Testing Revolt

This month's issue of Monthly Review is a special (with extra pages) issue on education in America and the opt out movement that has sprouted up against it.

Interestingly enough – the whole testing movement has its genesis in the Republican party and the opt out movement has a base in the TEA Party (there are other groups that are opposed to testing as well). Ironic that the TEA Party is complaining about government over reach when their party is the one responsible for the over reach. Go figure?

Monty Neill has a great article called “The Testing Resistance ans Reform Movement.” It will be available on-line for the remainder of March 2016 and then to subscribers via password afterwards.

In it he chronicles the history of the testing movement and why it was created – to segregate education into haves and have nots (or don't deserves – my opinion based on my reading of his article. There are people that deserve a quality education and those that need to be shuffled off into wage slave jobs).

Testing – from IQ tests and the various other tests administered K12 to the SAT and ACT appear to me to be forms of population control (via fear – if you are afraid of doing poorly, you won't take the exam and, thereby, shortchange yourself) and of gate keeping – the SAT and ACT cost a significant amount of money to take. You may be smart, but if you can't afford the exam fee (and now the picture ID), you can't take the exam and are kept out of higher education.

No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and Race to the Top (R3T) were both means by which the two capitalist controlled parties – the Republicans and Democrats – could force school districts to be privatized. One of the key issues with modern education is that it is a $550 Billion industry that Wall Street makes no money off of. If it is privatized, then stock can be issued and there's the money for the 1%. So all these tests were imposed with the intent of forcing states to turn schools over to private entities that could make a profit. They didn't have to be any better – they just had to be private. NCLB could force schools to be privatized by means of poor test scores. R3T used a carrot – the Federal government would give the states money if they privatized the worst districts. Stick and carrot. Same results.

After protests against all the testing formed, the capitalist's pawn in power – President Obama – signed into law the ESSA – Every Student Succeeds Act. Anyone that actually read the legislation calls it the “Everything Stays the Same” Act because it only “softened” the requirements of NCLB and R3T. It did not remove them.

The Common Core State Standards – private standards with no teacher input – were also released during this time and a great deal of opposition broke out because of them. More I think because conservatives hate President Obama (who is black and I hear of very few conservatives and Republicans that aren't in some form racist.) Make it a white Republican president releasing them and I think the response from conservatives would have been different.

Of course parents and taxpayers did not like hearing that their children were performing poorly on exams that had no educational merit or meaning, so resistance started cropping up in the form of test boycotts. (I wonder how many parents sent their children to religious schools or turned to home schooling in response to the tests. I have not seen any studies on this, though they achieve almost the same goals as NCLB and R3T – the destruction of public education. Almost all home school curriculum is purchased from private corporations, so there's profit in that.) Oregon dropped the MAPS testing. NYS had over 240,000 students opt out of testing last year (2014-2015 school year). Other states had similar results.

So we have resistance to the exams – parents, students, teachers, in their various organizations, They lack one thing – Organization. There are a number of different groups in different states that have mounted successful attacks against all the testing that is being forced upon the students. They lack a central leadership that can coordinate their work so that these wasteful and mistaken exams can be canned.

Those opposed to the destructive tests that turn students off from education need to have the leadership of their groups come together to organize their actions against testing. That's their main weakness. It's like herding cats.

And they need to look at what Lenin did in the lead up to the Russian Revolution of October (or November – depends upon your calendar) 1917. He was able to link together the different groups that were opposed to bourgeois rule under the Bolshevik flag (remember “Peace, Land, and Bread”? It joined together soldiers, workers, and farmers together against the Russian version of the 1%.) and bring and end to the disastrous monarchist led – capitalist state.

Those that are opposed to the privatization of education need to do the same thing. They need to join together under a common tent that will link all their actions together for a successful revolution.

And if we can do it in education, where else can we do it?