John Thompson: Opt Out is Frightening the Politicians
John Thompson, historian and teacher, writes that parents have shaken up the education landscape:
“February has always been a time when blizzards keep blowing across the nation but, too often, it now marks the end of meaningful learning in our classrooms. Long before Spring arrives, the test prep season begins, followed by the annual testing ordeal. During the last few years, however, the grassroots Opt Out movement has risen to the occasion, and fought to restore authentic teaching and meaningful learning to public schools.
The refusal of parents and students to participate in the test, sort, reward, and punish season has knocked the corporate reform movement back on its heels. It has undermined the imposition of Common Core and value-added evaluations, which were top-down mandates enforced by High Stakes Testing. The assertion of families’ democratic rights to choose engaging and respectful instruction, and reject soul-killing teach-to-the-test, has predictably prompted some reformers to retreat, while it has angered others. The second response by blood-in-their-eyes reformers may prove to be one of their most consequential mistakes. They are inviting an even more effective counter-attack by the Opt Out movement.
In 2009 and 2010, the RttT, the SIG, and an alphabet soup of other social engineering initiatives essentially imposed the full test-driven, competition-driven reform agenda on the entire nation. The non-educators who dreamed up Common Core, value-added evaluations, mass charterization, the mass “exiting” of teachers, and the resulting focus on nonstop remediation of students’ weakness, while ignoring their strengths, often were oblivious to the inherent contradictions in their dictates. Regardless of what they didn’t know, and when they didn’t know it, their mandates were so divorced from reality that they exposed accountability-driven, market-driven reform to an overwhelming political backlash. Those few reformers who are grounded in classroom realities must now know that their school improvement hypotheses are doomed.
The more interesting – and probably the more important – reaction by corporate reformers has been a consequence of their angry (and ego-driven?) response to defeat. Apparently blaming educators for failing to recognize what they believed was the beauty of their incentives and disincentives, and resenting patrons who fought against the testing toxicity that flowed down on their children, many elite reformers have thrown a huge temper tantrum. In doing so, they unintentionally revealed the true nature of their desire to micromanage schools. By their angry outbursts, elites show how oblivious they are to the feelings and interests of regular people.
Rather than go to school on the failure (or at best the modest benefits of hugely expensive experiments) of attempts to transform Newark, Memphis, New Orleans, and other systems, “astroturf” reform think tanks doubled down on discrediting objective scholars and journalists who documented results that were underwhelming at best. Next Steps in Newark: Superintendent Chris Cerf Responds to Dale Russakoff’s ‘The Prize’ – Education Post Then, the Broad Foundation, apparently seeking revenge on Los Angeles educators and elected officials, proclaimed its intention to charterize half of the LAUSD.
Rather than go to school on the failure (or at best the modest benefits of hugely expensive experiments) of attempts to transform Newark, Memphis, New Orleans, and other systems, “astroturf” reform think tanks doubled down on discrediting objective scholars and journalists who documented results that were underwhelming at best. Next Steps in Newark: Superintendent Chris Cerf Responds to Dale Russakoff’s ‘The Prize’ – Education Post Then, the Broad Foundation, apparently seeking revenge on Los Angeles educators and elected officials, proclaimed its intention to charterize half of the LAUSD.
Most inexplicably, the post-Duncan USDOE has sought to intimidate the Opt Out movement. The attempt by the outgoing Arne Duncan and John King to bully opponents is likely to be the greatest political mistake of a reform movement that is frenetically striking out against stakeholders who disagree with them.
Apparently forgetting the myriad of ways that data-driven policies have failed to improve schools, the USDOE threatens to turn its numbers-driven club on states that do not squelch the Opt Out Movement. The federal government sent intimidating letters to 13 states, warning that John Thompson: Opt Out is Frightening the Politicians | Diane Ravitch's blog:
Apparently forgetting the myriad of ways that data-driven policies have failed to improve schools, the USDOE threatens to turn its numbers-driven club on states that do not squelch the Opt Out Movement. The federal government sent intimidating letters to 13 states, warning that John Thompson: Opt Out is Frightening the Politicians | Diane Ravitch's blog: