High Stakes Testing’s Threat to Civil Liberties
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 Walker ignited a firestorm at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference after he compared combating teachers unions to fighting Isis. “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 of terrorism 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 10 years later the label High Stakes Testing:
