Sleeping Giant of Education Politics - Parents - Are Awakeand Rebelling - Huffington Post

A New York Times frontpage headline last Aug. 13, 2015 stated,

"20 percent of State Students Opted Out of Tests in Sign of a Rising Revolt."

This grassroots rebellion is a response to the war on public education being waged by billionairefoundation heads, corporate CEOs, Wall Street hedge funders, and numerous politicians whosupport 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 NYCstudents, 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 ofclassroom teachers and is spreading across the country. Parents resorted to civil disobediencebecause they felt helpless to protect their children from the test prep and testing mania and fromthe damaging new Common Core State(not) national Standards.

Congress and President Obama saw the growing rebellion by progressive, moderate andconservative parents. Last December, they finally replaced the widely discredited No Child LeftBehind law. Also former U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who was politically tone deaf andbecame 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 thatstates test all third through eighth graders was kept in the new law. The new law, the Every StudentSucceeds Act, does empower the states to create their own accountability systems but they must beapproved 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, butwas this a change in policy? No. King's prepared remarks for a speech delivered on April 10, 2014 ascommissioner said, "And finally--we at the state level and our colleagues at the federal level need toown up to the unintended consequences of our policies -- from narrowing of the curriculum to anoveremphasis on testing." Incredibly, he said we are going forward. (King and Obama both sendtheir 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-BasedAccountability in Education," released in 2011 by the prestigious and highly respected NationalAcademies of Sciences' National Research Council. It studied No Child Left Behind and 14 othertest-based accountability programs. It found few or no gains in student achievement and gaming ofthe test scores by the states.

Gaming is a polite way of describing interventions to improve test scores that had nothing to do withincreased learning; the report also documented cheating. The report lists the unethical and evenillegal state interventions to improve scores:

"There is evidence of attempts to increase scores in ways that are completely unrelated to improvinglearning. The attempts included teaching test-taking skills, excluding low performing students fromtests, feeding students high-calorie meals on testing days, providing help to students during tests,and even changing student answers on tests after they were finished," (Pages 62-3).

The report included a number of conclusions and recommendations:

"Conclusion 1: Test-based incentive programs...have not increased student achievement enough tobring the United States close to the levels of the highest achieving countries," (page 84, bolding inreport).

"Recommendation 1: Despite using them for several decades, policymakers and educators do not yetknow how to use test-based incentives to consistently generate positive effects on achievement andto improve education," (page 92).

The Obama administration is hypocritical for continuing to ignore these scientific findings whilecriticizing climate change deniers for ignoring scientific findings.

The so-called corporate reform agenda is filled with radical experiments on 50 million Americanchildren and there is little or no science to support most of it. The Common Core was created behindclosed doors with no proof it is based on research. In fact there is proof that the Common Core earlychildhood education standards are damaging children.

The problems with the Common Core are especially severe in the early grades. For example, "manychildren are not developmentally ready to read in kindergarten, yet the Common Core StateStandards require them to do just that," (p. 1). The report goes on to say, "When children haveeducational experiences that are not geared to their developmental level or in tune with theirlearning needs and cultures, it can cause great harm, including feelings of inadequacy, anxiety andconfusion," (p.2).

Similar problems, such as direct instruction, can be found in pre-k programs. One pre-k studysuggests long-term harm, especially in the social-emotional realm, from attending overlyacademically-oriented preschools.

The Common Core, a major experiment, would not have been created without Bill Gates and his $40billion foundation. He acted like the de facto secretary of education pouring $300 million into thecreation and promotion of the Common Core. A June 7, 2014 Washington Post investigative articleabout this, had a headline stating:

"How Bill Gates pulled off the swift Common Core revolution"

Gates believes that having one national education standard, as opposed to 50, will allow for greater,"free market competition." Gates must be a free market ideologue to ignore the damage being doneby for-profit colleges and growing corruption in K-12 privatization initiatives.

The Post also quoted Tom Loveless, a former Harvard professor now at the Brookings Institute,"Everyone who developed standards in the past has had a theory that standards will raiseachievement, and that's not happened," (p. 6).

Given the almost complete failure of people and organizations with power in the education/politicalcomplex to put children first, parents nationwide are deeply concerned about the welfare of their

children and are outraged that, until recently, they had no leverage and hardly a voice.

What has given them a voice and leverage in New York was the successful organizing by parents andteachers of the opting out of 220,000 New York State students last spring. According to EducationWeek, 12 other states had 5 or more percent of students opting out of the tests too.

The opt out movement is rapidly expanding across the country because the education war rages on.In a December letter from the U.S. DOE, all 50 chiefs of state education were threatened withpossible loss of funding if opting out of students exceeded 5 percent this spring.

Parent opt out leaders clearly saw this threat aimed at them. In a swift and furious response,Jeanette Deutermann, as a leader of New York State Allies for Public Education (NYSAPE) andfounder of the 24,000-member Long Island Opt Out, wrote a response to Ann Whalen the AssistantU.S. Secretary of Education.

Deutermann wrote, "The fact that you are describing the country-wide history making actions ofparents rising up to protect their children, their public schools, and their communities as 'theproblem,' shows gross lack of understanding on your part."

She also reminded Whalen that parents had run her new boss, Secretary John King, out of New York.She warned Whalen that more coercive tactics will only, "lead to increasing our resolve and boostingour opt-out numbers."

Deutermann also places the opt out movement in a larger political context. She sees that if we don'trestore our democracy, we'll be living like Bill Murray in the movie "Groundhog Day," where everyday was the same.

"I've been repeatedly saying just this: as we fight education reforms, we must keep our eyes on thesource - until we return politics to the people, and stop the corruption and corporate greed that hastaken hold of our political system, we will be living a 'Groundhog Day' existence." (Deutermannconfirmed this quote in an email to me.)

One way to return politics to the people, would be for one of the candidates for president to joinforces with parents and classroom teachers to save American public education. That would bring abig new army of moderates, progressives, and even some conservatives to a campaign.

The enemies of public education - billionaires, corporate CEOs, and Wall Street hedge funders -come from the same class that has created tremendous income and wealth inequalities in our nation.The declining middle and working classes and the growth of poverty severely impact educationalopportunity. Bernie Sanders is already fighting these powerful groups to end economic inequality; itwould be natural for him to take on these groups in the war to save American public education.

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