Dive Brief:
- While teacher unions have "lost" on issues like evaluations and tenure, they are gaining traction with a more universal issue: standardized tests.
- Pushing against tests is a way for educators to "join forces both with parents who object to testing and Republicans who oppose the Common Core standards as a federalization of education," according to UC-Santa Barbara labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein told the New York Times.
- Those opposed to the current opt-out phenomenon argue that educators do not have students' best interests at heart and that they are really only focused on how tests are tied to their evaluations.
Dive Insight:
Why an educator is pushing against testing seems somewhat inconsequential, considering that many of the issues with testing (for parents, teachers, and legislators) are rather large, messy, systemic problems stemming from the emphasis placed on high-stakes tests.
Jeffrey M. Stonecash, professor emeritus of political science at Syracuse University, told the New York Times that educators are in a tricky situation as they figure out their messaging against testing. “The teachers’ unions are in a terrible situation,” he said, “because on the one hand they want to argue that expectations are too high. But the question that lurks behind that is, ‘So you mean teachers don’t have any impact on students?’"
