Four Reasons I Defend The Opt Out Movement

1. It defends the integrity of childhood against those who would seek to standardize and routinize instruction so that creativity, spontaneity and play are excised from our classrooms, preparing children to be obedient and submissive employees when they enter the workforce or fodder for the prison industrial complex.

2.. It denies the data to those seeking to privatize education and undermine the teaching profession by using computerized learning as a substitute for the mentoring, relationship building, and creative thinking that real teaching involves.

3. It unites people across lines of race, region, religion and political ideology the way NO OTHER MOVEMENT IN OUR NATION DOES, in a common defense of children's right to learn, and teachers right to teach.

4. It calls attention to the misuse of test data to close schools in high poverty communities which are true community spaces and who refuse to sacrifice everything in their building to the production of high test scores.