Abstract
This article explores the Opt Out Florida (OOF) movement, a predominantly woman-led group seeking to dismantle neoliberal education policy by coaching children to boycott high-stakes standardized tests. Guided by Campbell’s assertion that neoliberalism will never disappear without a “gender revolution” and Noddings’s belief that those who have claimed power in the “traditional masculine structure” of our educational institutions will not readily cede their authority, we assert that movements like Opt Out are not only necessary to bring about a post-neoliberal future, but offer important insight into the role activist mothers may play in fulfilling that vision for all children. As a noticeably maternal movement, Opt Out displays a commitment to Noddings’s description of moral education and her assertion that “if an enterprise precludes…meeting the other in a caring relation, [one] must refuse to participate in that enterprise.” Understanding standardized tests as instruments of control meant to defund and privatize public education, Opt Out members actively resist them. Their ethic of care eschews corporate influence, and guides both their mission to return control of the classroom to the local level and their rejection of the deskilling and intensification of the teaching profession. Drawing on critical ethnographic data from OOF, we ultimately argue that the movement’s emphasis on the ideal moral and caring relations between school and child offers one example of what post-neoliberal education might look and sound like from a distinctly feminine perspective.
Introduction
Writing in the wake of the Great Recession, an economic disaster brought on by neoliberal greed, Steger and Roy questioned whether neoliberalism was “doomed,” or if it would eventually “regain its former glory” (Steger and Roy, 2010: xi). Six years later, in the midst of an unprecedented US presidency, neoliberalism’s prognosis remains uncertain. More nebulous, however, is the shape of a post-neoliberal future and the role of education in that inevitably post-capitalist landscape. If such a vision is attainable, proponents of democratic education and advocates of democracy writ large must imagine and describe its core features. In so doing, though we might look to the past for answers, we cannot and should not linger there, striving instead for a fundamentally different future. Paying close attention to contemporary social movements that are steadily gaining ground and listening to the activists who comprise them offers one path toward developing a coherent post-neoliberal future. Those who wish for such a future must, in Cornel West’s words, “inspire each other driven by a democratic soulcraft of integrity, courage, empathy and a mature sense of history—even as it seems our democracy is slipping away” (West, 2016). West’s dire assessment of the national zeitgeist underscores how we are, indeed, at a pivotal point, but we can and do remain optimistic about empathy’s role in our society.
Empathy and care are central to any conception of democracy our public institutions might foster—particularly our schools (Noddings, 1984; Nussbaum, 1997). With this in mind, this article explores the Opt Out Florida (OOF) movement, a mostly woman-led group striving to dismantle neoliberal educational policy by coaching children to boycott high-stakes standardized tests. Part of a nationwide movement called United Opt Out, OOF desires to act “as a focused point of unyielding resistance to corporate education reform” (United Opt Out, 2016). Guided by Campbell’s assertion that neoliberalism will never disappear without a “gender revolution” (Campbell, 2014b: 25) and Noddings’s belief that those who have claimed power in the “traditional masculine structure” of our educational institutions will not readily cede their authority (Noddings, 1984: 200), we posit that movements like Opt Out are not only necessary to bring about a post-neoliberal future, but offer important insight into the role education activists may play in creating a post-neoliberal future for all children.
As a noticeably maternal movement, Opt Out displays a commitment to Noddings’s description of moral education and her assertion that “if an enterprise precludes…meeting the other in a caring relation, [one] must refuse to participate in that enterprise” (Noddings, 1984: 175). Understanding standardized tests as instruments of control meant to defund and privatize public education, Opt Out members actively resist them. Their ethic of care eschews corporate influence and guides their mission to protect and defend public education, return control of the classroom to the local level, and reject the deskilling and intensification of the teaching profession. Drawing on critical ethnographic data from OOF, we ultimately argue that the movement’s emphasis on the ideal moral and caring relations between school and child offers one example of what post-neoliberal education might look and sound like from a distinctly feminine perspective.
To make such an argument, we outline neoliberalism’s impact on educational policy, the rise of the Opt Out movement, and the present marriage of patriarchy and neoliberalism. To this existing literature, we bring a focus on Noddings’s (1984) conception of moral education and ethic of care, the theoretical framework supporting our analysis. We then turn to our research design and report on our findings, which illustrate how a contemporary social movement has ostensibly enacted Noddings’s ethic of care in their rejection of corporate education reform. Affirming Campbell’s claim that “in a world dominated by neoliberal neo-patriarchy there is little indication that this [sexism] will change in favour of women—without a gender revolution” (Campbell, 2014b: 25), we argue that the ethic of care advocated by the female-dominated Opt Out movement is absolutely necessary to move beyond the current neoliberal, patriarchal global society in which we live. A post-neoliberal society must be post-patriarchy, Campbell (2014a) argues, and the Opt Out movement offers one such avenue toward that end.
Related literature and theoretical underpinnings
Neoliberalism’s impact on education
Since the 1950s, the US government has played a growing role in determining US educational policy. In 1983, A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform, a widely publicized document outlining a perceived crisis in public education, “forced education onto the political agenda of the local, state, and federal governments” (Godwin and Sheard, 2001: 111) and encouraged a variety of policy reforms. Godwin and Sheard note that these initial measures largely failed, allowing “a more radical reform idea to reach the political agenda: school accountability” (Godwin and Sheard, 2001: 112). Hursh illustrates this drastic transformation “based on a corporate model of market competition, with quantitative evaluations of students, teachers, schools, and school districts based on students’ scores on standardized tests” (Hursh, 2016: 2). Indeed, the movement toward school accountability, marked by high-stakes testing, school choice, and vouchers (Hursh, 2013), encourages schools “to produce the best possible outcomes at the lowest possible costs” (Godwin and Sheard, 2001: 113), reducing teachers’ autonomy and placing an overwhelming focus on education’s technical aspects (Apple, 1986).
School accountability is arguably the defining feature of neoliberal education reforms. As a political and economic theory, neoliberalism contends that society is best served “by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade” (Harvey, 2005: 2). Neoliberal policy grows out of a belief in “competitiveness, self-interest, and decentralization,” promotes the individual over the collective and the private over the public, and defends the “self-regulating free market as the model for proper government” (Steger and Roy, 2010: 12). Neglecting the common good in favor of self-interest and profit (Apple, 1999; Webb et al., 2009), neoliberalism adopts the business model by testing, grading, and ultimately punishing low-performing schools.
Although some may dismiss the use of the term neoliberalism as a “meaningless filler” as “squishy as silly putty” (Borders, 2015), we believe that the failure to acknowledge the concept and its manifestation in schools today obscures the purpose of the Opt Out movement, overlooking how such a broad coalition came together in the first place. Indeed, this politically diverse group has organized around the (paradoxical) twin pillars of neoliberalism—a broad and interventionist state and an endorsement of laissez-faire economics—with some Opt Out members simultaneously rejecting corporate influence on the one hand and government overreach on the other (Steger and Roy, 2010). Because neoliberalism is nonpartisan, it is objectionable (and also appealing) to people from multiple political persuasions, as politicians of all stripes can and do promote the values of individualism and competition inherent in neoliberal ideology.
Buttressed by this broad reach, neoliberalism’s impact on education has been overwhelming. Parents and teachers know it well: the increase in standardized assessments; scripted curricula packaged and sold by corporations; school grading systems; and teacher evaluations based on value-added models. While standardized intelligence quotient tests and college entrance assessments have been common practice since before the Second World War, the 2001 No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation mandated high-stakes tests as a way of measuring school success or failure (Au, 2007). Race to the Top, the Obama administration’s continuation of NCLB, continued to promote “parental choice and competition between schools” (Hursh, 2005: 605–606). These federal laws have allowed “corporate and political leaders at the state and federal levels” to mandate standardized curricula and assessments for a diverse array of students (Hursh, 2005: 605–606), limiting the role of parents and communities in educational decision-making. High-stakes tests, Au (2016) argues, form the basis of neoliberal reforms, even as educational research continues to document their troubling consequences: fragmented knowledge; over-reliance on direct instruction; and curricula narrowed to the point of ignoring un-tested subjects like science and social studies (Au, 2007; Diamond, 2007; Hursh, 2005; von Zastrow and Janc, 2004).
These and other detrimental impacts correspond with largely misguided intentions. Au (2008) notes that test scores are unreliable measures of actual learning, indicative of zip code rather than achievement. Mayo, building on data compiled by The Committee on Appropriate Test Use, explains that “testing itself is now doing more work symbolically and practically (or impractically) […]. Tests that were meant to provide aggregate data are being used to assess individual students and identify low-performing schools” (Mayo, 2005: 358). The socio-economically marginalized populations inhabiting those institutions face widened opportunity gaps (Au, 2016; Gorski, 2013), as tests fulfill a dual role of “both legitimating and masking structural race and class inequalities” (Au, 2013: 16). Indeed, policy-makers continue to use scientific measures to perpetuate inequality, and the “moral distance encouraged by a quantitative method of investigation [makes] the work much easier” (Porter, 1996: 85).
The parents of the Opt Out movement found their children in the midst of this crossfire. Coming from a variety of socio-economic backgrounds and political leanings, members of Opt Out found common ground in resisting the standardized test, the ultimate symbol of neoliberal ideology in schools today. Rejecting corporate influence, the impact of competition on their young children, and the imposition of a strong state, Opt Out members were able to connect across party lines, seeing their movement as political yet nonpartisan. Without an overarching umbrella term such as neoliberalism, we believe it is difficult to understand the nuanced arguments coming from OOF members.
One of OOF’s central arguments suggests that the challenges facing US schools demand something far different than standardization or mere accountability. As Noddings has argued, “the language that characterizes educational policy today is dominantly business talk, and it is antithetical to genuine education” (Noddings, 2013: 155). Likewise, Crowder and Konle point out, “the widening disparity in education and wealth in this country cannot be solved by simply disaggregating test scores…it now requires much more sophisticated, clever, and original strategies to begin approaching a solution” (Crowder and Konle, 2015: 288). We are, in a sense, “using language that belongs to another game” (Noddings, 2013: 156), but Opt Out movements across the USA, inspired by post-neoliberal visions, have begun to voice new strategies.
The rise of Opt Out movements in the USA
At present, neoliberal policy is entrenched in our educational and political systems. There exists, however, “a significant, popular backlash among students, parents, and teachers” (Au, 2016: 54), which has coalesced into the current Opt Out movement. Dating back to United Opt Out’s 2011 origin, a nationwide (and even global) resistance movement has grown through the use of social media (Coughlan, 2016; O’Flynn, 2009; Skinningsrud and Brock-Utne, 2016). The Opt Out movement’s social media presence has even invited mainstream media attention (Heron-Hruby and Landon-Hays, 2014).
While the Opt Out movement has been portrayed as anti-test (Kamenetz, 2015); dismissed as a homogenous group of White, middle-class mothers staging “petulant, poorly conceived protests” and caring little about the ramifications of their actions, particularly for minoritized students (Coleman, 2016); and even characterized by then-Secretary of Education Arne Duncan as “white suburban moms” realizing their kid “isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were” (Strauss, 2013); the reality of Opt Out is more nuanced. Members reject the high-stakes nature of testing “as meaningless and detrimental to the development of a creative, nurturing and supportive learning environment,” advocating instead for “multiple measures of authentic assessments that are used to inform instruction and which do not result in punitive consequences for students, teachers and schools” (United Opt Opt, 2016). Their protest is principled, steeped in a vision of democratic schooling that provides teachers with the autonomy they have long been denied. Rather than acting out “poorly conceived” protests, members of Opt Out stand by the assertion that test refusal can “stop fueling the test machine and stop the overuse and misuse of high stakes tests” (United Opt Out, 2016).
Influenced by this message and social media’s consciousness-raising milieu, thousands of parents have joined the nonpartisan Opt Out movement. Coalescing around hot spots in New York, New Jersey, Washington, and Florida, liberals and conservatives alike have made significant progress in their efforts to “starve the system of data” (Schroeder et al., 2016). Parents opposed to high-stakes testing and corporate control of education have influenced some states to limit testing hours (Taylor and Rich, 2015), teachers’ unions have actively pursued anti-testing campaigns in New Jersey, Florida, and New York (Harris, 2015), and states such as New Hampshire have adopted more authentic assessments (Duncan, 2014). Opt Out’s demands even made their way into the 2016 Democratic Platform (Strauss, 2016). Through on-the-ground organizing as well as what some term “armchair activism” (Agranoff, 2015), the Opt Out movement has significantly influenced education and will continue to be a force for change.
Patriarchy and neoliberalism: A marriage
Despite broad media coverage (Duncan, 2014; Harris, 2015; Rotherham, 2015; Taylor and Rich, 2015; Ujifusa, 2015) and burgeoning scholarship on the movement (Au, 2016; Hagiopan, 2014; Hursh, 2016; Johnson and Slekar, 2014; Mayo, 2005), Opt Out’s gendered dimensions have been largely unexamined. Seeking to fill this scholarly void, we have argued elsewhere that Opt Out has attacked “a corporatized and violent system of American public education,” managing, as a group of women, “to wrest teaching from neoliberal reformers” (Schroeder et al., 2016). Understanding the role gender plays in the movement requires acknowledging how patriarchy and neoliberalism are intertwined and reinforcing. As Kynaston explains, “neither patriarchy nor capitalism are exclusively privileged in…women’s subordination. Rather, both are perceived as autonomous systems that intersect in specific ways at specific historical periods” (Kynaston, 1996: 222). Our participants’ experiences illustrate these intersections.
As the ultimate capitalist project, neoliberalism combines with patriarchy to divide the labor force, violently maintaining gender, economic, and racial inequities (Campbell, 2014b). Patriarchy, according to Walby, is a “system of social structures and practices in which men dominate, oppress and exploit women” (Walby, 1990: 20). Patriarchy continues to govern religious, educational, and family systems around the world by demanding “blind obedience” and “the destruction of individual willpower” (Bradshaw, 1994: 26). Similarly, neoliberalism “radiate[s] violence” by punishing deviance (Campbell, 2014b: 12), consequently silencing or altogether eliminating non-conformity (Lyotard, 1984). To be sure, global capitalism, part and parcel of the neoliberal project, “works with patriarchal principles, institutions, cultures, and psyches” (Campbell, 2014b: 13–14), thereby exacerbating inequities along gender lines.
Patriarchal neoliberalism’s effect on education is decidedly disproportionate, given the field’s persistent gender imbalance (Apple, 1986). The subordinate role women have played in schools, stems from the sexual division of labor, replete with inequitable pay: women are “the very agents who deliver their children to the patriarchy” made up of male administrators and politicians tasked with designing and overseeing school policy (Grumet, 1988: 33). The classroom becomes “increasingly mechanized and impersonal” (Grumet, 1988: 56) and, when mandated worksheets fail to produce the desired results, female teachers become “a suitable scapegoat” in the neoliberal quest to “reassert patriarchal norms” (Falter, 2016: 21). Grumet examines the impact of this imbalance of power, wherein blame for poorly designed and detrimental education policy “is deflected from the men who establish these policies onto the women who teach the children who fail” (Grumet, 1988: 23). Threatened with their livelihoods, women are disciplined into silence and conformity. Campbell asserts, “In no society or system are women paid the same as men for a day, a week, or a lifetime’s work. In no society do men share equally the work of care with women” (Campbell, 2014b: 24–25). Neoliberalism has not ameliorated these conditions—it has merely altered them. Furthermore, Campbell argues, as do we, that “our liberation from this tragedy is inconceivable—it is, literally, unthinkable—without feminism” (Campbell, 2014b: 13–14).
Previously (Schroeder et al., 2016) we have characterized OOF as reacting against high-stakes testing that they view as an outgrowth of neoliberal violence. Speaking truth to the powerfully oppressive patriarchy, they have filled the silence of teachers eliminated from conversations surrounding accountability. Advancing this argument here, we suggest, as Campbell contends, that “the revolution against neoliberalism has to be a gender revolution” (Campbell, 2014a). OOF illustrates Campbell’s (2014a) hopeful vision of a group of women seeking out “the fissures, the contradictions, [and] the instabilities” of hegemonic neoliberalism, calling for a decidedly different form of education organized around an ethic of care and recognition of common humanity. According to Campbell, a post-neoliberal society must be post-patriarchy, and we argue that Opt Out’s ethic of care deserves due attention to move beyond the current neoliberal agenda for US public institutions, especially schools.
Moral education and an ethic of care
Chief among tactics for combating neoliberal reforms is re-centering education’s focus on empathy and care. Schools wishing to adopt a moral approach to education must situate care as the “primary aim of every educational institution” (Noddings, 1984: 172). In the classroom, the ethic of care does not ignore content or subject matter, but always places the ethical needs of the student first. As Noddings explains, the student “must be aware that for me he is more important, more valuable, than the subject” (Noddings, 1984: 174). Students are subjects seen as responsible humans, not objects or “a succession of roles” (Noddings, 1984: 183). Both teachers and mothers, Noddings argues, have a responsibility in this paradigm to “point out and question the foolishness that pervades current school practice” (Noddings, 1984: 183), including the evaluation of students for “distributing educational goods,” the lack of respect provided to those most impacted by education—women and children, and an educational structure that eschews “nurturance” and “enhancement” in favor of evaluation (Noddings, 1984: 196). Noddings urges us to rethink the current educational model for an ethic of care to prevail. To that end, teachers must engage in dialogue with students and parents, learning must be “offered freely with no demands for specific achievement” (Noddings, 1984: 192), and teachers must not have policy forced upon them, but instead be engaged in a cooperative process of decision-making. This ethic of care, echoed by our participants, is necessary to overcome the neoliberal, patriarchal policies pervading public schools today.
Of course, the ethic of care is not sufficient in the effort to overcome patriarchal neoliberalism, nor should the exercise of an ethic of care be viewed as solely the domain of the “woman.” As Noddings makes clear, the use of the feminine in describing the ethic of care is helpful “only if we understand that all of humanity can participate in the feminine” (Noddings, 1984: 172). While the dichotomies of masculine/feminine and man/woman may be rooted in both sexist and capitalist frameworks, the ethic of care has no gender. It is a human ethic of care that we advocate for and that has long been practiced by women and/or considered feminine. As a result, we use the language and frameworks of the present to begin imagining what could be, acknowledging all the while that what we imagine today, as of this writing and revision, is constrained by our historical moment, just as what we could imagine upon first authoring this piece was constrained by an arguably different historical moment.
Important to note, too, is the relationship between Noddings’s ethic of care and democratic education. Neoliberalism stands in stark contrast to democratic life, as “democracy and capitalism are inconsistent types of social organization” (Strike, 1991: 455). Competition and individual self-interest are valued in the neoliberal environment, not the democratic skills of cooperation, collaboration, dialogue, interdependence, and creativity necessary in the 21st century (Noddings, 2013). Moving beyond neoliberalism, then, requires not only Campbell’s hoped-for gender revolution, but a commitment to democratic thinking, both of which the Opt Out movement embodies. If we want to move beyond the current neoliberal environment dominating the educational system, we must seek out frameworks and actions that can provide a way forward. Scholars must “look for the spaces where organizing might occur to transform schools into humane, agentic places for learners of all backgrounds” (Boyte and Finders, 2016: 141). Embodying an ethic of care, the Opt Out movement offers one such example.
Lastly, many Opt Out members identify their protest as an act of civil disobedience, similar to actions taken during the US Civil Rights Movement. Civil disobedience is a necessary component of democracy, “effective in bringing positive change” to a society that has been too slow to adjust to changing social mores (Zinn, 2002: 18). As Zinn asserts, “Democracy must improve itself constantly or decay,” and, as a result, “it is the positive good of civil disobedience that should be stressed” (Zinn, 2002: 18). At a time when dissent is discouraged by those on the Right and lauded by those on the progressive Left, it should be reasserted that civil disobedience, in its ability “to break down in the public’s mind the totalitarian notion that laws are absolutely and always to be obeyed…is healthy for the growth of democracy” (Zinn, 2002: 19). We therefore highlight the democratic promise of Opt Out and the agency of its members in cultivating a post-neoliberal future.
A word of caution
For Opt Out groups across the USA, the most logical space “where organizing might occur” (Boyte and Finders, 2016: 141) is the ubiquitous and user-friendly territory of Facebook. Even in the hyper-patriarchal Middle East, “Facebook functions as an online platform to unify and connect the concerned public and establish collective identity” (Al-Rawi, 2014: 1153). Like empowered women’s groups during the Arab Spring, the Opt Out movement credits social media for expanding its numbers, sustaining its mission, and amplifying its collective voice. With good reason, then, Facebook and other platforms have attracted scholarly attention for serving as “the key site where protest identities are created, channeled, and contested” (Gerbaudo and Treré, 2015: 866), but such contestation appears alongside complication, too. Indeed, though social networking sites foster “fluid and shifting […] social relations around gender, ethnicity, and class” (Hutton et al., 2016: 75–76), the Internet’s potential “for creating more democratic and egalitarian power structures” is nevertheless susceptible to “stereotypical norms and discriminatory double standards” (Bailey et al., 2013: 93, 107). As some have argued, Facebook is most certainly enmeshed in neoliberalism, and allegations have been levied against the company for discriminatory “hate-speech rules [that] tend to favor elites and governments over grassroots activists and racial minorities” (Angwin and Grassegger, 2017). As a result, Facebook’s policies may “serve the business interests of the global company, which relies on national governments not to block its service to their citizens” (Angwin and Grassegger, 2017). Additionally, algorithms and individual choice prevent us from connecting with those outside of our societal bubbles, and our Facebook News Feeds have managed to alter our exposure to certain types of news (Bleiberg and West, 2015). Indeed, social scientists have argued that social media clearly does not operate as a neutral, inclusive, or democratic space (Bleiberg and West, 2015), and others remain skeptical that social media activism, based on weak ties rather than strong personal ties, can create or facilitate real social change (Gladwell, 2010).
Moreover, despite the democratizing promise of social media, Silicon Valley, the metonym for US technology industry, is notoriously patriarchal. Mundy (2017) suggests that although “Silicon Valley is populated with progressive, hyper-educated people who talk a lot about making the world better,” the prevalent belief “that tech is a meritocracy” ironically reinforces inequalities along gender and racial lines. Alfrey and Twine likewise contend that “Technology is the most powerful industry of the early twenty-first century,” but it is not immune to equally powerful social forces, including “an industry-specific norm of masculinity […that] leaves male supremacy intact” (Alfrey and Twine, 2017: 45–46). Acknowledging these realities and their implications not only for social movements but also for the social scientists who study them—both factions engaged, for better or for worse, in social media, we nevertheless remain hopeful. Greenhalgh-Spencer (2017) looks to education as one solution to Silicon Valley’s woes, urging educators “to open spaces of both critique and possibility” (Greenhalgh-Spencer, 2017: 47). The Opt Out movement, as we will demonstrate, does just that.
As Kandiyoti has argued, “Women’s strategies are always played out in the context of identifiable patriarchal bargains that act as implicit scripts that define, limit, and inflect their market and domestic options” (Kandiyoti, 1988: 285). Though 21st century technologies and the industries that produce them confirm Kandiyoti’s sense that “patriarchal bargains are not timeless or immutable” (Kandiyoti, 1988: 275), the current social media landscape also underscores how “new strategies and forms of consciousness do not simply emerge from the ruins of the old and smoothly produce a new consensus, but are created through personal and political struggles” (Kandiyoti, 1988: 286). Opt Out’s vision for an ethic of care in a post-neoliberal era, conceived across a medium fraught with social inequalities, is by no means a neutral enterprise. Our critical methodological design, described below, primes us to identify and reflect upon these and other power imbalances.
Methods
The findings presented here are culled from an ethnographic study of OOF, the central hub of which is a Facebook group titled Opt Out Orlando, one among many such groups statewide, roughly corresponding to the number of school districts. Our three-person research team joined ten of these groups three months prior to data collection. After observing the groups in “everyday contexts” for an extended period of time (Hammersley and Atkinson, 2007: 3), we generated research questions (Spradley, 1980).
We approached this study as critical ethnographers because of our participants’ identities as parents, teachers, and other concerned citizens opposed to oppressive neoliberal policies. As ethnographers, we investigate “what people do, what people know, and the things people make and use” (Spradley, 1980: 5). We also seek to uncover “how people view the situations they face, how they regard one another, and also how they see themselves” (Hammersley and Atkinson, 2007: 3). Our research goals included understanding the origins of OOF, how members have experienced their participation in the movement, and the group’s vision for public education. We framed this study as a critical ethnography, recognizing “power relations and knowledge are interconnected” in order to question “conventional ideological images inherent in all research by investigating the possibility of alternative meanings” (Thomas, 2003: 45). As critical ethnographers, we sought to comprehend the role power plays within the group to “unmask hegemony and address oppressive forces” (Crotty, 1998: 12). Consequently, we position neoliberal education policy as an oppressive force and the members of OOF as activists organizing against what they perceive as educational injustice. With an “ethical obligation to make a contribution toward changing those conditions” (Madison, 2012: 5), we seek to illuminate how a woman-led group has organized against oppressive neoliberal educational conditions.
Data sources
Because Opt Out organized predominantly on social media, our data collection began online, namely on Facebook (Murthy, 2008). Considering levels of activity, population, and location, we followed and observed ten Facebook groups for three months prior to data collection and continued our observations while recording field notes as participant-experiencers (Walstrom, 2004) throughout the 10-month period of study. After obtaining access and permission through a gatekeeper, we shared our 21-question qualitative survey, garnering 208 responses. Of the 185 respondents who shared their gender, only seven replied, “male.” A section of the survey asked if respondents would be willing to participate in a separate telephone or focus group interview. From this, we conducted nine individual semi-structured telephone interviews, lasting between 50 and 120 minutes each, and two face-to-face focus group interviews of 6–10 participants each, which lasted between 60 and 90 minutes. The research team transcribed the interviews and the original interviewer reviewed each transcript for accuracy.
Data analysis proceeded in iterative stages, mirroring Glaser and Strauss’s (1967) grounded theorizing. While developing grounded theory was not our goal, Facebook observations and the preliminary themes evident during initial survey analysis enabled us to craft increasingly focused interview questions (Boellstorff et al., 2012; LeCompte and Schensul, 1999). Formal analysis followed Creswell’s “spiral” in that data were organized by type and initially read in entirety by each member of the research team before open, axial, and selective coding (Creswell, 2013: 182). In open coding, we chunked the data into broad thematic categories. After comparing across researchers to refine and revise codes, we identified axial relationships between major topics. We then sought out literature that would illuminate our participants’ responses, particularly those focused on their vision for the future of public education. Once we developed a theoretical framework centered on Opt Out’s post-neoliberal vision, we created deductive codes guided by Noddings’s ethic of care, which subsequently informed the analysis presented here. Because our argument centers on mothers and female teachers, we have focused exclusively on data from those respondents who identified as female and/or as mothers.
Positionality
As former high school English teachers, the authors were forced throughout our careers to administer high-stakes standardized tests. Sympathy with the Opt Out movement drew us to study this group, and those sympathies have undoubtedly informed our theoretical framework, research design, and analysis. We recognize that education, teaching, and research are never neutral endeavors (Kincheloe and McLaren, 2013), and, as a result, we have not only taken up a critical research orientation, but felt it necessary to make that critical orientation explicit (Madison, 2012). To develop trustworthiness, we have collected an array of data for triangulation, sought feedback from trusted peers and mentors from a range of theoretical positions, and presented various analyses of our data at local, regional, and national conferences.
Findings
Data collected from Opt Out members illustrated that OOF acts and organizes for the end of high-stakes testing, the abolishment of corporate influence in public education, and the desire for democratically organized, teacher-controlled classrooms. Their vision offers a path to move beyond our current neoliberal, increasingly privatized state. Indeed, while expressing their vision for the future of public education, our participants indicated a need to embrace what we consider to be an ethic of care distinctly evocative of Noddings’s conception of moral education. Specifically, five major points stand out in our data: a rejection of high-stakes testing due to its negative impact on children; calls for multiple measures of assessment; advocacy for teachers; the need for dialogue; and the acknowledgement of common humanity. Each of those elements is outlined below.
Rejection of high-stakes testing
First and foremost, Opt Out members expressed disdain for high-stakes testing, a contempt extended to corporate influence on school policy that ultimately harms children. Two themes emerged as catalysts of their rejection of high-stakes testing, including the negative mental or bodily results of testing on children and lack of engagement and joy in learning. These themes coincide with Noddings’s discussion of grading and testing, hallmarks of a paradigm wherein students are treated as objects, not humans in need of care and relationships, and learning is not “offered freely with no demands” (Noddings, 1984: 192).
As Noddings contends, “the teacher does not grade to inform the student. She has far better, more personal ways to do this. She grades to inform others about the student’s progress,” rendering the student “a thing to which some measuring stick can be applied…This is demeaning and distracting” (Noddings, 1984: 194). To Opt Out members, the demeaning results included both bodily impacts and a diminished sense of their children’s self-worth. Many participants indicated that in the wake of developmentally inappropriate assessments, “little kids are throwing up, wetting their pants,” or exhibiting signs of digestive distress, that sometimes warranted medical intervention. A parent claimed, “My husband wanted me to take my kid to [the hospital] because he kept getting a stomach ache. It was stress. It stopped hurting after I told him he didn’t have to take the test.” Other children expressed their anguish through tears, as a teacher noted, “I have six-year-olds who cry when I put a test in front of them.” Parents and teachers specifically identified gifted children as struggling with the pressure of taking high-stakes tests. One focus group participant lamented, “my gifted child, the brightest kid of the three, is the one that is self-harming, hitting herself in the stomach, smacking herself in the face.” Another woman in attendance agreed: “mine bites himself and pinches his legs.” Noddings suggests, “if the teacher or parent inflicts pain on the child for whatever reason, the child learns that the infliction of pain can be justified” (Noddings, 1984: 193). Opt Out members ominously wonder about the long-term effects of this institutionalized abuse, questioning what might happen, “when someone finally tells them they are smart. Will they follow them anywhere and do anything?”
Opt Out thus rejects high-stakes testing for its psychological as well as physiological effects. Participants expressed concern that children were being “shackled” and “labeled and condemned for life,” causing them to “shut down” or experience crushing futility. Parents and teachers decried schools’ use of “data walls,” serving to humiliate students who scored poorly and effectively squashing any latent motivation. Indeed, bodily and mental impacts also harm student engagement. One student who, her mother explained, normally saved assignments for later review, received a negative grade on a practice writing test and promptly threw her assignment away because it “just made her feel small.” Another parent admitted, “my son and his peers just lost interest. The kids who were normally strong, enthusiastic learners were not anymore.” The trouble, these parents insisted, was not grading, but the pressure associated with the grades and tests. One participant explained, “As a parent I have seen that testing has taken over the curriculum my son is exposed to and that he has no joy in learning, is under intense pressure to perform, not learn.” Noddings’s notion of grading also supports this stance, as she claims: the point is that the caring teacher does not shrink from evaluating her student’s work along all the dimensions proper to the field she is teaching; but she feels no need, and no right, to sum it up with a report to the world. At this point the relationship crumbles; it is altered. In many cases, it is utterly destroyed. (Noddings, 1984: 195)
Multiple measures of student learning
Although our participants reject high-stakes testing, they do not reject assessment. Rather, Opt Out members overwhelmingly endorse the use of multiple forms of assessment, in line with Noddings’s notion that “We can help, as teachers, by providing multiple opportunities for students to demonstrate that they have learned the material we judge to be essential” (Noddings, 1984: 192). In addition to showing knowledge via multiple forms of assessment, students should be allowed to retake and retry assignments that judge their knowledge and ability. Noddings asks, Why should a student be penalized for not learning something on the first attempt? Think about it. What is it we are trying to accomplish? If a student has difficulty the first (or second or nth) time with a topic, both teacher and student have a job to do: Try again with renewed support and, perhaps, more imaginative techniques. The effort, if learning really is our goal, is a mutual one. (Noddings, 1984: 192)
Key to multiple measures of assessment, of course, is the role of the teacher in creating those assessments and learning from them, something Opt Out members trusted their children’s teachers to do. Indeed, one parent expressed concern that the high-stakes test “just doesn’t take into account everything they did for the entire year to make [her daughter] into this incredible, end-of-year fourth grade student. They were just incredible, and that just doesn’t go at all into this test score.” This parent saw what Noddings asserts must be the actual process of learning—a mutual endeavor in which the teacher engages just as much as the student to ensure learning. Grading, according to one participant, should thus be the result of “real tests, created by the teacher, and which provide immediate feedback, to be used to inform instruction.”
Respect for teachers
Opt Out’s desire for authentic assessments encompasses their concern for teachers as well as students. The need to respect teachers or, at the very least, the need for teachers to be consulted in the creation of education policy was another common theme in our data. Similar to Noddings’s ethic of care, many participants rejected current education policy that imposes strict rules without teachers’ consult, particularly injurious given Opt Out members’ belief that teachers were often the only advocates for students once parents left them at school each day. One parent explained, “It’s so frustrating because the only people advocating for children are the classroom teachers,” prompting considerable concern that teachers are excluded from administrative and legislative conversations about testing policies and other decisions. Another parent shared that her child’s teacher admitted to feeling “very confused about what’s going to be given.” Yet another concurred, “teachers are often the last to know things.” Opt Out members believed that as professionals, teachers should be respected, which is to say trusted, for “teachers are the ones that we need to trust to make the decisions and yet…they’re not, no one is trusting teachers to make educational decisions for our kids and it’s awful, it’s awful.”
Opt Out members were also aware of the negative impacts of allowing legislators or other outsiders to make educational decisions, and were particularly critical of how the larger narrative implicated teachers as the scapegoats in failing educational policy. One participant, “tired of teachers being blamed for the problems in education,” explained how politicians made “decisions …without any knowledge of the education spectrum,” implying that teachers, with first-hand knowledge about the students and profession, should be making such decisions. Another worried that teachers had become the “pawns” and “whipping boys” of legislators, accountable not to the students but to policy-makers and administrators. Ultimately Opt Out members expressed a desire to see more respect for teachers and were critical as to how teachers, with no real decision-making power, were nonetheless blamed for negative testing outcomes. Each of the following points connects to this central concern.
Desire for dialogue
Noddings, writing long before the formation of Opt Out, championed the need to dialogue with teachers, engaging with them in a caring relation. She urges stakeholders to “try more seriously to find out what they are doing, and to work cooperatively with them toward perfecting the methods to which they are devoted and in which they reveal their talent” (Noddings, 1984: 186). Rather than “coercing teachers to adopt particular philosophical, psychological, or pedagogical positions,” administrators should invite them to “talk with each other about the methods [they] have chosen, the ends [they] seek, and the pleasure [they] experience in knowing each other” (Noddings, 1984: 197). True dialogue would reposition teachers and parents as “cooperative educators,” and if acknowledged as “vital in every aspect,” would allow educators, parents, students, and policymakers to “meet the other and to care” (Noddings, 1984: 186). OOF participants expressed similar views. Although many focused on the need for parents to dialogue with one another to grow the movement, others knew that dialogue itself was key to exposing high-stakes testing’s negative impact on public education. Conversely, some participants explained how a lack of dialogue among stakeholders created the current high-stakes environment in the first place.
Our participants were thus keenly aware of the role dialogue could play in changing unjust policy. One interviewee spoke at great length on the subject, confiding: I’m hopeful that the movement will be successful in at least eliminating the toxic environment that exists now in schools. […] Because I mean, when I have a ten-year-old child that doesn’t want to go to school because it’s too stressful, there’s something very wrong that’s going on, because…a ten-year-old shouldn’t even know the word stress. So, I’m hopeful that the movement and the dialogue that’s happening as a result of the movement is going to at least do something about that toxic environment. start somewhere, and if you don’t say, “No,” and get the message through to people that we’re not going to continue letting our kids be abused in this way, nothing will change. So, it’s my small contribution to hope that I can help move people around me in a small way or possibly a large group of people in the country to really call attention to the cause, you know, and say, “This is wrong, and there’s a better way.”
Opt Out participants also indicated the unevenness and even scarcity of dialogue regarding high-stakes testing in their local schools. One parent who opted her children out of tests explained that when she asked teachers about testing: They were obviously respectful but refused to talk about opting out, which I thought was really interesting. I would send e-mails and say, “Look, what do you think? […] I value your input on this huge decision I’m making for my son,” and the answer I would get back was, “I’m not allowed to discuss this,” whereas the fourth-grade teachers, who were a little bit younger and have a lot more vested and time and also have children in the schools were like, “Yes! Opt out! Opt out! Please! But don’t tell them I said so.” So, it was a very interesting dichotomy within my own school, within my own experience, about opting out my children.
The acknowledgement of common humanity
Noddings, in her ethic of care, identifies how the first role of the teacher is to meet the other in a caring relation. “As teacher, I am,” she writes, “first, one-caring” (Noddings, 1984: 176). To Noddings, “the primary aim of every educational institution and of every educational effort must be the maintenance and enhancement of caring” (Noddings, 1984: 172) and “chains and circles of caring” must be established first and foremost (Noddings, 1984: 180) before learning may begin. Opt Out members expressed similar albeit less abstract commitments, desiring community solutions rather than top-down changes and a reduction of competition—essentially calling for care and respect for each other’s humanity. We interpret both Noddings’s and Opt Out’s calls for such care as an acknowledgement and embrace of our common humanity, in stark contrast to the “neoliberal mindset,” which holds, “each woman is an island, providing for herself and her own without the assistance of communal solidarities or tax-funded support” (Weber, 2010: 127).
Opt Out members expressed their desire for community solutions to educational problems as a way to humanize the education system and reduce competition. One participant explained that she wanted “parents, grandparents, [local] businesses, and schools to come together and develop an educational plan that serves all students.” Rejecting top-down decision-making models, Opt Out members wished to eliminate “the role of for-profit corporate entities in education” and instead shift to “humanizing practices within the field of education.” Indeed, they felt that the corporate model of education reform dominating their children’s schools lacked a human touch. For example, one focus group participant who identified as both parent and teacher recalled an email from a principal “that was a direct quote from a Marzano book. I mean, can you be human? Nobody quotes Marzano!” Others in attendance described how district officials or school administrators often took “a Band-Aid and bomb” approach, issuing statements meant to be “parent pacifiers.” Rather than dealing appropriately with parental concerns, parents were merely placated for the short term and then bombarded with testing. This neglect of the shared humanity within the school community, in participants’ eyes, encouraged competition rather than collaboration. One teacher who was integral to the movement explained that “teachers are competing against each other now…within their school. Where is the incentive to collaborate when we are incentivized to compete?”
Noddings explains that “Schools as institutions cannot care directly. A school cannot be engrossed in anyone or anything. But a school can be deliberately designed to support caring and caring individuals, and this is what an ethic of caring suggests should be done” (Noddings, 1984: 182). Our participants articulated how corporate education reform has made schools far less conducive to caring, in part by promoting dehumanizing methods of communication. More importantly, however, they expressed a desire to deconstruct and reconstruct those social arrangements in ways that support all learners, honor and affirm teachers as professionals, and offer a seat at the table to all stakeholders. Their recognition of the common humanity in and around the schoolhouse walls, coupled with awareness of the impact of those walls’ design, reinforces our belief in their unique ability to envision and articulate a post-neoliberal future.
Implications and conclusion
Although expressed in terms specific to opting out, our participants’ rejection of high-stakes testing implies a commitment to Noddings’s ethic of care. Embedded within their repudiation of corporate education reform is a desire for dialogue and participation in educational decision-making, a belief that teachers have students’ best interests at heart and, consequently, deserve respect, and a recipe for more caring and humane relations between school, child, teacher, and parent. They acknowledged that the current schooling arrangement is not working and that public schools must be restructured. One interviewee explained: We’re kind of at a pivotal point in terms of education…. So, I think that the best outcome that could happen for all is to begin a long-term conversation to say, “Ok, what should public school look like right now?”
Despite our insistence that care is essential to the post-neoliberal educational future outlined by Opt Out, we must remember that empathy and care cannot “become a kind of end point” (Pedwell, 2012: 281), a harkening back to the compassionate conservatism out of which NCLB grew. Instead, care must be embedded in democratic and collective dialogues that foster humanity and reveal commitments to the common good. We see those nascent social compacts in Opt Out’s articulation of schools marked by care and dedication to the preservation of public institutions. While Giroux and Giroux (2009) lament that US society, educated well through the public pedagogies of neoliberal ideology, is unprepared to imagine a future after neoliberalism, we assert that the Opt Out movement, read through its gendered dimensions and ethic of care, shows tremendous promise, enacting Pedwell’s notion of empathy’s “function[ing] as an affective portal to imagining, and journeying towards, different spaces and times of social justice” (Pedwell, 2012: 295), even as we acknowledge that we are inevitably mired in the language, frameworks, and ideologies that govern our lives. As Henricks and Brockett avow, the abstract ideals of “liberty, freedom, and justice […] have never been fully realized, but this does not mean they could not be” (Henricks and Brockett, 2013: 172).
That said, our hope is admittedly tempered. Writing in the wake of Donald Trump’s ascendency to the US presidency, we are sobered by signals of a dangerous turn away from public education and a seeming backlash against the “it takes a village” mentality shared by the care-focused Opt Out movement. While we strongly believe that a post-neoliberal society must be post-patriarchy, we are less optimistic than at the outset of our study. As Stein has noted, the civil disobedience practiced by our study participants “will only work as a political strategy when it is brought to bear on issues where the injustice is so fundamental and clear that the community as a whole can be brought into sympathy with those who are breaking the law” (Stein, 2016: 20). We do not believe the Opt Out movement is at this point. Despite these realities, we, like Mayo seek out “the cracks in the monolithic power of testing” (Mayo, 2005: 358), noting that “the resistances against the machinery of testing hold promise for care of the self and its attendant care of the community” (Mayo, 2005: 359–360). Confessing that “Public education advocates and progressive movements do not typically take up the long-term questions, although our opponents very likely do,” Ryan credits Opt Out for having “the most concrete long-term proposal” to date, particularly for the movement’s recognition of how neoliberal education reform hinges upon high-stakes tests (Ryan, 2016: 249)—a pivotal point, indeed.
Neoliberalism in education may continue, but the “ripples of resistance,” (Mayo, 2005: 362) the inevitable “fissures, contradictions and instabilities” in such a system (Campbell, 2014a), encourage us to see beyond the murky present, to embrace this moment for the “pivotal point” it is, rather than an indomitable terminus. We recognize the “two steps forward, one step back” mentality in this line of thought, and aspire to believe that an “affective politics” focused on empathy does not need to rely on “a linear temporality” (Pedwell, 2012: 295). It is through the cracks and fissures that we can envision an alternative reality unbound from linear progressions. It is only when we imagine a different future that we can begin to move toward it, and the Opt Out movement provides a vision toward a post-neoliberal education.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.