Sleeping Giant of Education Politics - Parents - Are Awake and Rebelling
A New York Times frontpage headline last Aug. 13, 2015 stated,
This grassroots rebellion is a response to the war on public education being waged by billionaire foundation heads, corporate CEOs, Wall Street hedge funders, and numerous politicians who support the corporate reform agenda and who like campaign contributions that come with it.
Nancy Cauthen, a member of Change The Stakes an anti-testing organization and parent of two NYC students, criticized the "test-and-punish regime that remains fundamentally unchanged...The Bush-Obama-Gates experiment with public education needs to end -- now."
The opt out movement against high stakes standardized testing also includes a growing number of classroom teachers and is spreading across the country. Parents resorted to civil disobedience because they felt helpless to protect their children from the test prep and testing mania and from the damaging new Common Core State(not) national Standards.
Congress and President Obama saw the growing rebellion by progressive, moderate and conservative parents. Last December, they finally replaced the widely discredited No Child Left Behind law. Also former U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who was politically tone deaf and became a lightning rod for criticism, resigned at the end of December.
But Congress and the president seemed to be addicted to testing because the federal mandate that states test all third through eighth graders was kept in the new law. The new law, the Every Student Succeeds Act, does empower the states to create their own accountability systems but they must be approved by John King the new Acting U.S. Secretary of the Department of Education (DOE).
King, the former Commissioner of the New York State Education Department, replaced Duncan, but was this a change in policy? No. King's prepared remarks for a speech delivered on April 10, 2014 as commissioner said, "And finally--we at the state level and our colleagues at the federal level need to own up to the unintended consequences of our policies -- from narrowing of the curriculum to an overemphasis on testing." Incredibly, he said we are going forward. (King and Obama both send their children to private, progressive schools)
Some states will have fewer tests, others shorter tests, still others won't time the test taking, etc. But less of a bad thing is still a bad thing.
Obama, King, and Congress keep ignoring a major nine-year study, "Incentives and Test-Based Accountability in Education," released in 2011 by the prestigious and highly respected National Academies of Sciences' National Research Council. It Sleeping Giant of Education Politics - Parents - Are Awake and Rebelling:
