefty campaign contributions and other payoffs by the corporate giants making a fortune on testing schemes did not cover the violation of basic civil liberties that went along with their testing packages.

In fact, those talking points consist only of ways to brand parents, teachers and teacher's unions as the real problem. The tired rhetoric would be laughable if it were not fundamentally undemocratic. That is really what makes it so scary -- for it is clear they are less concerned with safeguarding democracy than generating profits. Yet, they use extreme labels and metaphors that paint as extremists those most concerned with the protection of youth.

Last month, for instance, Wisconsin Governor and presidential hopeful Scott Walkerignited a firestorm at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference after he compared combating teachers unions to fighting terrorists. "If I can take on 100,000 protesters," he stridently informed those in attendance, "I can do the same across the world."

This is really the same stale script of trying to use fear and the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement to advance the corporate education reform agenda. To show how unimaginative Walker was, more than a decade ago George Bush's Education Secretary, Dr. Rod Paige, definitely branded the country's leading teachers union, the National Education Association as "a terrorist organization" in February of 2004. When the comments Paige shared in a closed session with the nation's Governors became public, he apologized, but more than ten years later, the label remains.

Paige, an African-American, also infamously drew comparisons to the Civil Rights Movement; he often referred to opponents of the Bush administration education polices as tantamount to the Southerner segregationist, trying to prevent the integration of schools. It makes for great copy, but as former football coach Dr. Paige knows, it is merely one page in the corporate education reform playbook.

At best, the careless declarations of Paige and Walker were merely examples of poor Have You Any Decency? What Every American Needs to Know About High Stakes Testing and the Latest Threat to Civil Liberties | Yohuru Williams: