While it is impossible at this stage to know whether these resistance movements will be strong enough to force political leaders to withdraw their support from privatization and testing, they have created enough of a grass roots presence to publicly challenge and contest almost every Reform initiative at the local and national level. We now have a Counter Narrative, based on strong scholarship as well as experience, which warns that Reform policies are likely to widen educational disparities rooted in race and class and weaken the nation’s schools by driving out the most committed teachers. And people are listening. An extravagantly funded Hollywood film,”Won’t Back Down” supporting a favorite Reform cause, Parent Trigger Legislation, got so little public support it was judged one of the greatest failures in the history of Hollwood film. A rally in New York City support of teacher assessments based on standardized tests, organized by Students for Education Reform chapters at NYU and Columbia, was a dismal failure. Parent trigger legislation and charter school initiatives have been voted down in several states; and lawsuits are being filed by parents across the country protesting the impact of test mandates on special needs students. (Source)
It's not just bad policies that we're fighting it's a mentality defined by crusading neoliberals who believe their own propaganda. It's like a cult. They really believe they have the key to solving problems in American public education. But they believe it the way the best and brightest in the sixties believed they were winning the war in Vietnam or th the way the neocons of the last decade believed they were liberating the Iraqis. They are wrong but they are incapable of recognizing they are wrong until the evidence for catastrophe is overwhelming.
I've argued in my post "Humanistic or Technocratic Education" that common ground that corporate education reformers share with the militarists that brough us Vietnam and Iraq is technocratic:
Technocracies as systems are very uncomfortable with what they cannot control or predict. They therefore see the lively, eccentric, and unpredictable as irrelevant or as a problem to be eliminated. It revels in the general, and is allergic to the concrete and particular. It cares about the abstract and quantitative and regards the qualitative as soft, unmeasurable, and thus trivial. As McGilchrist points out, it lives within a rigid template of reality, in its own mirror world, and anything that doesn't fit gets chopped off.
And so technocratic projects are always naively, if not cynically, "data driven". Naive because technocrats don't understand the limitations of the impoverished interpretive framework they use to find meaning in the data, and they don't understand how irrational interests shape their supposedly rational methods. They are cynical when they know their interpretations of the data are arbitrary or manipulated to serve predetermined agendas. They see themselves as "impatient optimists" who develop elaborate and fundamentally wrongheaded, if not delusional, strategies to change the world for the better by some limited metric of their own contrivance, but too often create even bigger messes than the one they hoped to clean up.
There are sincere Neoliberals, but their sincerity does not mean that they deserve to be taken seriously. Their policies at first glance often seem to make a kind of sense. Charter Schools, for instance, make a kind of sense. I could envision a world where charter schools could be a positive addition to the educational landscape. But because they have been coopted by the neoliberal agenda, they have created and will continue to create bigger messes than whatever messes they hoped to clean up. It's as predictable as the consequences of the invasion of Iraq. That, too, seemed a good idea at the time to many "reasonable" people.
Neoliberal programs often seem like good ideas when you first encounter them, but that's because we live in a technocratic culture inured to a mentality that is pathologically abstract, decontextualized, left-brained, that is data-driven while at the same time tone deaf to historical and cultural complexity, that thinks of itself as impatiently optimistic while remaining blind to the intractable humanness of humanity. And naive impatient optimism, so attractive to the average Main Streeter, that gives cover to cynics who spout Neoliberal platitudes to justify their rapacity.