The opt-out movement is gaining strength as more and more
parents recognize that over-use of standardized testing is damaging their
children’s education and psychologically harming their children in the process.
In New York State, for example, more than 183,000 of some 1.1 million students
refused to take a recent English exam, more than triple the number last year.
Opting out is going to continue to gain momentum. It’s not,
as some have asserted, about labor unions disputing with legislators because
over-testing looks a lot like union-busting, though that would certainly be
another reason to opt out. Boycotting tests is a grassroots action by
increasingly better informed parents and students to stop a harmful,
time-wasting, money-wasting, and educationally useless practice, namely,
testing for the sake of testing—and for the sake of enriching testing
corporations with public tax dollars. That’s the bottom line.
Of course, there is push-back from those in power whose
corporate overlords don’t take kindly to even a modest damming of the money
flowing into testing corporations—or their long-term objective to bust unions,
lower wages, and control education workers, those folks we used to call teachers
who now mainly function as test preppers and proctors. U.S. Education Secretary
Arne Duncan says the federal government will be “obligated to intervene” if too
many students opt out and states don’t reach their testing quotas.
By “intervene” Duncan means cut federal funding, which as
most people know, flows mainly to programs that assist low-income students. In
the way of the world—or at least the way of the United States in recent
years—punishment will be meted out to those who are most vulnerable.
Underfunding education, a consistent pattern of abuse of education that
increasingly happens at all levels of government, is a way to destroy public
education and thus complete the transformation of the United States into a
third world oligarchy.
Some states are already ahead of others in the race to the
bottom. In Kansas, Governor Sam Brownback’s failed financial policies and
radical tax cuts are causing school districts to shut down early this year
because the state’s education coffers have been depleted. This and similar
problems are not the result of grassroots movements by parents and students to
push for better education. They are the consequence of bad government, of
government that has ceased to be by the people or for the people but is,
instead, by the few for the few—those few being the corporate elites for whom
destruction of public education is a fundamental objective in their war for
wealth and power.
