Revolution Against Corporate Education Targets Achilles Heel--Profit

http://www.nationofchange.org/revolution-against-corporate-education-targets-achilles-heel-1397311055

Despite setbacks, the opt out strategy is continuing to gain momentum, and the movement is being joined by growing numbers of teachers and students across the country.

In many school districts, opting out even a small percentage of students from a given test can effectively invalidate an entire school's test scores, thus denying corporate reformers the test score leverage they could otherwise use against a school, its teachers, parents, or students. That small amount of disruption can be organized fairly simply, but it is especially powerful because it also hinders corporate reformers' ability to realize their major goal: profit.

"Without the testing," Rodriguez says, "there is no profit to be made."

And without that bottom line driving testing and data collection, the hope is that teachers, students, and communities would be able to regain control of their schools.

"Once you throw a monkey wrench in the profit machine," says Smith, "You'll have to go back to the old ways, back when [education policy] was very local. It was very close to that individual teacher - with her individual students in her individual class room - who can identify the weaknesses and address them." At the very least, she says, "it will certainly stop the pilfering and robbing of public schools dollars that are channeled to [corporate reformers]... at the expense of teachers, taxpayers, and children."