The Refusal: teachers making policy in NYC

Abstract

Drawing on empirical sources, I argue that teachers’ actions to remove district-mandated testing from their classrooms are a form of teacher policy-making. Analysis of interviews with teacher activists and records of teachers’ activism meetings show that teachers perceive belonging, trust, and community as critical to their efforts to provide equitable learning conditions for recent arrival immigrant, bilingual youth. Teachers explained that racialized neoliberalism, as it is instantiated through high-stakes testing, harms young people and creates problematic conditions for learning. Teachers opt out of testing action demonstrates what teachers believed was necessary to opt into, thus, I argue teachers’ policy-making sheds light on the constructs necessary to center in education policy.

Keywords:

• High-stakes tests
• immigration
• neoliberalism
• bilingual students
• teachers

Notes

1. All of the teachers have been given pseudonyms, although the name of the school where the testing opt-out occurred is not a pseudonym given that it is a matter of public record.

2. Neoliberalism in education refers to how market-based reforms have transformed the educational endeavor from one that is democratic and public to one based on individual achievement and competition (Margison & Sears, 2006; Torres, 2009). One can think of racialized neoliberalism in education, therefore, as the ways that the market-based education institutions perpetuate racial inequality and injustice; here, I draw on Omi and Winant’s conceptualization of the racial project as racist ‘if it creates or reproduces structures of domination based on racial significations and identities’ (2014, p. 128). Racialized neoliberalism in education has resulted in policies that have organized a high-stakes testing culture that measures the achievement of immigrant, English Language Learners (ELLs) against native-born, English-speaking youth on linguistically and culturally inappropriate tests that are generally impossible for ELLs to pass (Menken, 2010). Neoliberalism in education is a racial project because it creates a structure where one set of youth advances and a second set of youth struggles based on their racial, national, and linguistic identities.